286: A content plan is NOT enough

You know what day you post about what, right? Great. You are organised and you are creating content for your business. 

But without a strategy it is just a posting plan. It is just a system. 

When you know the foundations, it is strategic, that is called marketing! What do you need to be more strategic? Let me break it down for you in this episode of The Content Queen Podcast. 

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 foundations to a content strategy 

✨ Why your posting plan isn’t a strategy 

✨ How to start being more strategic 

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 286, and I'm sharing how a content plan is simply not enough to grow your business on social media through content marketing. 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. We share their own journey, along with actual steps to help you take your business to a wholly level through amazing storytelling, our online marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it. Hello again. All right. Quick question for you. Do you have a content strategy or do you have a content plan, which means you know what your. Posting when roughly, so on Monday you might do X amount of content on X topic versus Friday where you might do something more fun and engaging and lighthearted.

So that's great. I love that. I think that's awesome, but it isn't a strategy. So if you're on Spotify, jump in the poll and answer it. No judgment. I just wanna know, I'm curious to know because I think we're getting. Misinformation about what actually makes up content strategy. And I ask this also because at the moment I am.

Working through how can my program content bootcamp support entrepreneurs and business owners with strategy? And obviously, one component is what am I posting on X day? Because that helps us stay organized, right? So whatever your content pains are, whatever you are struggling with, essentially Content Bootcamp is here to support you in that based on creating a proper strategy.

My answer has always been strategy. Sometimes I think strategy gets thrown around as like a buzzword, but if you don't have a documented content strategy and not just a posting plan, it is really hard to do marketing. It's not marketing, it's just posting content. So it's content creation, not actually marketing, which is.

Marketing your products and services for a higher good of your business. So if you think that, oh, well, yeah, I'm posting, so I'm marketing my business. It's just creating content and I don't wanna shame anyone because it's just what we've been taught. Right. Okay. I just need to show up on social media like you have experts.

Social media gurus like just post. Just post every day, or just post X amount of days and you'll be fine. And it's like, well, there does become a point where it's not actually strategic and that's why. Yeah, you can have those posts that inject engagement into your business and get you the numbers of people.

And then also why if you promote something promotional, it gets less engagement. 'cause that's basically how marketing funnel works. And if you're not equipped to be able to deal with that, not getting the right people in all the things, then not only are those posts getting less engagement, they're getting less engagement by the wrong people.

And why this comes up is I did bootcamp live round in May. I'm running another live round in August. So if you've been thinking about joining bootcamp, join us for a live round. It gives you space and time with me to be able to answer, get any of your questions answered. And this was one of the things that came up totally valid too, right?

One of the participants was like, oh, I saw this guy on social media and he has like quite a big following. And he said his business really changed when he stopped doing a content strategy. And he just posted from the heart and she's like, and I sort of resonated with that because sometimes when I do sit down and write from the heart, the content resonates and I feel good about it.

And I'm like, yeah, of course. But he still has a strategy. Because he's telling you he doesn't have a posting plan, but hands down 100 and I'm willing to bet my bus on it 'cause I don't have a house. And if you notice, we're not in the bus. Um, if you are watching any video content of this, because we are just having a little three week break while we have loads of workshops happening, one every week for the next three weeks, it's gonna be amazing.

But I'm willing to bet my bus on it that he has a strategy. He just doesn't have a posting plan, and a posting plan is only one. The element of a content strategy, like seriously, he would know his audience, he would know what he's trying to do, and he knows what channels he needs to be on. And then there's elements that he doesn't have.

You have the core foundations of a strategy. It's like when organic marketers or digital marketers create Facebook ads saying why you don't need Facebook ads. But they're using Facebook ads in their strategy

like. It doesn't a hundred percent make sense. Like I get what they're trying to do, but also like they're using Facebook ads, so obviously they see some sort of power with it, right? So anyway, what I wanna talk about today is, well, the key title was a content Content plan isn't enough and it's not enough.

