Building a Brand Story: Consistent Content Creation Using Content Planning

1. About Building a Brand Story: Consistent Content Creation Using Content Planning: Hello and welcome to the Skillshare master class called Building a Brand Story: Creating Consistent Content through Content Planning. I'm Liz, and I will be your facilitator for this master class. I'm the founder of a small agency called the Star Studio where we've helped build voice and amplify brand stories of our clients. I created this master class because I realized two important things. One, end users and customers are experiencing high levels of social media burnout and fatigue. They no longer want to be sold to on social media yet they do have purchasing power, and they can choose to put that power behind brands they trust, brands that are more transparent, and brands that connect more meaningfully with them by providing a different kind of value on social media. Two, the brands themselves, the small business owners, the entrepreneurs, the creatives. They're experiencing social media burnout and fatigue as well, just in a different way. They don't know how to promote their businesses and they get tired not knowing what to post on social media. Therefore building a brand story was created to help bridge the gap between content creation and telling a brand story for entrepreneurs and small business owners. What can you expect for this class? In this class, there are six video lessons, one bonus lesson, one class project lesson, and one summary video that will take you through all the key takeaways from the entire class. Each lesson will cover a specific topic. The topics covered are: getting to know your audience, establishing which social media platforms are best for your business, identifying your brand story, brand strengths and key brand messages, working on your content ideas through content pillar identification and content ideation, creating a content map, creating a content calendar. The bonus lesson covers tools to use to automate the content creation and planning process, and the class project covers creating a content map and calendar. Thank you for considering this class that will help you gain a competitive edge in your content marketing. I look forward to connecting with you. In the next lesson, we will discuss the class project. Thank you, see you later. 2. Class Project: Create a Content Map & Content Calendar: Welcome to this video on your class project. Your class project will be to create a content map and a content calendar. You will be provided with a template that you can use to do this. I recommend that you watch the video lessons first before attempting your class project. The reason I'm introducing it now is so that you can follow along with the lessons in your template. The reason I chose the content map and calendar for this class project was because I wanted you have something physical and something practical that you can utilize for when you're doing your content strategy. It's also a template that you can use in the future to continue with your content strategy. For the class project, you will only need to focus on one platform. Remember, to also upload your class project map and calendar, to the class project section. You can either provide a link or upload the file. This way, you can get feedback from myself and from your fellow students. Here are the steps to take. Go to this link under the project gallery and click on it to find the template for the content map and calendar. In order to use this template, you will need to make a copy. To do so, select File, make a copy, save to your drive to create your own editable version of this Google Sheet. Note, you'll need a G-mail account. Alternatively, you can download the template as an Excel document. To do so, select File, click "Download", click "Microsoft Excel." You don't need a G-mail account for this option. Fill in the template using what you have learned in the lessons. Share the link to your file or upload your Excel spreadsheet file in the project gallery for feedback. Remember to have fun with it. The point of this class is not to experience content burnout or social media fatigue again. I want you to feel excited. Because when you're excited and you feel passionate about the content you create, you are more likely to post content consistently. Coming up your very first lesson, and it's all about getting to know your audience. Bye. 3. Target Audience Profiling: Getting to Know Your Audience: Welcome to this video on getting to know your audience. A target audience are the people who are most likely to buy from you. For this class, you can think of it as the people who are most likely willing to engage with your content. Where target market is broad, a target audience is more specific. For example, if you're selling art materials, your target market might be artists, but your target audience might be designers who study around the corner from your art material shop. What is important to consider is that the people who make up a target audience share similar traits. The first step of getting to know your audience is to identify what those similar traits are. You can break down these traits in your overall target markets into certain categories. I'll name a few of them: demographics, psychographics, behavior, and socioeconomic status. With demographics, we look at traits like age, gender, and location. With socioeconomic status, we consider traits like marital status, parental status, career, income level, and stage of life. With psychographics covers beliefs, pain points, values, attitudes, priorities, and motivation. Behaviors cover habits, interests, hobbies, activities, purchasing style, social media use, media consumption and device usage. Why look at these traits and content creation at all? In creating content that connects meaningfully with the target audience rather than superficially, we are trying to understand what drives and motivates our target audience. If we understand the person behind the audience, we will find it easier to connect with them and create content that