Speaker 1: If your social media content has been lacking, then I'm super excited to bring today's video where we talk about content planning and why it's so important and significant. It doesn't matter if you're a small business owner, an entrepreneur, you're starting up a brand or whatever else it is, content planning is very crucial to being successful on social media, your general content, email marketing or whatever it may be. So let's dive into the importance of a content plan and why you need to have one in place. So picture this, you manage multiple platforms and you're struggling to come up with content ideas. You're having to think of these things on the fly and just make these posts as things go along. And that becomes quite stressful and not very effective to your overall strategy. So what a content plan does is streamline this process, gets rid of all the chaos and makes your life so much easier. It gives you a clear voice and a picture of the road ahead. It helps you to tell your brand's story, outline upcoming events and things that are going on and let your audience really know what it is that you want them to know. Essentially, it's like having a roadmap to the world of social media and it paints a very nice picture for your audience to understand exactly what the messages are you're trying to put out. Now at the cornerstone of any great content plan is your audience and knowing who your audience is and what resonates well with them is going to be the most important thing to think about when planning out your content. Imagine that you're having a party and you've got a bunch of people that aren't big fans of fish and other types of food like that. They strictly like pizza, but you decide to serve them sushi instead. It's probably not going to win them over very well. You need to know things like their likes, their dislikes, their habits, their age ranges and just general interests that are going to get them excited and involved in the content that you're planning to put out. Are they the type of people that are going to scroll through Instagram and Facebook while drinking their morning coffee or are they going to be doomscrolling TikTok late at night rather than going to sleep and getting the much needed eight hours that supposedly we all need? By understanding these nuances, you're able to tailor the content that's going to resonate, be engaging and get your audience excited, which is ultimately going to boost your peak performance, your followers and overall enhance your brand strategy. Now let's talk about content categories and themes. Content category is going to be one of your strongest secret weapons to utilize here. Imagine putting out your content like a full service buffet. You've got a variety of different things here. You have main courses, you have appetizers, soups, salads, pastas, desserts, drinks and a variety of things that go out to the people to make them happy. Now if you can take all these different elements that you can be putting out there and season those with your overall brand's flavorings, then you're going to be able to have that variety so your content doesn't get stale. Are you about motivation and inspiration or do you tend to lean a little bit more towards humor or education? These themes should be the DNA of your content that gives your audience a taste for what it is that you're all about. Now if we're talking about actual content itself versus food items on a buffet, we could talk about things like polls, pictures, reels. Maybe you have interactive content, you're running a contest, you have a special promotion. There's a variety of different things you can create here. Just find what resonates well with you and your audience. Now let's get to actually planning the content. So go ahead and grab a calendar of your choice, whether that's a paper form, a digital form, or if you want to get some type of app or software to assist in this process. And you want to think of this kind of like a puzzle. You've got all these different pieces of various shapes and sizes. Things like blog posts, social media posts, stories, reels, shorts, whatever it is, think about all the different elements and how they're going to interact well with one another as well as your audience. Which one of these forms is going to best tell that story that you want to get out? Is it a story of how you're starting up a brand new business? Is it how you continue to expand on your current brand or business? Or is there something else that you're wanting to get a message out to your audience? And what you want to think about here is balance. You don't want to do too much of one thing or the other. Over time, people might get tired of watching a bunch of videos and they might just want to simply see a photo or just read some text about what's going on. Our audience members all have different ways they like to receive information, whether that's through reading, listening, seeing, or in some cases, I guess, smelling. But you can't really do that online. But you can also leave room for impromptu or spontaneous posts as well because you never know what kind of exciting things might pop up randomly. You can leave room in your content plan for things like that and basically just don't be posting every single day, but maybe set forth three to four days a week. And then you have an extra three to four days, depending on how many you're already posting that are left empty to put in these impromptu posts. Now let's talk about tools and resources of what's going to make this easier for you to make your content plan. In today's digital world, there's a lot of resources out there from artificial intelligence to just the good old manual entry stuff. Things like Trello and Asana for organization and just really trying to plan out the overall map ahead. Canva is a great resource, both free and paid, if you want to create visually stunning imagery. If you have the paid version, you can also schedule your social media posts. You can use things like Google Trends to help you come up with ideas of trending things that's going on in your industry right now. You can also use things like Hootsuite or Later to also schedule out your posts to make it a lot easier. And once you get everything rolling out, you can start analyzing and tweaking what you're doing. Perhaps the content plan and strategy that you put into place isn't really resonating well with your audience. While you can analyze that, try to figure out why and start recreating the posts that you already have scheduled to maybe better fit your audience and see if those perform better. So here's a real world example of how I like to content plan. Typically I will do this every other Monday and I will plan two weeks at a time. I'll figure out what I want my themes to be for the week and then what my individual posts will be about for each of the days of the week that I plan on posting. I will then go ahead and get all the materials that I need to make those posts, whether it's photos or videos, all the copy, the hashtags and all those good things. I'll compile all that together in a nice organizational way. I prefer to use Notion. It's a free resource that I use quite often for life planning in general. And then once I have everything exactly how I want it and think it looks really good, then I'll go ahead into my scheduler program of choice and go ahead and get all the posts scheduled out. And then I don't really have to worry about anything over the next couple of weeks other than just replying back to comments and messages. Until that every other Monday pops up and I have to start planning again. But that's about all I have for content planning. Let me know in the comments section below if you struggle with content planning and why and if anything in this video really resonated with you. But I hope you enjoyed today's video. Can't wait to see your content planning. And as always, be sure to create something new today.