It's not enough to know I need to show up on this day and post this type of content. So what is a strategy now? A strategy is part of a plan, right? It is an A to B, so you might go well, yeah, so it's a posting plan that's content creation. What are the most three foundational parts of a content strategy are the foundations, your audience, your goals, and where you need to show up.

Whilst you might have done a target audience analysis, but what happens is a lot of times we don't look at it and we don't think about that person. I see videos of influencers and they say, as people say to them, how do you create content for like millions of people that watch your content? And they're like, I don't.

And literally create for one person. I could not possibly think about creating for millions because I would be paralyzed and I would never post. So even these influencers that reach, a lot of people know the importance of understanding who's watching on the other end. So you understanding and there's a difference between, okay, I've got this target audience that buys my product or services and I have multiple different people versus this is the person I'm creating content for.

'cause yes, you can have multiple people. So really understanding them from a very deep level, but continue continuing to understand them. I have a participant in the Ask Me Anything WhatsApp group at the moment, and we spent a lot of her time understanding her audience, understanding their pain points.

She did market research and people avoid this stuff. They don't like doing it. I get it, but it's so important, even just after a meeting sitting down and thinking, what did that person ask me? If they're your ideal audience, what did that person need? And then mapping out that experience of how they go from A to B, to C to D, all the way to Z.

So then understanding where they're at in their journey. And I've done a whole episode on this, understanding where your audience is at from problem aware, unaware, solution aware, brand aware. I'll put it in the show notes. But basically I worked with her to understand all of that, and then she could create a posting plan for that person.

But really understanding that was so important for the next steps. So that's the first part. The second part is your goals. And I feel like I talk about this in nearly every episode. Yeah. Right. Which is nodding, but it's like I need to keep saying it because a lot of times the conversations I'm having is, social media's not working for me.

Or this is not working. And then when I say, okay, well what do you wanna achieve from that platform? Do you have goals? They can't really tell me the answer because they haven't set the expectation of what they want to achieve. Or what are your business goals like, what do you need to get out of being on these platforms other than likes, engagement, followers, and sales?

Like there might be a specific reason that you need to be on that channel. And I've had this happen with clients before where they're like, oh, Instagram's not working, da blah, blah. And I say, okay. Well, when we first spoke, the goal for that particular channel being Instagram was because you wanted to build it into your overall funnel and eventually run.

Paid advertising. So we needed to create content and build a presence on Instagram for that reason. And then they go, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. And then so we need, but even if we have goals, we need to remind ourselves of these goals. In times where new platforms come out, in times when the engagement is low, in times where we feel like something isn't working, we reflect on why we are there.

These channels can act as the top of the funnel, the brand awareness platform. Not always, I need sales or I need leads, or I need consistent leads, or I need to be growing followers. Yeah, of course we always want those things, but it helps you stay grounded in times where you think things aren't working and there could be times where they are just actually not working and you need to tweak or you need to find a another platform.

I had this conversation as well with a client who was like, well, I have all these products and services and I just wanna like put them all out on social media, so should I just post all about them all the time? And it's like, well, no, because we need to understand the goal of where that content channel sits to understand what we need to talk about and when not, I need to show up every Monday with this specific piece of content.

It's like, this is the goal of me posting. This is the goal of the individual post. It doesn't necessarily matter what day it is. The day just keeps us consistent. The topic just gives us something to talk about, but we need to have a goal on why we are there and what each individual post is trying to do.

And this is where we can tweak things. Right? So you might be times where you are in more of a promotional mode, so a lot of your content is more promotional. Does it have to be like that all the time? Absolutely not. Then there are times where things are more brand awareness or trying to get people to trust you.

Doesn't always have to be promotional. And I think as business owners we always get into that habit of everything always being promotional. I think we always need to be selling, but selling can look in very different ways. Selling can be selling yourself as trusted source, could be selling an idea. So that is goals.

And then the last one is the channel. So if we are thinking something's not working, is it because it's the wrong channel? Is it because we might not need to be there? Or are we focusing our energy too much on one channel? Where is our audience hanging out? And also on that, I know I'm talking content marketing.

