Building Better Content Calendars: How to Stop the Scroll & Convey Core Messages

• The average person uses 6.5 social media channels per month and spends 143 minutes per day on social media each day. 
• 76% of consumers are using social media to discover new products and brands.
• 41% of small businesses depend on social media for a revenue driver.

That being said, there’s a lot of competition for consumer’s attention! How do you break through all of that and stop the scroll so that consumers connect with your brand specifically? It’s all about your content – and creating a strategic effort to really grow and connect. During our April event, local experts, Sarah Curry and Brett La Frambois from S/B Strategic Marketing shared 5 tips for tackling this sometimes dreaded monthly task in a way that is approachable and practical.

5 Pillars to Building a Better Content Calendar

1. Uncover Your Universal Truth

This is your content North Star. What is the universal truth you’re speaking to? Outline this in your social media strategy. This helps make sure all of your content is laddering back to your brand and marketing objectives.

How do you uncover your Universal Truth? Try asking yourself these questions:

• What makes your story unique?
• What does your audience care about and what can you say to them to impact or change their behavior?
• What do you want your customers to think about your company?
• What does a customer feel when looking at or interacting with your brand?

Distill the answers of these questions down to 1-2 lines of text that becomes a throughline to your social copy. It doesn’t need to be exact copy you’re sharing, it’s just a guiding theme that helps to connect all of your social content together.

Once you have a Universal Truth, come up with a few Content Guardrails. These can include things like:

• Brand tone of voice
• Brand personality – what does your brand feel like/give it a persona
• Content pillars – 3-4 overarching content objectives that your content falls into

2. Tell the Same Story Over and Over Again

Consumers are inundated with content, and thanks to the algorithm, aren’t seeing everything in their feeds. Don’t be afraid to reshare content in new ways – recut a video into new clips, use the same message as a text, video or meme, etc. 

Content pillars are really helpful here, because you can see how to tell the story under the guardrails of your pillars and the brand message you are wanting to share.

TIP: Don’t be afraid to test and optimize – try new things, see what’s working and what isn’t – and continue to evolve your messaging and content.

Look to your feed for inspiration – see what other brands are doing, what trends are happening, and then see how your Universal Truth fits into those opportunities. 

3. Consider the Shareability Test

It’s not about us (as a brand), it’s about our audience and connecting with them. Make sure that every post you share informs, assists, and entertains (aka the NPR model). You don’t mind when a brand talks about themselves or asks you to purchase something, because you’re regularly being provided value above and beyond.

How do you put this into practice? Make sure you know your target audience (who they are, what social channels they are using, etc), and then ask yourself these questions with every post:

• Will my target audience feel something?
• Will this post help build my community?
• Is this post providing value or service?

Aim to answer yes to 2 out of 3 of these questions with every post.

4. Look to Your Audience

What is your audience telling you? Track comments and responses from your fans. 

TIP: Look at hard analytics – reach, comments, etc. Track your posts by post data and look by content pillar, video or photo, etc, so you can categorize and find trends within your own content. This will help you continue to optimize your content strategy.

From a qualitative perspective, monitor the feedback – comments from users on posts, blog posts, etc. Your customers will tell you when they’re confused and need more information, when they’re excited about something, etc.

You can also use this feedback as inspiration for more content. For example, if someone asks a question – create a reel to answer it! If someone leaves a great review, turn it into a pull quote and share it with your audience.

Finally, perform social listening. There are a lot of tools that do this for you – for free or low-cost. You want to see what consumers are talking about outside of your immediate purview. Often times, customers are talking about your brands outside of your social channels and you can’t see what they’re saying.

5. Be Trendy, Yet Timeless

Find ways to create ownable content. This could mean an ongoing content series that is unique to your brand, or a very specific creative style you apply to your brand. The goal is that a consumer sees your content, and knows it’s from YOU!

This is useful because it helps you stand out and stand the test of time, and it also puts into practice the idea of telling the same story over again.

How do you put this into practice?

• Use content pillars to brainstorm ongoing content series within them
• Trends are an easy way to create content – be mindful of what makes sense with your brand, and make it ownable to your brand
• Make your social content integrated with the rest of your online marketing efforts

More Resources

• Link to this Presentation Deck
• Photo Recap of the event, thanks to Picture Salon