Episode 116: Your First Step to Creating a Marketing Strategy

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Content Marketing Strategy First Step

When it comes to a content marketing strategy first step, I’ve been asked many times what that very first step is, and the answer might surprise you. Which is why I’m addressing it today, as well as walking you through my 4 steps for creating a content marketing strategy. If you enjoy today’s episode, I would be so grateful if you’d leave a review for the podcast. It helps more listeners find us, and it also lets me know that I’m creating what you want and need to hear. Let’s dive in.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Watch the Basics of Content Marketing Lesson
This week’s action step: Grab my A Year in Preview workshop to start planning out the rest of 2022 today and make strides towards a strong content marketing strategy!
This week’s book recommendation: Educated by Tara Westover
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.

Welcome to Chasing Simple episode 116. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. If you’re an old friend, welcome back. And if you’re a new friend. Hi, I am so glad that you’re here. Like I said, I’m Amanda, I’m a simplicity, focus, content marketing strategists, and Chasing Simple was created. Other entrepreneurs simplify their business so that they can enjoy running a business that supports their life.

When it comes to a content marketing strategy first step, I have been asked many times with the very first step is to creating one. And the answer might surprise you, which is why I’m addressing it today, as well as walking you through my four steps for creating a content marketing strategy. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I would be so grateful if you’d leave a review for the podcast, it helps more listeners find us.

And it also lets me know that I’m creating what you want. Need to hear. Let’s dive in.

When it comes to getting started with content marketing strategy. The true first step is consistency. I know it’s not exciting or fun or sexy, but if you are not consistent with your marketing, you are not ready to take the next step into strategic content. I have worked with numerous clients who were not yet consistent and because they were not yet consistent, the strategy that we created did nothing.

Consistency builds the know like, and trust factor with your audience consistently. Is foundational step for relationship marketing, for having a relationship with your audience, for your audience, trusting you, knowing that you’re the expert in what you are. Consistency is the foundation of all of that.

And when I’ve worked with clients in the past, who I’ve taken on because they promise this was a year, they were going to be serious and get consistent. What ends up happening is that we both. Waste our time, because what happens is we get on a call. we planned out this beautiful strategy.

We’ve got all these great content ideas. It’s moving people towards a sale, and then they don’t post anything.

And so we meet again, and I essentially tweak the dates. And send them back on their way with the exact same plan, because the strategy sound, they just haven’t posted it. So they haven’t moved their audience towards anything yet. And this is not speaking about one client in general, I’ve had numerous clients do this because they weren’t really ready for the strategy side of things yet they were not consistent yet.

And so we.meet And I gave him the same plan we meet and I give them the same plan and we meet and I gave him the same plan and they spend a whole year working together, not moving the needle with their content marketing for their business because they never get consistent. So get consistent before you do anything else before you worry about strategy before you worry about best practices, just.

Focus on consistency, focus on building a system. I recommend batch week, but building some sort of system that will get you consistent. Now I have many, many podcast episodes about this episode. 14 is literally titled Creating Consistent Content episode 24, How to Create a Month Worth of Content In One Week episode 40, Implement a Content Strategy That Converts it’s all about consistency.

Episode number 42, My Schedule for Creating Consistent Content episodes 44, 45, 46 are all tips for creating content faster, whether you’re YouTube or podcasts or a blogger. I have so many episodes already all about consistency. I highly recommend go back, listen to those. Get consistent before you worry about anything else.

So let’s say that you are consistent, you are showing up, you are ready, you have the mental capacity to get strategic. You’re ready to go. Well, your first step, if you’re there, if you’re consistent your first step. And the first thing I do with all of my content marketing strategy, clients is creating a plan for your year.

I sit down in November and I create my plan for the year to come. So last November, I sat down and created my plan for all of 2022, put all the dates on the calendar I already had. There’s a lot that goes into it. I actually am full for one-on-one clients, but if you wanted to get my system for how I do this, grab my a year in preview workshop, and that will help you walk through planning out your year.

You can plan for the remainder of this year. You can plan for next year, whatever, but walking through the entire year and visualizing what I’m launching and when, how many clients I need or want to have how many. Courses, I want to sell, how many members do I want inside of Club Content Batching. These are all things that you need to know before you can create a strategy.

So the first thing I do with all of my content marketing strategy clients is we map out their year and then we look at their goals for the next year and we take those goals and we turn them into actionable. Things we create plans to achieve those goals. So like if they have a revenue goal, we know we need to break that down into X amount per quarter, which would mean X amount per launch.

And it really depends on everyone’s goals, which is why this is a fantastic one-to-one activity. But. Mapping out your goals and how you can achieve those, how you plan to achieve those and then putting those things on the calendar. So if you know, you need to make X amount per quarter, that in every quarter, you’re going to have some kind of big promotion to reach that goal.