But when we're looking at channels as a whole, I think a lot of the times we're we, we rely so heavily on social media and online channels when all the channels work together, and that even can work with other people's channels. So for example, if you are in partnership with someone, you hire a space from them or you.

You know, uh, in collaboration with someone, there's so many, you know, people have practices or they have, um, uh, people that stock their product. All these things, right? Those people become channels as well for you to promote your products and services. So you don't always have to rely on your own. So when we are thinking about channels, we also wanna, how can all the other marketing things we do come together so that.

Then it allows us to go back to our goals of, okay, why am I on social media? Or why do I have an email list? Or why am I creating a blog? It all serves its purpose and it all comes together. So then when you are looking at your posting plan or you are looking at your metrics and what's working and what isn't, you are doing it from a lens of I know my people, I know my goals, and I know where I should be.

Then we work on the posting plan, then we work on what we wanna be known for, which are content buckets. In my content strategy, we work on the content cycle, which is the funnel, the marketing funnel, what days are we posting, what types of content, and then we work out the types of content that we're going be sharing in alignment with our business goals or what we're selling or what we are talking about.

What's topical. Which become the topics or the themes. So until we have that core foundation done, we shouldn't be having a posting plan. And you might have stuff written down, you might have had it in your mind, but we need to look at it together, not from target audience analysis. We did in a business program, not some goals that we wrote down at the start of this year.

Not the channels that we're on because someone tells us we need to be there. It all needs to work together. So sometimes you might have these things fragmented, so you gotta bring them under one place and then we can work out a posting plan. So going back to what that client had said to me of, oh yeah, this guy said he has no content strategy.

He just doesn't have a documented content plan, which some intuitive people work really well like that. I like to have something a bit more systematic 'cause that's just how I operate. But there's plenty of people that don't operate that way. But I can guarantee you they know the foundations of their business and they know it very well 'cause they've been doing it for a very long diet.

So going back to the key point of this episode, a posting plan isn't enough. You have to have a strategy, and it's always good to do it together under one thing that is content marketing. And that's why I love doing bootcamp. That's why we run it. We do two live rounds every year, sometimes three, sometimes more depending, and it is about helping you as a business owner create a documented content plan so you know what you need to post.

But you've gotta go back to the beginning and start from there. And then after that, we sprinkle in our own stories. We create core stories that we're gonna share that makes our content engaging. We work on a process of how we're gonna get it out there. We optimize our systems so that it takes us less time to do the thing.

So we're not spending all our time creating content. And then we measure against all the stuff we've done to make sure it's working, and then we can just repeat the process. That's why. Everyone that joins Content Bootcamp always has access to it. That is why I run live rounds and invite people to join as alumni.

That's why I created my DIY Content marketing club, which is the membership that is a continuation of content bootcamp. Because it's a cycle we need to always go through. It never ends. I'm always doing mine. I'm always looking at, I literally have a task to look at my content strategy. When I do all my quarterly planning, I try to look at it more.

'cause obviously the content's my thing. That's all it is. That's what it is. It's not, oh, well, I show up on a Monday and talk about this. That's awesome for being organized, not a strategy. So let's get you a strategy. If you'd like to join bootcamp, I'll put all the links in the show notes. But be a content queen knocking and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Insta Stories and tagging me at Content Queen Mariah, or just tell 'em about it. And if you do rate review on whatever platform you listen to this on, it does help me get this out there, but also get pitched by awesome guests.

I've got a chief marketing officer joining us. I don't think I'm recording it till September. But from like a really well known app, so like. We have these people pitch me because I'm in the chart. So we want these amazing people pitching me. Keep reviewing, keep leaving comments on episodes. Like even if you've already left your review, you can comment on all the episodes and um, yeah, let me know any topics you want me to talk about in the future.

We'd love to do that. You would notice this is meant to be a guest episode. It is not. I'm doing a little content series, so we're going through content, bits and pieces with me, so join me next week for another episode, part two. I'll see you then. Bye.

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