Episode 085: 4 Steps to Strategic Content

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Want a step-by-step plan for creating strategic content? This episode is for you! I'll walk you through my 4 steps to strategic content!

Steps for Strategic Content

Last week, I shared two things you can do to make time and space to create strategic content for your business. Today, I’m sharing 4 steps to creating strategic content. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that one first, because I reference it a few times in this episode.

If you have the time and space to create strategic content, but you struggle to know what strategic content is, you feel overwhelmed when it comes to determining what your content will be, and you tend to feel like you’re pulling random ideas out of your head instead of strategically planning your content, you’ve come to the right place.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Learn more about working with me 1:1 on your own strategic marketing plan!
Tune in to Episode 070: Steal These 4 Sample Content Plans
Listen to Episodes 081 and 082 to learn more about my CEO Day Routines
Episode 083: What Having a Plan for Your Year Can Do For Your Business
This week’s action step: If you’re interested in working with me 1:1 in 2022 to create a strategic custom marketing plan, head to amandawarfield.com/application and let’s chat about whether or not this service would be a good fit for you!
This week’s book recommendation: The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!

Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

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

Last week, I shared two things you can do to make time and space to create strategic content for your business. Today, I’m sharing four steps to creating strategic content. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that one first, because I reference it well quite a few times in this area.

If you have the time and space to create strategic content, but you struggle to know what strategic content is. You feel overwhelmed when it comes to determining what your content will be. And well, you tend to feel like you’re pulling random ideas out of your head instead of strategically planning your content.

You’ve come to the right place. You’re listening to episode 85 of The Chasing Simple Podcast.And I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in.

The first step in creating strategic content is to have a marketing plan. Well in advance, if you don’t have a marketing plan in a, you don’t know what you’re launching and what you’re promoting, and when, how in the world can you expect your content to warm your audience up?

Now I’ve done quite a few episodes about creating a marketing plan in the past. If you listen to Episode 81 and 82, I’m talking about my CEO days that I do every quarter in Episode 83, I actually have some of my own personal one-on-one clients coming on and talking about what a marketing plan did for their business and way back in Episode 70, I even gave four simple content plans that you can still for yourself.

So to check all of those out episode 70 episode, 81, 82, 83. And if you didn’t listen to last week’s episode about making time to create strategic content, make sure you go back and check that one out as well.

But that’s the very first step you have to have a marketing plan. Well in advance, you cannot go into every month and decide, okay? What is my theme for this month? What am I going to promote this month? Am I going to have a sale this month? You need to know that way before you sit down to make content for the next month, trying to figure out October’s marketing plan at the end of September does not work. How can you expect your audience to be warmed up to whatever your sale or promotion is going to be? If you give them no notice. If you’re trying to warm them up within one week or two weeks, it doesn’t work. It absolutely does not work. You have to have a marketing plan. Well in advance, you need to know what you’re putting out in wins so that you can go through the warmup phase with your content, with your audience.

Step two for grading strategic content is to ask your audience. Now I talked about this again in depth in last week’s episode, but the main idea is that you want to ask your audience. What is your biggest struggle when it comes to. X, whatever X means for you, whether that is something that you are specifically a very specific topic that you’re gearing up for some kind of launch or promote, or if it’s a wider one.

So for me, if I was gearing up for a launch of club content, batching, I would say, what is your biggest struggle with batching your content? Or I might even say, what is your biggest struggle with content creation and then take it a step farther. Which we’ll get into in just a second, but I can take it a step back instead of just saying, what’s your biggest struggle with content badging? What’s your biggest struggle with content creation or if I’m just looking for ideas for the podcast, I might say, what is your biggest struggle with content marketing? It’s much more broad. I can get a lot more variety in my answers, giving you guys way more variety in the episodes I bring to you.

But that, that main question is what is your biggest struggle when it comes to. And you can ask that in all kinds of ways, you can survey your audience. You can ask it in Facebook group, you can put it in your email sequences. You can do a yearly survey. You can pop a question about was on Instagram, get creative with how you’re asking. And again, I talk way more in depth about each of those in last week’s episode, but the idea of asking your audience what their biggest struggle is.

Number three, when you’re in the spaghetti throwing phase of business. And even after that, but especially at this point, when I know you might be thinking, I don’t have an audience to ask you do. And we talk about that last week too. You do have an audience to ask, but even if you’re feeling that way, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with coming up with ideas for yourself.

I know that sometimes that feels like it’s not strategic because you’re just pulling random ideas out of your head, but it can be strategic. As long as you’re asking yourself questions in the right way to pull those random ideas out, quote unquote were in them. I should say. As long as you’re asking yourself the right questions, it’s not super random. You can pull out strategic content from your own brain. So what are you asking? I want you to ask yourself what it is that your audience thinks is standing in the way of using your product or service.

So, again, for example, if we’re talking about club content, batching, I would ask myself, what is. That’s keeping my audience from batching their content and wanting to invest in Club Content Batching . Those are really two questions. What is it that’s keeping my audience from bashing their content? And what is it? That’s keeping them from wanting to invest in Club Content Batching?

So maybe a hurdle is that they don’t even know what to say in order to create content. So maybe that’s a hurdle for them. They can’t even get to the idea of batching their content because they’re not even really creating content. They have no idea how to begin. Okay. Well, how can I solve that problem for them? I can come up with an episode all about how to find ideas for content. And in fact, I have done that Episode 69 is seven places to find content inspiration.

Let’s say one of their hurdles is they have an idea of how to batch their content and they can just do it then. Maybe I could do an episode about the way, the community, this is actually a great idea. I could bring on some of my students and they could talk about the way that having that accountability and that community to keep batching month after month has made a difference for their business. That could be a way that I jumped that hurdle.

You want to ask yourself, what is it that’s holding them back from using your product or service and what is it that’s holding them back from even getting to the idea of doing what it is. So. What is keeping them from even beginning to batch their content and what is keeping them from club content, batching.

Those are two questions that you can ask yourself to come up with content ideas that are still strategic. Even if you’re not pulling them straight from your audience.

And then step number four is to give yourself enough runway to warm up your audience, to whatever you’re selling. So similar to point one, you have to have a marketing plan well in advance, if you don’t have that marketing plan well in advance, you can not do step four. If you don’t know well in advance when you’re launching something or when you’re, promoing something, there’s no way for you to give yourself enough runway to warm up your audience, to whatever you’re selling.

We all know the statistic. It takes 7 to 10 times of us hearing about something before we actually take action. So if you decide at the end of September, that on August 15th, you’re going to run a promo. And that’s the first time you ever talk about this thing that you’re launching?

Well, That’s not enough time to warm up your audience. You have got to talk about it over and over and over and over again. You cannot expect anyone to drop what they’re doing to buy something from you the first time they hear about it, think about your own shopping habits when it comes to your business, but not even just your business.

The first time you see something that intrigues you, you might go. Hmm. That’s interesting. But you might keep swiping. And then the next time that ad pops up, you might think, oh, I saw that before. That’s really cute. Maybe I’ll check it out and maybe you click, but maybe you don’t and then you click and you look at it and you think, oh, I just don’t spend that money right now.

And so you click out of it and then you see that ad, over, and over, and over again. And eventually you’re probably going to buy the thing if they keep putting that out in front of you, but you don’t do it on the first time. How often is anyone, especially when they’re watching content, because let’s face it when I’m on social media my wallet is nowhere near me. And honestly, I don’t buy things from my phone. If I’m going to buy something, it’s something that I’m going to go get up, go to my computer, to go get my wallet. I’m not going to do that the first time I see something.

If I’m listening to a podcast, I’m either out walking or I’m cleaning my house or I’m driving. I’m not going to stop and buy anything. If I’m watching a YouTube video, which I really don’t do that often. But if I was watching a YouTube video, honestly, I’d probably be in bed binging something, you know, like you have to talk about something over and over and over and over again for defintely stick. And if you don’t give yourself enough runway to warm up your audience to whatever it is that you’re selling, they’re not going to buy.

So four steps to creating strategic content first, have that marketing plan well in advance. Second, ask your audience what they struggle with. Third, ask yourself what hurdles your audience might have and create content around those hurdles. Solve those hurdles for them. And four, give yourself enough runway to warm up your audience, to whatever you’re selling. You need the marketing plan, but you also need to talk about your thing, your product, your service, over and over and over again. Before you get to that point, it’s not enough to know. Okay. It’s September. I’m going to launch something in January and then wait to talk about it until December. That’s not enough. Give yourself enough time to do it well.

And this week’s action step. If you’re interested in working one-to-one with me in 2022, to create a strategic custom marketing plan, head on over to Amanda warfield.com forward slash application, and let’s chat about whether or not the service would be a good fit for you.

If you know you need some help creating strategic content. You need some help having that marketing plan set up well in advance and frankly, sticking to that marketing plan, because I know shiny object syndrome is so real for all of us. If you know, you want some help with that strategic custom marketing plan, I’ve got just 10 spots available for one-to-one clients for 2022, some of them are already filled.

So head on over to Amandawarfield.com/application, and let’s chat to see if you’d be a good fit. And this week’s book recommendation is The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz. Now this has been on my to read list over a years. Realistically, you guys know I am a huge Mike Michalowicz would fan, all of his books, I just, I haven’t read one that hasn’t been amazing. And I wish that I had read The Pumpkin Plan years ago when I first wanted to, because it would have helped me so much with simplifying my business. And that might come as a shock because I know the whole premise of everything I do is all about simplicity, but I spent so much time and I know I’ve talked about this in the past. I’ve spent so much time trying to do all the things and make it all work and put all of these different products out there.

When in actuality, I just needed to try to grow my own prize-winning pumpkin, Which now I finally stepped into that and this book was very reaffirming, but I wish I had read it so much earlier so that I could have started growing my own prize-winning pumpkin years ago. So highly recommend The Pumpkin Plan. If you feel like you are doing all the things, but nothing seems to be working and you feel like you’re not getting the traction that you need highly recommend that you go check that one out.

And until next time I hope that you’ll go out and Uncomplicate your life and biz.