This is the 3rd post in a series I have written providing some help and advice to answer the question: How much will social media cost me? Make sure you read the full series – ‘Social Investment’.

This area is definitely not given as much time and attention as it needs to be. I think I can best describe underestimating content creation by saying it’s like expecting to win the London Marathon by making sure you walk 30mins a day with your dog. Disjointed thinking right? Exactly.

Value is at the heart of creation

In order for you to truly attract your ideal customers on social media…or at least ‘find’ them – you need to value them. You value them by really getting to know them and what drives them.

• Why do they do the things they do?
• What questions do they ask themselves when looking for what you sell?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What gets them out of bed in the morning?
• How do they digest information?
• Where do they hang out – online and offline?
• What specific behaviours are unique to them? (Think: buyer’s decision making journey)

All of these kinds of questions are ones that you would cover in your target customer (avatar) exercise which you would do as part of your strategy or planning time. (Read more in my ‘Invest in a Strategy‘ post where I talk more about that.

Once you have fully fleshed out the avatar exercise – you will have a full list of topics, themes and ideas of the kinds of content you need to create.

The AEC buckets

I tell clients to think about their content creation as an asset building exercise. The time, money and energy you put into the content must pay off in the long term. You are building a beautiful, useful and valuable library ( = content bank) that you can keep referring to and pulling out of, over time.

You will be looking at creating three ‘types’ of content (for each of your avatars) – we call these your content buckets:

• Awareness (loaded with value, subtle education about your services, showcasing expertise, meet the team, etc.
• Engagement (discussions, slightly provocative to get some interaction, something close to the avatars pain points to offer help, conversation and an empathetic ear)
• Conversion (call to action based content)

(Credit: I have borrowed that AEC acronym from the knowledgeable Dennis Yu – thank you Dennis!)

Social media is not the ‘immediate’ sell medium – it’s the Mo Farah of your strategy and not the Usain Bolt. It is a place to be found (awareness) and for relationships to be built (give the user / prospect time to get to know, like and trust you).

You only go into “the sell” – after a steady journey of drawing them into a conversation and giving them enough to trust you. After you do this very well – you can use your Conversion based content and you will get a great conversion (whether that is a direct low level sale, opt-in or enquiry form completion).

Within each of these buckets you will vary the format of the content that you create between:

• Text (text only updates; Polls; questions; quotes; statements; blog posts; Facebook Notes; LinkedIn Publisher articles)
• Images (with and without text; a series; a theme; a prompt; notices; quotes; tips; learning)
• Audio (podcasts)
• Recorded Video
• Live Video

Who is involved in content creation

When we work with clients – we always try to get as many people across the business involved in content creation / idea generation. With the different buckets I mentioned above – you may enrol more people across the business to help your marketing team with ideas and topics (in line with your avatar exercises). Setting up a mini-network within your business who can filter ideas, images, thoughts, video through to the marketing team is something I would strongly suggest you get in place.

But, the person(s) who will physically take the ideas and bits and create the content that will be seen by the public will more than likely be your in-house marketing manager/ social media manager and/or your agency.

A lot of time and skill goes into creating content – so make sure you give your team the toolkit to be able to do this job quickly, effectively and professionally.

Top tips for this task area:

1. Buy a good, easy-to-use video editing/creation tool like Animoto, Wave, etc. You don’t need to be a professional videographer to use these, and you can use your collateral, as well as stock video and imagery.
2. Invest in an easy-to-use graphic creation tool like Canva, Easil, etc. (You may have an in-house designer – in which case they may have an Adobe suite. But for ease of use and a creative who isn’t necessarily a designer, who needs to create graphics and images quickly – make sure that they can do that without having to wait for someone to do it for them)
3. Set up task structures for repeatable tasks so that you can easily delegate to team members and stay on top of where things are in the creation process (once your activity steps up and you are doing this properly – you will buy me flowers for making you do this I promise). Our preferred project /task management tool to use for this is Asana.
4. Invest in a good file sharing tool like Dropbox for Business (or Google Drive) – so that you can easily work together as a team and not worry about storage limits. Set up rules for what goes where and keep it orderly. This helps when you are working with remote team members and/or with an agency.
5. Make sure your in-house team member has training to understand how search affects content creation. (This is baked right in to how things are written and put on social media, and on your website)

Investment of time and money

It’s hard to nail this down to something set in stone – but I can say that you need to look at investing a chunk of time and money to get a good bank of content to start off with (so you can launch on to social media and be consistent for a good while).

My suggestion is to always be ahead of the pack and not be chasing your tail. What I mean by this – is that you need to make sure that you are generating enough so that you are working in advance. Once you fall behind and you don’t have enough content or ideas…you will lose motivation, get stressed and then it will all fall to pieces.

If you are wanting to work with an agency, I would say that you need to allow for around £350 to £600+VAT for content creation alone per month. (This can cover anything from: blog editing, writing, image creation, video editing, content written specifically for each platform based on a blog post / vlog, etc). Obviously if you have in-house resources who can help with some of this – it will be reduced.

But, in my experience, we (as an agency) are better off getting you to focus on drawing in the ideas, gathering the imagery, video etc – and then we support you by taking it all and shaping it to be delivered in the right places. (An agency has the multitude of skills and knowledge needed to stay on top of algorithm changes and platform needs, to know how to do what, and in what format).

Need help with putting a content creation strategy in place?

Consider having a chat with me about our diagnostic strategy session. I spend a good chunk of time with you and your team getting your strategy on course, and then getting all of the systems and tools in place that I’ve mentioned above. You can book a free initial conversation with me here.

Remember to read the first two blog posts in this Social Investment series:

“Social Media Investment”(#1) | “Invest in a Strategy” (#2)