If you are starting a business, getting ready to start a business, or if you've already started a business — you probably have already heard plenty of times that content is king. Content is going to be such an important part of your overall marketing strategy and that can be really overwhelming for a lot of business owners, especially if you're a solopreneur and you're trying to handle your marketing on your own.

Content Marketing Strategy?

With content marketing strategies, a lot of times, people don't know where they should be putting their time and attention. And then they feel like they're putting too much time and attention towards it, and not seeing results from that time and attention that they're spending on it. And this is why you see a lot of people being really inconsistent with their content, stopping and starting posting a lot and then ghosting for a while and then re-starting that cycle. This is why I am all about setting up a strategy for your business that is sustainable and realistic for you. That's the biggest thing because it doesn't really matter what strategy you're setting up, if it's not going to be sustainable for you, if you're not going to be able to execute on that strategy. That strategy is irrelevant — who cares? You might as well not even have it.

So something that's going to be really important as we talk through content marketing today is to think through what you can realistically do every day, every week, every month for your content marketing strategy. I just want you to run everything through that filter, because that is going to be the most helpful and impactful thing that you can do when you're thinking about your content marketing strategy.

The three things I really want to touch on are:

1. Content pillars and themes

2. Repurposing your content

3. Recycling your content

Brand Pillars & Themes

Essentially, your first stop is brand pillars and themes. So basically, your brand pillars are going to be those really important big ideas in your business, that really matter to you to the core of what you're selling, and to your clients. And then your themes are going to be subtopics within those pillars. So you can have three to five pillars. And within each pillar, you're going to have different themes. So for example, my pillars would be something like marketing, sales, systems and processes, strategy execution. You want to outline pillars that are broad enough and topics that you're going to be able to come back to them and be discussing them in different ways, time and time again, and they're really at the core of your business. So you don't want to choose something to be your pillar that's too specific.

Once you've identified those three to five pillars, think through those themes, or more specific things. So if my pillar was systems and processes, a theme for me might be task management systems like ClickUp. Then once you have a couple of themes within each of your three to five brand pillars, you now have content topics that you can start to design your content strategy around.

The key here is that you want to touch on one theme at a time, and mix them up a little bit. So you wouldn't be talking about all three themes within your marketing pillar, all at once, or if one of my pillars was mindset, I wouldn't want to talk about all three themes that I have within my mindset pillar one right after the other. You want enough variety there so that if a customer is getting to know you, they're coming into the fold, they might not be as interested in the mindset piece of it. But that systems and processes piece is really speaking to them! So I'm not talking about one area of these pillars too long.

Another really quick content tip, once you've established these brand pillars and themes, when you're consuming content, you need to be available for having ideas and brainstorming, “how could I make a piece of content like that?” And a lot of people want to make that wrong. They say they don't want want to “copy” them. But the reality is — it's not very often that you are truly inventing something completely new. We're all always learning new things, taking those things in making them our own. And then bringing those into the fold. So when you're consuming content, really just be open to having ideas around what you can make a piece of content around and keep a running list of possible content topics. This list is going to come in handy when you sit down to create your content each month because you're going to be able to slot those possible content topics into the brand, pillar and theme that they are associated with.

Content Repurposing

So once you have your brand pillars and themes locked in, what I want you to focus on next is content repurposing. Content repurposing is using one core piece of content, and then repurposing that piece of content into other pieces of content for the same platform or for other platforms.

An example of that would be filming doing an Instagram Live and recording that and splicing it out into multiple smaller pieces for IGTV. And then that might be further splicing that out into shorter Instagram stories. That's an example of repurposing there. So now you have way more pieces of content, but you spent a lot less time actually creating that content and recording that content! The reason that this is so great is creating content is not easy for everybody. It takes a lot of time and energy for a lot of people! Even if you feel like you love creating content and always feel really inspired by it, at a certain point, you're going to hit a point where you don’t really feel like creating anything. So repurposing that content is basically just making that piece of content work harder for you, it's making it go further. And it's also going to allow you to get that piece of value, get that piece of education to users where they're at.

Repurposing content is also beneficial when you start to outsource. Because you can create that core piece of content, and you can have other people split that stuff up into those different pieces of content, it's still all your content, it's still all your words. But now you have 10 pieces of content from that one, and you only spent time creating that one piece of content. And this is so so impactful for business owners as they're growing and as they're scaling, they want to give more free education based value so that they can really build that know like trust factor on social media channels but they have a limited amount of capacity. They can't just be creating content all day, every day. That's exhausting. And most of us don't have the time to do that. So this repurposing strategy is so effective, and it's going to help you to work a lot more efficiently!

Recycling Content

Recycling content is similar to repurposing content — you're making it work harder for you, you're making the content you've created, go further. And you're allowing yourself to not have to spend so much time creating content, but you're going to get more out of it. So if you've already set your brand pillars and your brand themes, and you've got a really solid strategy around how to repurpose that content from those couple of core pieces of content that you're creating and whether you're doing that or your team member is doing that. Next, you're going to think about recycling that content. This is where really tracking how and when and where you're posting things really comes in handy. I like to just use a spreadsheet for this where we note "the podcast is talking about this this week.” So this right here, this blog post is all about content marketing strategy. So that's marketing that falls in my marketing pillar. And then within that pillar, I have that content marketing theme. So we know that that's the pillar and the theme, and this podcast episode is happening this week. It's getting posted this week. So we know when it's being posted in that spreadsheet. Then all of our extra kind of one off value add posts, we have in a different tab on that spreadsheet, so we're able to just pull from those and add them in. And we know which post was posted on what date. This is important because you're going to start to work through those pillars and those themes that we talked about. If you've set up five pillars for your business, and there's three themes within each of those pillars, and each theme represents one week worth of content, that's 15 weeks worth of content right there! So you're going to really clearly and really diligently organize all of that content. And you're going to know when it's going out in that spreadsheet.

After you work through all those themes — you're going to go back to the beginning. And I know that this is like mind blowing for some people. But you should be recycling your content. First of all, nobody's gonna remember what you posted 15 weeks ago, you probably don't even remember. But also you have new audience members, you have new users who have discovered you, since you've posted that. And if that's an education, value based piece of content, and they've never gotten it, you can almost think of it as your duty to reshare because it’s really great information and I want them to learn this information! And that's just a little bit of a mindset reframe that sometimes people need to make. When we are learning things, oftentimes we have to hear them and see them and try and learn them multiple times before it actually clicks. So that's another reason why recycling content is not a bad thing.

So many people just create content, create content, create content, but they don't think about it as a content library. And they are not fully leveraging that content that they spent so much time producing, creating and educating people around for no one to see it. If you're spending all of that time on that content, you want to make sure the most people possible are seeing it and seeing that value and seeing that benefit and building that know like trust factor with you. So if you are not recycling your content, do it now you just have to make sure that you're organizing it in a way that it's going to be easy for you to go back and see what you posted and when and you can start recycling content immediately.

If you want to dive deeper into how I execute on all these things, check out my Content to Clients course. This course is going to help you help you to figure out how to organize and repurpose all of your content!