Okay. Put those promotion dates on the calendar. What are the promotions for you need to know that are you doing, do you have four different products and offers and you’re going to do one per quarter. Do you have. a one-to-one offer that you’re going to do at the end of the year. And then the other three are all going to be digital, whatever that looks like.

You have to map that out, what you’re launching and when,

and this is so important because unless you know exactly where you’re trying to go, there’s no way to create a strategy to get there. For example, let’s say you are driving to a friend’s house. There are likely multiple ways that you can get there. There’s probably one that’s the best, fastest way, but there’s probably different routes that you can take to get to your friend’s house.

What if you didn’t know the address? Once when Russell and I were dating and I was in college, he went out with some friends and he wanted me to pick him up, being responsible, not drinking and driving. He wanted me to pick him up and he texted me and said, Hey, I’m ready to be picked up. I’m in this area.

Let me get the exact address for you. And I didn’t hear back from him. And I didn’t hear back from him. I didn’t hear back from him. And the area was about a 30 minute drive. So I said, okay, I’m going to get in the car. And I’m just going to start driving that way. And surely he’ll get me that address soon.

Right. Which, you know, very naive Amanda thing to think. But I started driving towards him. I put the area into Google maps and suffice it to say, That he gets lost that night. And we ended up in very different areas and it was a whole thing, but I did not know I was where I was going. So I had no way to find him.

Right. I only had a general idea of what I was trying to do. And the same is true for your content, for your strategy. If you don’t know where exactly you are trying to go, your content is not going to be very strategic. It’s going to be very general and again, if you’re focusing on consistency, that is perfectly fine, but if you are ready to get strategic, you need to know exactly where you are going.

So if you haven’t already go listen to episode 92, 6 Steps for Planning Your Year in Business and go check out my A Year in Preview Workshop that will help you create your plan for your year. So once you’ve gotten. All of that down. You’ve got your yearly plan. What you do next is you work backwards from any launches or promotions that you have planned because you know exactly what your endpoint is.

You work Preparing from that end point, you create a launch runway, which I’ve talked about many, many times the importance of what it is, how long it needs to be, et cetera, et cetera. You can listen to episode 1 0 3. Preparing Your Launch Strategy for Your Next Course, Launch to learn more about a launch runway, but you create that launch runway working backwards from the actual end goal.

That is the strategy side of things. You add that strategy into that launch runway. And then after you’ve got your launch runway figured out you have all of this extra content space because. You only need to be in launch mode during your launch runway, right? So you have all of this extra content space where you can really have fun with your content.

What do you want to talk about or questions have you gotten from your audience? This is your permission to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, keep it niche related. Keep it things that your audience is asking you, but give yourself that freedom strategy is important, but you don’t have to be married to an exact strategy.

All the time. You can really add in some fun stuff here. And who knows that may spawn a new product offer idea or strategy that is in line with your current funnel. So if you’re like, okay, but what do I talk about? Go listen to episode number 69, to learn about Seven Different Places that You Can Find Content Inspiration for this part of your content marketing strategy, different ways that you can say, okay, here’s what I want to talk about.

Where, how do I find inspiration? That’ll give you seven different ways and you can fill in your non launch runway content with those things. So your action step for this week, go plan out the rest of 2022. Again, highly encourage you to grab my A Year in Preview Workshop. That’ll help you walk through exactly how I plan out my year and how I work with my clients to plan out their years.

You can grab that@amandawarfield.com/ayp but plan out your year, however you do it and make strides towards a strong content marketing strategy. Again, if you’re not consistent yet get consistent, but if you are already consistent, you need to plan out your year. And those are your action steps for this week.

This week’s book recommendation is Educated by Tara Westover. I mentioned this a few episodes ago, I believe, but I have been on a, a memoir this year. This one was recommended by, I mean, I’ve seen many, many people recommend it, obviously over the years, but my husband’s cousin recommended. It said it was incredible.

So I figured okay. Time to pick it up.

It blew me away. And I mean, so the basic premise, if you haven’t heard of it is Tara grew up in a family that shunned a lot of modern everything education. They did not go to school, growing up education medicine, all the things, and. She gets into the why, obviously in all of that, in the book, but it amazed me how much I could relate to her and what she went through, even though I didn’t go through anything like it.

And I’m not sure if that follows, as I’m saying that out loud. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but she is so relatable. And the way she describes and details, what she went through is so relatable to just humanity in general, I believe So highly recommend Educated by Tara Westover.

I will link to in the show notes as always, and until next time, my friend, I hope that you go out and Uncomplicate your life and biz.