My 3-step guide to speedy content creation

You’re not alone. In fact, it’s a problem many of my clients face.

The good news is, when you get strategic about your content creation, not only will you produce better quality content, you’ll also save yourself hours and never be short of great content that your audience will love.

How? It’s easy, simply follow my three-step guide for speedy content creation.

Step one: Plan

As the saying goes, “Fail to plan, plan to fail”.

Make friends with time blocking. Set aside a regular time, once a month, that is blocked out in your diary for you to plan your content for the weeks ahead.

Start by spending some time looking back at what’s worked well in the past. If there’s something your audience loved, do more of that in the future. If you’re not sure how to find the insights on your social media platforms or what they mean, ask about a £99 power hour. They’re perfect for bitesize learning on specific things like this.

Next, decide on a number of themes and identify the content that sits within each. For example:

Sales posts – what are you promoting this month?

Expert posts – what can you create to share your expertise and show people that you know your stuff?

Pain to gain posts – what can you post to show your audience that you understand their problems and have a solution?

Personality posts – share behind-the-scenes shots to build know, like and trust.

#Bonus tip: You only need to come up with three ideas for each section and you’ve got enough posts for a month. Use a spreadsheet, Trello board or Post-it notes to organise your ideas.

Step two: Repurpose

At the heart of all successful marketing is understanding the value of repurposing content and it means that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you post. In fact, if you’re tactical, you can make one piece of content work multiple ways.

Let’s say you do a Facebook Live

• Use the free Otter app to transcribe your live and turn it into a blog for your website.
• You can then link to that blog from your socials.
• Pick out a number of tips from the Live and turn them into individual posts.
• You can also take quotes from the Live and create quote images in Canva or Wordswag.
• Posts that worked well in the past can also be refreshed and reposted.

The fact is, people’s social media feeds are fast-moving which means they aren’t going to remember the wording of a post they read three months ago. And even if they do, repetition is what makes your content stick (as long as it’s not boring!).

#Bonus tip: Creating templates in Canva (affiliate link) that you can reuse over and over again will save you a huge amount of time and give your content a consistent brand feel.

Step three: Automate

Now it’s time to think about how you are going to publish all that great content you have created. Using a content scheduler will speed up the publishing process and remove the stress of remembering where and when you need to post.

There are lots of great free options available and they’re usually easy to use.

My personal favourite is Sendible (affiliate link*) as it’s intuitive to use, allows me to manage all my client accounts in one place and has fabulous listening tools so that I can keep an eye on what’s happening on the different accounts.

You might need to try a few to find the one that works best for you. Others that I have used and liked are Buffer, Meet Edgar and Hootsuite.

You need to consider that different schedulers cater for different platforms too. Later and Planoly are great for Instagram for example, and Tailwind is perfect for Pinterest.

Facebook also has its own inbuilt scheduler – Facebook Business Suite – which can be used to publish posts and Stories to Facebook and Instagram.

#Bonus tip: Great as schedulers are, they’re not an excuse to load up your content and forget about it.

They may save time on a day-to-day basis but you should check in with your accounts and engage on a daily basis. Without consistent engagement, your posts will flop. After all, this is social media!

If you need help with content creation, planning or scheduling I offer a range of services including outsourced social media content creation with packages starting from just £325 per month.

*Affiliate links mean I receive a small commission if you decide to subscribe to the platform. I only recommend platforms I have tried and tested.