appeals to them. To start exploring how to get to know your audience, you can write down a list of these traits or you can get a little bit creative and fun and make a visual representation of your target audience. You can do this doing a user persona, a target audience profile, or even a customer journey. It's a fun way to get to know your audience and have a visual representation that you can stick up somewhere in your office space or in your home that you have a constant reminder of who you are trying to connect with. If you're finding it a little bit challenging to try and figure out what these traits are specifically, you can always connect with your current target market, so your current customers and clients, and do surveys and interviews with them to find out what these traits are or even what type of content they would like to see. You can also evaluate competitors and see who their audience is and see if there's traits that you could potentially grab from your competitors' target audience. Lastly, you can also look at your social media analytics to get an understanding of who is currently following your content. That's it for this lesson. Next stop is a video lesson on identifying which social media platforms are best for your business and brand. 4. Which Social Media Platform to Use: Now that there is a better understanding of what a target audience is and how to understand the person behind the target audience, it's time to look at social media platforms and why you should choose a specific platform for your business. It is important to choose a social media platform that fits your brand and business, as well as your target audience. If your target audience isn't on a specific platform, there's no point in creating a content strategy for that platform. In this lesson, I'll give a broad overview of the social media platforms, to help you get a better understanding of way you should be posting content. Let's jump right into it. With Facebook. Facebook is probably the most well-known social media platform with the most active users. It also has the largest demographic reach and representation. Facebook is also gained a bit of a reputation with customers and clients. Customers and clients expect brands to have some social media presence, most likely on Facebook. Also, Facebook is a great place to be if you don't have a website because you can easily set up a type of portfolio business page with relevant and important information on it. You can post various types of content, from posting text to images, to videos, and you can even do live videos on Facebook. There's so much content that you can create. Instagram. Instagram is visual-based, although they are other pieces of content, its key impact is on the visual experience. Brands that do particularly well on Instagram are brands in the fashion industry, the beauty industry, the travel industry, pet industry, the meme industry, you get where I'm going. It's brands that have strong visual focus. According to Brand Watch Research, 80 percent of users follow brands on Instagram. As it is a visual experience. Brands that do really well on Instagram are brands that take advantage of all the latest technologies that Instagram uses for content, stories, reels, Instagram TV, it's not only posts anymore that do well. Twitter. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail with Twitter. But Twitter is predominantly take space. It does allow for imagery and videos, but people use it because of inflammation and short bits of texts that people post. It does really well for people who jump onto content related to news and to trending information. It is also very fast pace with content constantly being updated on a timeline. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional social media platform. It is aimed at professionals. Brands who focus on business to business, or B2B do well on LinkedIn. If your target audience are people in senior decision-making positions, LinkedIn is the place to be because according to LinkedIn's research and articles that they post, the predominant base of users are decision-makers in the companies that they work for. Pinterest. Pinterest is another visual-based platform. It acts like a pinboard, where brands and people can pin specific pieces of content. Like Instagram, brands that do well are brands like in the fashion industry, beauty industry, travel industry, and so forth. But there're creative ways that you can use Pinterest as long as you have visuals that can entice users. What's also interesting to note is that the predominant demographic of Pinterest are female. YouTube. After Facebook, YouTube is the biggest social media platform with the second most active users. It is video-based. It's a great place for brands to address things in detail over video, like customer questions, product demos, educational content like tutorials, and in-depth behind the scene videos that other platforms don't really have the capacity to post that lengthy video. TikTok. I probably know the least amount about TikTok, but I'll give you a broad oversight because it is the latest social media platform and up to this date, it is the fastest growing platform. Its biggest demographic, are Gen Z users, meaning people between the ages of 16 and 24. It's a great place for people and brands who want to focus on user-generated content, entertainment, trends, and short-paste videos, like Vine videos. Lastly, I'd like to talk to you about some considerations you might want to think about when choosing the platform for you. Firstly, consider where your target audience is, which platforms are they using. Secondly, which platform fits your brand and business the best? For instance, a beauty brand might fit on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Pinterest. But that brand won't find benefit with LinkedIn. On the other hand, an accountant will find LinkedIn and even Facebook beneficial. Thirdly, which platform can help you create the best customer service? The last consideration, which platform for you is most doable and achievable? Which one do you find ease with and have fun with when you're creating content? Rather than choosing 4 or 5 platforms. Consider maybe doing 2 platforms and doing those 2 platforms very well. Specifically for this class, I'd encourage you to only choose one platform when it comes to the class project. Rather do this one platform very well, gain some confidence in creating a killer content strategy. Then when you feel ready, reach over to other content platforms. In the next lesson, we will be looking at identifying your brand strengths, your brand story, and key key messages. 