285: I have the answer to all your "content" problems

Have a content problem?

Time, consistency, knowledge, engagement, budget?

I have the answers to your problems. I will take you through 5 different problems and how to "fix" them.

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

⁠⁠⁠⁠LEARN THE DETAILS OF A CONTENT STRATEGY WITH MY FREE AUDIO GUIDE⁠⁠⁠⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

✨ The 5 content pains and how to overcome them 

✨ The answers to you content problems 

✨ How to manage business ownership and marketing 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

 This is episode 285, and I'm here to answer all your content problems. Welcome to the Content Queen Podcast. I'm your host, Mariah, entrepreneur storyteller, digital nomad, creative content bootcamp, and founder of Content Queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content, and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you.

Each week, I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business, and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey along withable steps to help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling.

Powerful aligned marketing and content strategy. Let's do it. Hello gang. Okay. If you watch any of this on social media, we're in the bus still, but only for one more week and then we will be in a normal bed. Actually, shouldn't say that because this is our house, but we are taking a bus break 'cause I have three workshops.

So if you are in Gippsland and you listen to this, doing three amazing workshops, I'll put the link in the show notes. Two of 'em with Latrobe City, one on the easiest type of content you'll ever create, and then another workshop on sort of future proofing your business and having a think about how social media plays one role in how you market.

And then another one with Bobble Shire, which is all about marketing on a budget. So I'll put the link in the show notes if you wanna check those out. But we're gonna be home. Well. Home where I grew up, um, for a couple weeks. So the videoing will look a little bit different, but that's not what we're here to talk about.

We all have a content problem, all of us. Even me, I have content problems. Obviously, I, it depends on the week and it might be the same for you, but basically we started our businesses to. Have a service, have a product, give a transformation, and then someone says to us, okay, great. Well you need to market your business and you need to be seen by more people.

And then what ends up happening is we really enjoy building. It might be a personal brand or our legacy. So content becomes this way for us to share our impact. It gives us a. Platform and a space for us to share more than just here are my products and services. It allows us to share our passions, our personalities.

A lot of us as entrepreneurs and small business owners, we do like that aspect, but it doesn't mean that we wanna do it all the time. Because even some days I don't wanna create content like a Monday. Not a good idea for me to be creating content. But here we are. So when I first started this and I was doing lots of research around like what were people's pain points, there were some really clear things that come up and I wanted to talk about those today.

So there's five, and give you a little bit of what you can do if one of these pains or problems is something that you are currently experiencing. Because I'm telling you, you could even be multiple of these. Um, but let's talk about it right? And going back to that kind of entrepreneurial journey and showing up and being this person online, you also find that you're really on all the time.

So you have waves of really inspired, like do you have those weeks where you just wanna show up on social media every day, or create an Instagram reel or a blog or a podcast, like you've got so much energy and then some weeks you don't. And maybe at the moment you feel like more of those weeks are not feeling it than.

The weeks that are, sometimes you've gotta ride those waves. I definitely have them, but in those moments, we can set things up to really support us in their business. So the first main point is time content marketing. Content creation is time consuming, of course, with AI now. You know, you can get a lot of support obviously with AI comes editing and please add a human element to your AI processes.

'cause everything is sounding very chat pt. And there's some current lines like it used to be in the world of, but now there's a lot of like tiny things that if you use AI a lot, you'll notice in people's content, you know, even, of course we know the M Dash, but there's other little slight things. But anyway, I digress.

Time is. Money. Time is time with our family. Time is time doing things that we love. And if you are spending a lot of time putting together content, scheduling it, putting it out there, it is very time consuming. So one of the things that I would encourage you to think about is of course, the content marketing strategy because that will help you a lot.

But how you utilize your time to create content. So, for example, I gave this piece of advice to a client recently is sort of break up your days. Doesn't mean every day you are spending hours creating content, but how can you best use your energy? So a Monday could be more high level planning versus a Friday that could be more content admin.

Tuesdays being more about writing, Wednesday's more about using your voice and recording. And Thursdays can be really like. Putting it all together, adding the visual element. So having a think about how you utilize your time and how much time things are taking you. I'll never forget a mentor said to me, you're doing your Canva Graphics.

Why aren't you outsourcing them? You don't like them? I'm like, yeah, I know. I hate Canva Graphics, but I said, but you know, it's just easier for me to do it. Or, um, I hadn't really thought about the financial element. She said, well, if you say charge yourself a hundred dollars an hour. And it took you two hours to create Canva Graphics every week.

