Small Business Content Series: Content Plan: Diminishing Returns
Now that you know what content is and why it’s important let’s get started on content planning and the idea that you not only have to have different types of content, but you need to publish that content with a thoughtful schedule. The first thing we want to talk about is this idea of diminishing returns.
What Are Diminishing Returns?
If you've ever had a big meal - let's say it's filet mignon or it's lobster or it's pizza or a giant cheeseburger. You take the first bite and it's great. The second bite is amazing. Third bite, great. By the fifth to seventh, the tenth bite, you are feeling like, “Oh, do I have to eat this whole thing?”
Let's say you finish that hamburger or you've eaten your third slice of pizza and you're saying to yourself, “Why did I do this?” The same thing is going to carry across into your content - this law of diminishing returns. If you post up the same type of content, the same messaging over and over again, maybe you'll get some engagement at first but soon enough people are going to say, I've seen it before and they're going to just scroll past. We don't want that.
The Goal Is Engagement
The name of the game with content is engagement. And when we're talking about engagement marketing, we're talking about the idea that a consumer is interacting with our brand, is learning more about our brand, is getting closer, more intimate with our brand. They're also showing all of their friends and family, anyone who's connected to them on social media that they like working with us.
Just a few of those brand evangelists can drive you tons of business, but they're not that easy to come across and if you don't have a plan, then you're not going to create and foster that type of evangelism you're looking for.
Creating A Content Plan
Now that we understand the logic behind it, let's talk about a content plan. What we want to do is create a content plan that could be for the next couple of weeks, could be for the next month or the next quarter. Of course, if you're looking out further on the calendar, it's hard to predict the future and of course, things are going to come up. So even if you are doing a calendar for the next quarter, it's really going to be high level, really broad. You don't have to get into the minutia yet. But let's just for the sake of best practice that you're going to create a content calendar for the next three months.
What you want to do is look at each of those three months and figure out what's the theme of the month. Do we have a certain theme? Is it a certain season? Do we have certain products that come up now over other times? Then we want to think about how we can tell a story around that theme.
We haven't even jumped into creating content on a specific week or a specific day. We're just looking at the month and figuring out how we can interweave a story throughout all these weeks through different types of social posts in order to get people to follow along with us to read the story with us and ultimately to be a part of it.
Final Thoughts
In the next post we are going to talk a little bit more about how you can take that story and break it into weekly bits. How you can take that story and basically break it down into silos so that each week you're adding on a little bit more and a little bit more to the story. But for now, what I want you to think about over the next few months is what are some themes that could come into your content. What are some themes, some different types of storylines that you could weave in so that your consumers feel closer to you, want to learn more and ultimately want to do business with you?