5. Brand Strengths, Brand Story & Key Messages: Multimedia mile, one of my favorite brands specialists, Roach's book called The Brand Gap. Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? In today's lesson, we will look at identifying brand strings, the brand story, and key brand messages. We are looking at these elements because we want to pull content ideas from them. You might find it difficult to come up with content if you don't know who you are, what you do, or why it matters. Firstly, let's look at identifying your brand strengths. Brand strengths are the traits that makes your brand stand out. They're also what you good at within your business and brand. It's also what makes you unique and special, so different to your competitors. Let's look at a few examples of brand strengths. The brand might be very visual audio. You can look at business-related strings like great customer service, knowing how to deal with customers efficiently, or even innovative business processes. You could also consider specific qualities like professionalism, leadership, public speaking, efficiency, quality, patience, enthusiasm, and creativity. These are all things that you can pull content from. Next, let's look at your brand story. In a more traditional business, the brand story might be captured by vision, mission, and values. But today I'd love to look at it more immersively. You can ask yourself the following questions. Who are you, and why does it matter? What do you do, and why does it matter? What is your personal why that drives your brand? The brand story is how you will be able to share your content with ease. Because it has that natural overall theme, the driving factor, your personal why to the brand on business. Go and write down your brand story. Here's some tips on what a brand story is, to help you inform how you write your story. A brand story is meaningful. It adds value and is unique and interesting to your audience. It is purposeful. A brand with purpose is a brand that matters. A brand story is emotional and personal. It's the emotional and personal side which your audience can relate to and connect with. The brand story has to be honest and authentic and tying with the brand's promise. If a brand in the future doesn't deliver on the brand promise, or does something else to what it has said in its brand story, it will appear inauthentic and not in T-grows to your audience. A brand story is simple. It should be easily understood and not overly complex. Simpler is better. Lastly, let's look at your key brand messages. The key brand messages can be pulled from the brand story. It can be pulled from the purpose, the mission, the vision, the values, and it can be pulled from the brand strengths. Essentially, your key brand messages are the most important things the brand has to say. To make this practical for you, I'd like to use the example of art teacher who posts tutorials on YouTube. The 10 most important things for an art teacher to say could be, ''I'm an artist, I specialize in watercolor painting, I'm passionate about art, I enjoy helping others, I'm passionate about teaching art. Education is important to uplift and empower everyone, everyone is inherently creative and artistic, with practice, anyone can be an artist. I love to showcase my talents and artworks. The most important part about creative artworks is to have fun.'' A very exciting listeners coming up. This way we will start to play with content ideas through content pillar identification. Thank you. See you next time. 6. Content Pillars & Content Ideas: You now have a foundation in who your audience is, what platforms to use, and also knowing your brand well through it's brand story, key brand messages and strengths. This foundation will help you to brainstorm ideas. The focus of this lesson is on content ideation and content pillar identification. What is a content pillar? A content pillar is a broad theme that guides smaller topics and content ideas. Meaning, you can take a content pillar, that theme, and break it down into smaller pieces of content. Content pillars will likely relate very strongly to your key brand messages as your key brand messages are almost like your brand guidelines guiding your brand. Similarly, the content pillars will be guiding the content and they might be very similar. I recommend that you work with 3-5 content pillars on a regular basis. They'll stay pretty consistent through out your brand story's journey. The way to get to these 3-5 main content pillars are to brainstorm and write down as many themes as you can. A good amount to focus on would be around 25, but you can start off with as little as 10. Anything from 10-25, broad themes that can direct your content. Now, in choosing these themes, you want to consider your target audience, you want to consider your key brand messages and you want to consider where you're posting your content. It's very important to consider your audience when you are creating these content themes. It can be easy to create themes around your brand strengths and your brand story and messages, but it might be a little bit more difficult to get into the mindset of your audience. We want to understand the audiences, we want to provide content that is valuable to them and sometimes one of the themes could even be a problem solver to your audience. The next step would be to take that long list of multiple content pillar themes that you've identified and refine them to the 3-5 themes that you can work with regularly. I have a bonus tip. The bonus tip is that, choosing