Been reflecting on my own content marketing strategy (different from a full-blown personal branding strategy, which isn’t my focus right now) for the past couple of weeks and felt the need to refine it a little. Make it a more purposeful while keeping a low profile (if only, slightly).
The latter is quite important to me right now. I’m working full-time with boutique marketing and staffing agency doing what I love — serving my clients by helping my team create new standards of excellence. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything else right now. So, while this blog and other outlets (will get to that in a bit) exist, I really don’t want it to interfere between what I do for a living with what I do for passion, outside of work.
I know purists would argue that I’m doing it the wrong way. And they’re probably right. But doing it this way would allow me to stay focused on a content marketing strategy that is purely focused on providing value (content creation, documenting, thought leadership and so on). A personal branding strategy, in my opinion, is way too into short-term tactics (that are either “trending” or “hacks”) to create an illusion (yeah, read that word again) of authority and trust.
I’m in for the long game. And I want to lead with value, which means my content needs to speak for me. Period.
Alright, now my playbook. In sync with my philosophy of keeping it simple, here’s what I have in mind for the rest of the year and 2019:
- Blog — will continue to post everyday. It’s part of my routine and I can’t seem to not put something out everyday. And I think it’s a good thing. (At least for me.)
- Facebook — plan to use just my page to post updates, including personal ones (not family stuff, that’s way too personal). The idea is to share hand-curated content 2-3 times every day. There will be occasional original content too, but I plan to restrict that to either videos or photos only. Relevance is the name of the game.
- LinkedIn — same as Facebook except the videos and photos, unless warranted (I get the feeling I just might do that once I podcasts get up and running). I love LinkedIn for it’s depth and scope for both B2B and B2C service providers. I’m working on building an online community that’s based off of LinkedIn. (Again, purists would whine about “owning” my list, but that’s another rant for some other day. I believe the days of relying too much on email lists are long gone. We ought to get better than building human to human relationships.)
- Podcasts — the plan right now is to get started and interview as many people (relevant to both my organization and my businesses) as I can in the next few months. I’ll choose a half a dozen of them as sponsored (by my organization) ones to be distributed within my professional network (the LinkedIn communities that I’m building) and the rest of will be hosted independently under my own show’s banner. I’m still working out the logistics, including the name of the podcast.
- Newsletters — I need to house all that good content that I’m curating and sharing on the internet. I’m sure my list of contacts would appreciate a weekly digest (or perhaps bi-weekly) from me with information from the best sources on marketing, communication and leadership. Damn, I would love such a thing! (I hope you would too!)
Henceforth, these four outlets will remain my primary focus (until further notice). My blog has been migrated from WP.com to FlyWheel.com, which means I have some more flexibility to play around the plug-ins and themes. (None of which would actually help my content marketing strategy… but you never know.)
The blog will remain my home-base for all things content, except curated content. But then, I’ll be using the newsletters to document most of content that I’m curating.
Here’s why I chose to share this — most of us are under the impression that it takes a lot of effort to create content and focus on all these different places that you should be in. I disagree. You don’t have to be everywhere. And you always have to be strategic about the places you choose. Yes, all of this takes a lot of time and effort. I will be the first in line to say this is easy. This isn’t! But you better not make this more complicated than it should be.
And let me tell you this — the best content/social media marketing strategy is the one that you “can” implement.