I recently had the pleasure of attending commonsku’s 2nd annual skucamp event in New Orleans and as always have a ton of new ideas and actions as takeaways.
One of the talks resonated to me more than others and likely it’s because of my passion for content marketing. Bill Petrie & Kirby Hasseman, known most recently for their award winning collaboration of the podcast called unScripted, spoke on content marketing. To be more specific their presentation was actually called “So You Suck at Content Marketing - It’s Time to Suck Less”.
Top Takeaways
Anything can be content marketing. That’s it. It’s really that simple.
Bill is wildly successful with simple social media posts about beer and pumpkin spice. If you don’t know that already, then you need to start following Bill. Think about it, he posts pictures of how pumpkin spices makes him sick and the beer thing… well, that’s just a picture of him drinking an “adult beverage” on Friday afternoons. How simple is that?!
Map out your plan. It doesn’t always have to be a blog, podcast, video series or anything that takes a lot of time, not too mention the time it takes to take action on your strategy.
Kirby on the other hand, has made a name for himself over the years with his Delivering Marketing Joy subbrand AKA DMJ. DMJ includes a weekly Monday podcast, a Wednesday video series and even a book that you can purchase on amazon! AND as if that’s not enough already, Kirby puts out a new blog post each and every day.
Well, I have good news for you… you don’t have to start with everything all at once! As the guys mentioned in their presentation it’s a good idea to start with one specific channel and have your first 5 pieces of content completed before launching.
How to Start
Earlier in this post, we covered that just a few of the most common pieces of content marketing are podcasts, blogs and video. These are actually pretty tough to start if you don’t have a background in hearing yourself speak, writing, or working a camera and editing the footage you shot. Let’s go back to the social media posts that we discussed earlier. Your one piece of content you begin with can be as simple as a create image you share weekly or even bi-monthly.
The important part is to take action and hold yourself accountable. This can be hard to do if you don’t actually know what you want to talk about.
Luckily, I have a quarterly Content Generator that can help you map out your content strategy for a minimum of at least 3 months!
This worksheet is easy to use, you just need to give yourself at least 30 - 60 minutes to use the worksheet in a quiet place with minimal distractions.
Steps
1. Possible Topics: First we’re going to spend some time on identifying your passions and areas of expertise
2. Categorizing: Next, we will go through the list and group similar topics together.
3. Organizing: At this stage we can start plugging in your similar topics together and giving each of the 3 groups a theme name.
4. Monthly Plan: Finally, we’re just going to look at how we can build the content off each other and decide which of the themes should go first. From there just re-organize each topic within the theme for any given month.
It’s really just that simple to get started! After you do this exercise, then it would be a good time to choose your channel of distribution.
For the full worksheet, click the link here. If you need any help or want to brainstorm some ideas just send me a note and I’d be happy to brainstorm some concepts.
Good luck and remember having a plan and following it is the way to win in content marketing!
Swag On,
SwagSam