themes that are relevant to upgrade, but choosing the top five that spark the most joy is even better. The last thing we want is to be in a space of content fatigue where we're not posting. Having these themes spark joy and relate to our passion and excite us is a way for us to post regularly and post with passion. I'll use the example of the art teacher who post her tutorials on YouTube. Across the screen, you will see the refinement process listing multiple ideas and then choosing the five most relevant ones and the ones that spark the most joy. The next step is to start with the content ideation process. After you have identified your five pillars, you want to fall in as many topics underneath those pillars as you can. It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't even have to be content ideas that you will definitely be posting about. It's mostly just to get the juices flowing so that you can start forming ideas and start considering what type of content to be posting. Have fun with it and brain dump. It's all about getting everything that's in here and getting it down on paper so that for the next steps you have a plan of action. Next up, we will work on refining these content ideas through content mapping. 7. How to Create a Content Map: Hello again and welcome to this lesson on content mapping. This lesson flows from the previous lesson so be sure to grab your notebook and all your brainstorm notes on your content pillars and content ideas. I'll be using the example of the art teacher who teaches on YouTube. You can follow along by filling in your own ideas as we go through this process using the template under the class project section. The focus of this lesson is to refine those content ideas now into manageable plan of action. We'll do that through content mapping. The table in the template is the method you'll be able to use. In order to get to a point where you have a map of all the content ideas that you can use, you first need to figure out how often you'd need to be posting. This will give you an indication of the number of posts or pieces of content. This little sheet I've included into the template just as a nice way to work out the frequency and to remember your goals. You don't have to do this as part of your class project, but it is a nice way to figure out how frequently you should be posting in the month that you're planning your content for. With the example of our teacher Sam, her platform is YouTube. Her overall intention is to create engagement on YouTube. She really wants to post videos consistently and frequently, and she wants her videos to be very engaging. She's planning content for the month of July and for her to post frequently and consistently, she's posting one video from Monday to Friday every day. She's posting five times a week, and that gives her a content total of 20 pieces or 20 videos. With the content map, you will have a table that showcases the content pillars at the top and then the topics at the bottom. They are the content pillars, and these are topics underneath that content pillar. What we've done with our teacher Sam, she doesn't need more topics because she's only planning content for one month. Sam is only working with four pieces of content per topic. You can fall in your pillar and underneath your pillar, you can fall in the various ideas. Have a look at how one topic can be adapted according to the pillar with a resulting theme for the entire week. This is a method I like to use to keep my weeks according to specific themes and make it easier for me to tie threads between content for clarity on my social media platforms. Sam does the same thing. You'll see we could potentially post one pillar per day, so our tutorial is on Monday's, our challenges on Tuesday's, ask me anything on Wednesday's, interviews with other artists on Thursday's, and student features on Friday's. If you just look at week 1 then, week 1 deals specifically with wet watercolor techniques. Voila, that's it. That's how simple it is to get 20 pieces of content for one month. It's not that complicated, right? Next up, content planning. In content planning, we will take all the ideas that we worked with and the more refined content map with all the topics and put that into a calendar so that you are able to post consistently. See you in the next one. 8. How to Create a Content Calendar: In this lesson, we will be focusing on taking the content map and now placing under into your plan of action, your content calendar. During this lesson, you can follow along with the content calendar by using the template from your class project. You'll be able to do your class project alongside this lesson. On the screen, you will find your calendar. This is the same calendar that's part of your class project. The screen, you can see your calendar, you can see the days of the week, and you can see the four weeks of a month. Someone's go into week 5. You're welcome to copy this section here and just rename it to week 5. You'll find your platform here. This is actually seen as one piece of content. We'll have the post type, the copy, and the words. That way when you're posting, you already have a great plan because it's giving you everything you need. You don't have to wonder what to be posting in relation to copy or even hashtags. With our teacher Sam, you can now see an example of what this might look like. Sam is only posting from Monday-Friday, so Saturday and Sunday are great art. She's added the month here at the top. She's added her platform, and you can now see from week 1 an example of how this could work. Under the first piece of content for Monday, there is weight versus dry watercolor technique as a topic. Although with Sam, we've posted the topic here which is important. With something like Instagram, you might want to consider adding the reel or the post or the story, which is the content type behind the topic. So using Sam as an example, if she was using Instagram, she should have typed Instagram reel after the topic name. The purpose of this is so that it's easier for you to follow what type of content