At Pennock, we have recently enhanced our internal content creation process to align our teams more effectively. Why? Over the last six months, we found ourselves heavily relying on chatbots for content ideas and mimicking our competitors, losing sight of steering our ship. As anyone on my team can attest, two things I hate more than ever are: 1, not controlling our destiny and 2, assuming marketing will be successful without a strategy.

Our 2.0 process for content creation, leading to a positive ROI, is as follows:

  1. Start with your team’s Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). These are the people who understand your end customers’ pain points, frustrations, aversions to your product or service, and what the customer perceives as strengths of your business offerings. This ideally leads to 8-12 distinctly unique themes that are top of mind when customers are problem-aware and solution-aware for what you sell.
  2. Assign one distinctly unique theme per month.
  3. Begin building out your monthly plans that align with the theme of the month.
  4. We recommend having one thought leader piece (long-form blog) and three bite-sized pieces for support (shorter articles around 800 words or a 3-minute video).
  5. Each thought leader piece should have three corresponding social posts (you choose which ones for your industry). Each support piece should have two social posts — and this content should be video! Now, I know many content teams might say, “There aren’t enough ways to spin this content into multiple social posts!” To that, I say, take a hard look in the mirror and reflect on the decisions you made. Either your content writer is producing lacklustre, of-no-value articles, or your social person isn’t skilled at figuring out what will hook on social media. Either way, you have an issue… and don’t delay solving it!
  6. This strategy alone will get you to 9+ social posts/month. But as real-time trends emerge, your content team can be on the lookout for ways to leverage trends in service of your monthly distinctly unique theme.

Everything else you do is icing on the cake. What we say at Pennock is if it’s not quality, don’t publish.

Now, the high ROI comes in when you leverage paid ads to increase the visibility of the monthly social content. To do this best, boost, spark, or sponsor all the posts within your Ads Manager account to your unaware or problem-aware audience. Those that engage with 80% of the video should be retargeted with your more traditional evergreen sales ads/content to make them solution-aware.