What Does Content Creation Include?
Content Creation: 7 Steps To Get Started Now
This post is all about Content Creation. What it is and what it includes. Whether you’re looking to DIY your content creation or want to hire our Bee Hive to do it for you we’ve got you covered in this blog post.
Content creation is a term you hear buzzing all over social media and blog posts lately.
Someone is shouting about the importance of content creation for your business.
Another person is claiming that you have to create content on all the platforms out there or you’ll be irrelevant.
There is *some* truth to what they are saying but the biggest issue is what exactly is content creation and how do you get started?
Let’s start with the basics first:
What is content creation?
Content Creation is the base of digital marketing. The simple definition is the act of brainstorming content ideas for your business that appeals to your audience, creating written or visual content around those ideas and then posting them on the internet.
It’s really as simple as that to get started!
That said, there is a lot of strategy and research that goes into creating effective content that converts into sales and raving followers. This part is the not so simple part - or at least not so simple for most.
What Does Content Creation Include?
When most people think of Content Creation they think of a cell phone on a tripod and people dancing and pointing to a song. They think of beautifully crafted scenes in a photo posted on an Instagram feed. They think of Story Time videos on TikTok where all the tea is shared about an issue someone is having.
While that is Content Creation - there is a lot more effort that goes into creating content before you even pick up your camera or phone to start creating.
Problems
Know what problems your customers have and have a solution to the problem.
We know this sounds simple, BUT, this is often a step that is missed when starting a business. Knowing what problem you solve for your customers is crucial to building a business and being successful with Content Creation.
We’re going to use Bee Social Solutions for an example here. We started off solely as a Social Media Management company in 2016. We solved the problem of managing social media accounts for businesses. That turned into content creation for our customers since a lot of businesses did not have the resources to create content and looked to us for that service. We developed a Content Curation and Creation service to fill that problem our customer base had.
We want you to write down all of the problems that you solve for your customers now. You can either use a sheet of paper, Google Doc or fill out the form below to have our bees send over our Content Creation Worksheet to you. There will be a spot to fill out all of the problems that you solve for your customers.
Research
Find out where your customers are hanging out, how they consume content and what they are searching for.
These are all three separate activities but fall under one task of RESEARCH. This is the one task that is skipped the most when it comes to Content Creation.
Why is this the step that is most often skipped in the Content Creation process?
Easy - it’s not as fun as the act of creating content.
Remember when we said that Content Creation itself is simple but creating content that converts to sales and raving community is a little more complicated? Taking the time to research where your customers are hanging out, how they consume content (not what you as a creator want to create) and what they are searching for is all part of the process of creating content that has a positive ROI.
We will dive deeper into the process of Content Creation Research in another blog post, since it is an in-depth process but for now, a surface level overview to get you started NOW, you’ll want to head to Google and search for:
Look up your audience demographics on Google to see what social media platform they utilize the most
Look at the content that is performing best for your competition and note all similarities that high performing content pieces have in common
Look at what your customer is searching for and how they are searching for it
Plan
We’re going to be honest and share something a little personal about the Bees here at Bee Social - we all GEEK OUT over the planning part. Absolutely GEEK OUT over Content Planning and making sure that we have covered all of the bases for our Content Creation Plan.
We’re going to break this part down into steps:
Identify how your customer is consuming content and commit to creating at least 50% of your content in that style. Are they watching how-to TikToks? Are they reading detailed blog posts on how to do Content Creation from start to finish? Commit to creating 50% of your content as How-To TikToks or long-form blog posts. We’re suggesting only 50% to start since everything in life is about balance.
Marry the problems that your business solves to the type of content that your customers consume. For us, one of the problems our business solves is Content Creation. We are marrying the problem and how our customers consume content by writing this blog post and also creating a podcast and YouTube video about this. This is how our customers mainly consume content.
Plan out the remaining 50% of the content you have to create that you actually like to create. Do you like doing short-form dancing videos? Create them. Do you like doing Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos? Do them. This is where we suggest creating the type of content that you like to create to prevent burnout and also create balance in your life. Just like restrictive diets don’t work long-term, restrictive content plans don’t work long-term.
Take the high-performing content for your competitors and use that as inspiration for your content. There’s no need to recreate the wheel here - just don’t copy the wheel. What do we mean? There are so many Content Creation businesses that do long-form content about Content Creation. We know that they perform well based off of our research of our competition. We also know that the higher performing YouTube videos, with the longest view rate, had scene changes about every 10 seconds and were not just talking head/screenshare videos. There were a lot of edits, b-roll and interest in the videos. We are not going to copy the information, the edits or anything from these videos - we are going to take inspiration from them and use our research findings. We’ll be sure to keep the video interest moving and keep scene changes to every 10-15 seconds, use as much b-roll as we can as well as demonstrations in bite size pieces so visual learners can also grasp the process.
Script out your content. This can be as simple as just an outline of what each piece of content is going to be about and cover. You can take it a step further and write out each word of your podcast or TikTok. Either way, it’s a good idea to at least know what you are going to talk about in each piece of content so you don’t waste time on your Content Creation Day.
Make a list of needs. Do you need certain props or products for your Content Creation? Do you need a certain freebie done so you can promote it in your content? Do you have a space to film your content that will reflect well on your brand? Map out all of your needs and make sure you have everything organized and ready to go when you start your content creation process.
Content Organization. This can be as simple as storing everything on your phone - there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it is always a good idea to have your phone backing up to a cloud or have your raw footage on an external hard drive so you can refer back to it for b-roll or for repurposed content. We have it on our own content calendar to do a detailed How-To on how we organize our own business content and the content that we create for clients. We’ll update this blog post once we publish it.
Create Your Content
This is where all of your research and planning comes together.
We suggest setting aside a day to create your content. Yes, we said a day.
To some this might seem like too much time and to others it might seem like not enough time.
We have found that for 99.9% of our customers a day is the perfect amount of time to create all the content needed for a month.
You already did your research. You already know what type of content you’re going to create, what it’s about and what you need to get it all done.
If you follow your plan, or our plan if you’ve hired our Hive, you’re set up for success!
We do have a few Pro Tips for you when it comes to your Content Creation Day:
If you’re creating video content we suggest setting up 2 cameras/phones to capture the main content that you’re filming and b-roll content
Use as much natural light as possible for visual content - it’s free
Don’t schedule anything else for that day. You don’t need a time contraint looming over your head. Treat yourself like you would treat a customer. Give your business your undivided attention that day
Test your equipment the week before to make sure everything is in working order. This will also allow you to order/replace any items that are worn or broken
Give yourself grace and go with the flow
Have fun with it
Edit Edit Edit
This step is pretty self explanatory but applies to any type of content that you might be creating and should have a decent amount of time dedicated to it.
You don’t want to stress over perfection but you want to make sure that the quality of product you’re producing is a good representation of your business.
In our Content Creation service we allow a minimum of at least 24 business hours of editing for 30 pieces of content. This includes video content, static image content and written content. If you’re creating 25 short-form videos, 1 blog post at 1,500 words and 2 podcasts episodes and 2 YouTube videos for your monthly content we would suggest at least a week of editing time to ensure that everything is done correctly and a good representation of your brand. That is if you’re about average skill level for all of the needs and that is what our Hive would take to complete the process for a robust content plan like this.
If you want to know what tools we use in our editing process, or in our business, we have lumped everything together and created ‘Our Favorites’ just for you!
Schedule/Post
What good is Creating Content if you don’t publish it?!?
How you schedule your content is really up to you. The only wrong way to go about it is not posting your content at all! You can schedule using a third party tool or you can schedule natively. It’s really up to what works best for your business and your team.
For our Hive we schedule out all of our content through Metricool or natively. We typically just use Metricool for everything though. It helps to keep things in one place and our bees on task and not switching between all the platforms.
That said, 99% of the time we are only creating the content for the client. We are not writing the captions or doing the hashtag, keyword research. We do have clients in the higher tier services that we do everything for but most of our clients are Content Creation only and we deliver finished content via Google Drive folders for their team to take and implement based on their strategy.
Analyze
The last step in the Content Creation process is analyze the performance of your content. This is where you see what your audience is connecting with. The posts with the higher analytics is what you want to create more of and the ones with the lower analytics either tweak and test to see if the changes help your audience connect or if you need to either cut that out of your content plan or just make fewer videos like that if you like creating that type of content.
This step is one that a lot of marketers keep shouting as the key to continued growth and there’s a reason for that - this is the magic, the key, or how to beat the algorithm. If you continually produce content that your audience wants to see and interact with the social media platforms will continue to push your content to your followers.
Give your audience what they want and your business will reap the rewards.
Why are these steps important?
Short answer - this is how you will convert your followers into buying customers.
If you need help with doing this for your business you can schedule a call with our Queen Bee here to see how our HIVE can help you.
Long answer -
These are the exact steps that we take to create content for clients.
These are the exact steps that the social media platforms have outlined for creators to take - if you read the blogs/informational sessions they produce.
These are the steps that provide insight into what your ideal client wants to consume and take the guesswork out of everything.
Doing these steps in order is crucial to your success. These steps are put in this order for a reason. This content creation method we outlined is exactly how your dream customer starts their buying journey. If you do these steps in this order you will not only see an increase in your following but you 99.9% will also see an increase in sales.
Conclusion
We’re not going to lie - if you’ve never done this method before it might seem intimidating, daunting, overwhelming, all the things. We get it. We thought the same thing too when we were struggling to create content that converts consistently for our clients.
Content creation is not going to go away. It’s going to evolve, that’s a given, but by following the problems that your ideal client has, how they search for answers and watch how they want to consume the content that solves their problems the guess work is taken away.
We know that Content Creation is not for everyone, if it was we wouldn’t have a business or a paycheck coming in every month!
We can help you. Click below to get started and we’ll guide you through the best way for your business.