should be posted when you are following the calendar. This would be the description in the video section and then year would be the keywords. If you're working on something like Instagram, you might want to consider hashtags here rather than specific keywords but hashtags and keywords are interchangeable to some extent because it is still what people search for when they're looking for content. The same goes in for Tuesday where there is a topic, a description, and the keywords. We can continue and follow through to the rest of the month. For extra effect, you can print out this calendar and stick it somewhere where you will be reminded to post your content consistently. In summary, this lesson focused on the content calendar. We looked at bringing in the topics from the content map into the calendar, writing a potential description for the post, the type of content of the posts, like a real, the story, video, image, and then we also looked at keywords and hashtags. Thus making it very simple and easy for you to follow your calendar and post content consistently. I'd like to remind you that the lesson on content mapping and this lesson on the content calendar ties in with your class project, where you're expected to create a map and a calendar. If you haven't already, go and download the template. Be sure to upload your completed class project to the class project section. I look forward to connecting with you. Bye bye. 9. Bonus Lesson: Canva Pro, Later, Planoly: Hello. In this bonus lesson, we'll look at tools that will help you automate the content creation process. The first tool and one of my favorite tools is Canva or Canva Pro. With Canva Pro, you can physically create content. It's a great content creation tool because it is so user-friendly for beginners. It has fantastic templates that can guide you to create content. It also has a very well stocked library of imagery that you can use. If you have Canva Pro, it is no longer just a content creation tool, you can plan your content and you can even schedule your content from Canva. It is such a great all-in-one tool to use. Next up is Later. Later is a content scheduling tool, and I specifically recommend it for Instagram. It is very user-friendly in the sense that it is like drag-and-drop. You see the columnar on the right and you drag your content from the left into your calendar to schedule it. It's intuitive to use, very user-friendly, great for beginners, and it fits Instagram very well. The next content scheduling tool I'd like to recommend is Planoly. Planoly is a planning and scheduling tool that you can use for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram, and that is why I recommend this one. It's also very intuitive and friendly to use. Those are my top three tools for content automation. If you aren't ready for the pro and paid versions of these tools, there's lots options available. Canvas free version is still a great way to create content. You might not have access to the scheduling and planning side of it, and not to the stock library, but you still have access to phenomenal templates and stock. For scheduling, you can use the social media platform's native scheduling systems, like Facebook's native scheduling tool. When it comes to planning, you can use Google Sheets to plan out your calendar using the template provided in this class. Thank you for watching. Bye. 10. Summary: Let's Recap Building a Brand Story: Thank you for attending this master class on Skillshare called Building a Brand Story: Creating Consistent Content Through Content Planning. Congratulations for making it this far and going through the video lessons. I had so much fun in presenting and facilitating this class. To wrap up this class I will go through each lesson and provide a key takeaway for each lesson. In the first lesson, we looked at getting to know one's audience, and how to identify the traits that make up the target audience. The key takeaway for this lesson is that by understanding the target audience in a detailed manner, you're able to create content that appeals to them. In the second video lesson we went through social media platforms and went through what makes them unique. The key takeaway for this lesson is to choose a platform that fits your brand and your target audience best. The third lesson was a juicy one and an important one, as it was about getting to know your brand strings, your brand stories, and your key brand messages that you will use to communicate to your audience. The key takeaway for this lesson is to understand your why. It is that why that will help you come up with content ideas. In the fourth lesson, I demonstrated how you can brainstorm your content pillars that will inform your content ideas and brainstorm content ideas and topics. The key takeaway for this lesson is not to get overwhelmed. It's all about having fun, about being creative, and brain-dumping as many topics and ideas and pillars as you're able to. Lesson 5 and 6 dealt with the content map and the content calendar. The key takeaway for this lesson is to keep it simple and follow the template to make it easy for yourself. The bonus lesson covered my three favorite content creation tools to help you automate your content creation process. Lastly, the class project lesson, which you will be able to follow along with the other lessons to make your content map and calendar and upload to the project discussion. Again, I just want to say, thank you and congratulations for attending this class. If you enjoyed this class, kindly follow me on Skillshare and please share this class. If you're following me on Skillshare, I will be posting more classes very soon. You can also keep in touch with me on social media, the links will be provided at the end of the video. I want to leave you with this quote by Seth Godin. "Marketing is not about the products you sell, but it's about the stories you tell." Remember, go and have fun, go share your brand story, go share your why, go share your passion with others, and that's how you will connect with your audience. Bye bye, see you in the next one.