Content Planning tips for business owners

The brain freeze begins

How often do you sit down to do content planning only for your mind to go COMPLETELY blank?  Constantly? Yup, I feel you!  

Most of my clients report to having LOADS of ideas for amazing posts. When it comes to the crunch though, it all just flitters away and they are left feeling frustrated, angry and writing a pants post. Sorry – truth.

The alternative

Imagine instead, having a constant stream of ideas.  Never forgetting those beauts you come up with on the way home from the school run.  And most importantly, they are ALL posts that your ideal customer will love.  In the words of Bob from Entourage…does that sound like something you might be interested in?!  If so, read on for my top 3 tips on how to achieve this!

3 Tips for content planning

1. Understand your target audience.  Now before I lose you, just wait!  EVERY Social Media Coach will tell you to do this but nobody ever follows through on why.  Here is why.  When you don’t know who you’re talking to – you can’t write to them.  Each social post should make your ideal customer feel like you are talking TO THEM.  Like you’re inside their head, you totally get them.  So for me, it’s not just about where they live and how much they earn. It’s where they are in their life, what their pain points are and how can you can solve them. If you’d like more on this topic, let me know in the comments. 
2.  You’ll most likely have heard of “content pillars” if you’ve ever Googled for social media advice.  These are the topics that are relevant to your business which will appeal to your ideal customer that you will never run out of ideas for.  I would recommend having between 3-5.  To give you an example, my content pillars are Instagram, Facebook, shopping local and juggling mumming/business owning.  These are all relevant to my ideal customer (90% of my customers want advice on all of these things). I will literally never run out of content of any of these topics….especially if Meta keep changing Instagram every 3 seconds like they did in October! lol
3. Once your have your content pillars, you’re going to want to think about each one in turn. How can you entertain with that subject? Can you educate? In what way can you inspire your tribe with that subject? The one you want to put most of your focus on right now is entertainment.  The reason is because Instagram is focussing on this in Q4 of 2021. We give them what they want you see!

https://bringtotheparty.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/PXL_20211026_120212153.mp4#t=0.01,0.1

The process

Once you have got all of these bits in place – it’s time to start content planning!

You want to think about the weeks ahead.  What do you have coming up that you want to promote – these will be your sales post. Your sales posts should account for around 20-25% of your posts.  Doesn’t seem like much does it?!. 

I also like to think at this point of other businesses I want to promote.  Either clients or other businesses I just love.  If we all help each other out, the world becomes a much nicer (and easier) place to live in!

Either grab a piece of paper and pencil, use a spreadsheet or a platform like Trello (I scribble on paper then transfer to Trello for my own content planning) and get all of the ideas out of your head. 

I would highly recommend having an online list that you can use either on your laptop or on your phone.  This makes you SO much more efficient as whenever you are out and come up with an amazing idea, you can quickly jot the idea down before you forget. 

Time to plot

Then it’s time for the fun part!  Plotting it all out.  

Think about your goals for social then figure out how often you should be posting.  Feel free to ask for advice on this one!

There is SO much more I could talk about on this subject, but at its core, this is the base of the system which should save you SO much time and frustration and make your business a little easier to run. 

And if you would like to learn even more, I have a workshop coming up at the end of the month where we will take a deep dive into this subject.  During which time I will be giving away a bank of suggestions for content ideas too!

How well do you know your customers? Is this something you could do with help on?

Jo