That's 200 a week. And you're like, oh yeah, okay. It's simple. So if you think I don't have the income to outsource, and we'll talk about budget in a second, um, it could be. Different ways that you outsource. It might not be like a full content marketer, but it could be just someone that could support you in some way, and you really don't know until you have a conversation with someone as to whether you could afford it or not.

I used to have people say, oh, I thought you were extremely expensive, so they're never engaged in your services. So. You know, the second one is consistency. Struggling to consistently show up. And most of the time it's because you don't have the foundation set up for consistency, so you are not having a plan.

So when you go to post, you're like, oh, what can I post? And you're plucking something out of thin air and you're putting something together. But consistency comes from building. Consistency comes from having habits. So how can you create a habit that allows you to consistently create? So the first one is having some type of plan.

And this is, yes, a posting plan, which becomes part A very big and small at the same time, part of a content marketing strategy. So knowing. Not necessarily, oh, I have to shop up on this day. It's like, this is the amount of times I can show up. So there's a few things that you need to do apart from having a content strategy is yes, understanding what you're talking about when, and it doesn't have to be like on Mondays I do this and on Tuesdays, depends on how you operate.

It could literally be like, this is the, this is the frequency in which I show up within a timeframe and. This is the goal of what I'm trying to achieve. So awareness, building, trust, converting, and this is the end goal, like the sale or what you're working on, what you're trying to build in your business, and then you can start to work backwards from there.

But if you don't know, then it's really hard to go. Okay. I can build a plan around this, and then you hold yourself accountable with meeting, like diary notes, task management, all these things until you can build that habit. So I'm currently building an exercise habit, so I need to put in my calendar, I need to do all those things that I never used to have to do with exercise, but I'm having to repeat the process again.

So building yourself up for success in that way, but you can't, without understanding why you're doing something. Then you can put in the frequency and the accountability. The third one is knowledge. So understanding, oh, well this is how the algorithm works, or This is how my audience is, or this is what my audience likes, or.

Uh, this is how I post a reel. So all these knowledge gaps and where you're going, oh, well I don't know how to do this, so it's really hard for me to show up. Now, there's a few things in these, in this. The first one is practice. So if you don't know how to post a good edited video, maybe that's also not your jam and you might need to outsource it.

But maybe it's like, oh, well I could learn this. I'm keen to learn this. So putting. The process in place to learn it. Finding people that can support you on that journey, whether it's a short course in real editing or a TikTok video that shows you how to do something or joining a community of people that know how to do something, or the other business owners that can help and support you.

That's why I originally created my DIY Content marketing club, which is my membership, which people go, I didn't know you've had that. If you do bootcamp, you know, 'cause you get it three months for free. But basically I created all these resources and templates to kind of fill that knowledge gap. I know with AI and Chat T now it's kind of like, oh, what's the point of that?

But some people just need those tutorials or those how to of someone actually doing it. So find where that knowledge gap is. What aren't you. Sort of feeling like you understand that's blocking you from doing something. Also, why I created little guides on how to start a podcast or how to study a YouTube channel because it felt like people were blocking themselves on things that they could get help with very easily and very quickly.

So understanding your knowledge gap and really putting things in place to help you go, okay, this is what I'm not understanding or getting support in that is so helpful. But then also knowledge in your audience. Who are they? What do they know? What do they like? And that's from another lens of going, looking at your data and looking at your analytics.

If you have been posting in some sort of consistency, but you're like, oh, well, I don't really know. I don't really understand what's happening. I don't know if my audience are engaging. Well, the numbers will tell you, and I've. Clients before in the past that have been so hung up on some sort of content channel like Instagram.

But then when we've looked at the numbers, something like YouTube is more powerful and more result like giving them more results. So we're going, well, why are we spending all our time here? We should be there. So knowledge is power in that sense. So understanding your numbers at a deeper level is very, very important.

I'm actually doing my Become a Measurement Queen workshop, which is free for any members and free for anyone that's joined. Content bootcamp and basically we, I showed you how to go through that and how to understand it, and it's whilst not the most entertaining workshop you'll ever do. It actually is when you go, oh, now I understand why.

When I do this type of content, this is the reaction I get. Just gives you the insight between what you're creating versus what your audience likes, and it paints a picture and tells you a story. So when you know that and understand that and learn to like that aspect of your marketing, it does save you a lot of time.

So all of these like pains work together. So once you kind of figure out one, it generally helps you with others, right? So if you understand how to do things like. Video editing or writing captions or those things, it'll save you time in the long run 'cause you'll get quicker at it and then you'll start to enjoy it more, so you'll be more consistent, like it's a flow on effect.

The fourth one is the problem of engagement. Lack of engagement likes vanity metrics. Now, this is where it's important to understand what are my goals out of the channels that I'm on? What are the goals with the content I'm creating? Because even very successful business owners might not get a lot of engagement on their posts, but the posts or the content, the email, the.

Social media post, the podcast serves its purpose of getting the conversion that they need. So if we look at a much traditional marketing funnel, the bottom of the funnel, which is the conversion content, is always a smaller pool of people. So that means less eyes, less likes, less engagement. So if you're like, oh, well the algorithm is tanking and my Instagram or LinkedIn posts are performing poorly, or I haven't got as many views on X, Y, Z, obviously numbers mean.

More chance of exposure, which can mean more conversion from a statistical point of view, but certain posts and certain types of content act in a certain way. So to help you with this, firstly, it's understanding the goal that you wanna create out of your content. If it is an engagement thing and you do need to work on that, then you go back to that knowledge gap of understanding your audience and understanding what content it's working and then sort of try and double down on that.

Tapping with me with clients before, our goal was reach massive audience reach, which wanna reach as many people as possible. So it was up to me to test things, learn what performed, and then double down on that, and that's how we got that increase in engagement, the viewers, et cetera. So. If you've noticed that there is an engagement, lag, or decrease and you need those views or that engagement you're building community, et cetera, then go back to step three, which is knowledge and looking at who your audience is and what are they engaging with, and that will help you.

And the last one is budget. So obviously not having enough budget to spend on maybe. Promoting your posts on social media or, um, hiring someone to support you, getting help that you need. This can be hard because obviously you're only one person, right? But again, having a conversation with someone, you never know their prices until you ask, and you never know if there's someone in your budget.

If you absolutely have no budget at all, start. Working on the other stages, time, consistency, knowledge and engagement. And that will help you boost up your content marketing, your funnel, to then bring in the more income so you can eventually outsource it. So having a think about a proper content strategy, like actually going, if I want this to work, I need to put the foundations in place.

I need to learn, I need to spend a bit of time. But it will help me in the long run because where we invest our time and money and energy. Needs to align with where we want things to go. So understanding your goals of the channels, your goals of creating content, your goals of marketing can then help you go, okay, well I can dedicate X amount of time.

I can build this type of consistency with frequency, I can spend more time increasing my knowledge on my audience, which will increase my engagement. And try and work out that even engagement from a conversion perspective and build up that income so then you can eventually outsource it. But a lot of the people that have done well through content marketing have really tried to learn it themselves, have learned strategy, and you don't need to be learning it 24 7, but just trying to invest some time into it.

Saw Brittany Saunders, who is a. Owner of a multimillion dollar clothing label started as a content creator, but she's blown away by the small business owners and business owners who aren't taking content seriously, whether it's through outsourcing it or doing it themselves. Like she always talks about, you know, trying to get yourself out there in front of the camera or being the face of your brand.

She was blown away by having conversations with people going like, oh, why do I need to do that? 'cause she's seen how much it's grown her business. So in order to get that budget that you need to pour into Facebook ads or outsource the work learning it is so powerful. Spending a little bit more time building that consistency and that knowledge.

So I would go back over those other points and focus on those. And it really comes down to the fundamentals of having a content marketing strategy. I can't stress this enough, as I've said before, that's not a posting plan. A posting plan is one element of content strategy. There's other parts, including understanding your audience, understanding your goals, understanding the channels you need to be on.

Then working out the content plan, what types of content you need to be creating and building a process so you can repurpose, you can build processes, so you are not spending hours doing this. You can use things like AI to optimize, then you can start building your marketing machine. So then when you've built up that budget and you wanna bring on someone to support you, you've got a massive foundation.

It's really easy to come in as someone that's working in a business. And of course I can build the foundations and I love doing that. But if you wanna get, really maximize your time. With the person that you have in your business. Having those foundations is super important. So we are gonna be kicking off the live round of Content Bootcamp very soon.

So I'll put the details in the show notes if you wanna check it out. We're doing a live round from the end of August, so if you want to purchase it now, you will get access straight into that live round if you're not ready to start kicking it off yet. But any one of these content problems, I can absolutely promise you.

If there's a way to move through it with strategy, with a plan, and with the right support, and I'd love to support you in bootcamp, so check out the details in the show notes, and. Be a content queen or king, and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Instagram stories and tagging me at Content Queen Mariah, or just tell 'em about it. If you do rate review on whatever platform your listeners on. Helps us get amazing guests, like previous guests that we've had and future guests at o'clock coming up.

So I would love to hear your feedback and also if there's any topics you want me to talk about in the future, please let me know. Follow us on Insta or TikTok, and I will talk to you very soon. Bye.

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment