You Ask, I Answer: Keeping Content Marketing and Social Media Fresh?

In today's episode, Whitney asks, Does anyone have any recommendations or resources for maintaining a fresh perspective when you're deep into the calendar planning process for clients? How do you pull yourself out of repetitive, stale caption writing? So this is a good question. I use predictive calendaring for this. Because being able to predict and forecast when specific topics are going to be of interest to your audience makes it easier to do your content planning, and it keeps you from getting still.

One of the problems that people have when they're trying to do content creation is that if you're doing it in a very reactive way and you just have like this general lump topic, like you know, you're gonna this this month you're gonna blog about you know financial services, uh repayment options, you know, and you're like, great, right? Um and there's not a lot of detail to it, there's not a lot of granularity to it. You absolutely can get stuck in a loop of being stale and repetitive because you've run out, you you've tapped out the broad topic without having any of that granular detail in it. So if you can take data, search data in particular, what people search for, forecast it using statistics and data science, and dig deep into what's going to be popular, you will have a much easier time creating lots of content at you know, a content at scale, timed to when people care about it the most, and giving you the ability to really plan ahead. So that's a lot of theory.

Let's look at an example here. We'll sw switch this over here like that. Alright, cool. So this is an example predictive forecast for uh we use it at the at at the shop here for um cheeses as a as a a fun demo because it's you know no confidential information. So we can see here is that on any given week uh throughout the year, we can we forecast forward what is the likelihood of uh an audience searching for this cheese by name.

So this coming week, the week of July 14th, 2019, when I'm recording this, uh the the cheese of the week is going to be Birata, followed by feta mozzarella provolone and American. So if I was running a cheese shop or a cheese restaurant or something cheese related, um, I would know that next week I need to have content about burrata cheese. I don't even know what Parada cheese is, but uh there you there you go. It's it's the thing, followed by feta, mozzarella from provolone, and so on and so forth. And we know that you know there the feta, for example, is uh a great cheese to add to like summer salads.

You could add it to like a a watermelon salad with some shaved basil and some crumbled feta on top. You got a great summer salad. So I could if I was running a cheese shop and I knew that next week was was gonna be a feta week, I can create a lot of content, look for some recipes about feta, and so on and so forth. Uh the following week, it's change that here. Now this is there's a week uh cheese called Scamorza.

I didn't know what's gonna what is Scamorza cheese. Um Google that. So Skomorza cheese is is the popular thing. The based on the reaction I just had, if you were the cheese shop owner, you'd be like, wow, people are searching this thing, but clearly nobody has any idea what it is. So you can create lots of content from that.

What is it? Why is it important? How do people use it? Uh all the different types of questions around a topic that people are not familiar with, but are clearly searching for. Week by week, you create your content calendar.

What's the the popular cheese of the following week? Stays scamorosa for a little while. And then mozzarella takes the lead in uh early August here. Mozzarella, super versatile cheese, very easy to work with. And uh you start seeing uh you get these second and third and fourth tier cheeses, you would create content about those.

But we know once you've made sure you've got content about mozzarella and feta, and you covered as many recipes as is reasonable for that topic, you move on to the next and to the next and to the next. When you go out into uh, you know, uh pretty far out into the into the like the the holidays here, uh this is the week of December 22nd. Swiss cheese, followed by cheddar, followed by white cheddar pepperjack. It's interesting actually. I don't know a ton about cheese, but it there are clearly, you know, summer cheeses like uh halloumi and and uh and feta, and then there are these sort of these like winter cheeses like Swiss and cheddar, white cheddar, pepperjack and stuff that you I guess use for different recipes, different purposes throughout the year.

So you have the ability now to create a tremendous amount of content, a lot of content, recipes, how to, ideas, to and you can create tons of social content. None of it's gonna be repetitive because you have so much granularity because this comes from your search data. This comes from what you know your audience will be searching for at some point. Now, by the way, you can use this data for more than just social content. You can use this to inform your blog.

You can use it for videos like this. You can say, Hey, this this is you know video today is about how to cook with um Jarlsberg. Um you can use it to dig into explainers like what is almond cheese. Can you use almond cheese in a fondue or cauliflower cheese? Ugh, that doesn't sound very good.

Um cheese on cauliflower sounds good, but cheese made of cauliflower? Anyway, anyway. Um you can time your campaigns. If you had an email newsletter, guess what? If you know what the top three cheeses are of that week, you would of course make the you know your first three articles or your first three recipes or your first three ideas all about that cheese.

This would be a good resource, even if you're doing like paid marketing. Because if you know, for example, that you know, uh in four weeks, racelet cheese is going to be uh least searched of the cheeses that you're running ads for. Take down reclut's budget and pump up the budget for Swiss, because that's what people will be searching for. So you can use this type of forecasting for any and all of your content marketing. Keep it from getting stale to keep it from getting repetitive, to keeping that fresh perspective, and because you're using search data and chances are whatever your business is, there are a lot of search terms.

There should be a lot of search terms in your business for the services you offer. What is it? How does it work? Why is it important? When do you use it?

Uh, who should be responsible for it? All the major questions for any given topic. You can create tons and tons and tons of content. You can and should have way more content ideas than you have time to make it if you're using predictive forecasting. You can assign it out, subcontract out stuff if you need to.

Uh you can even you could even use um machine learning, uh, artificial intelligence software to to draft some of the social posts. If you if you know, for example, exactly what uh people are going to be interested in, um, you could generate social posts based on previous ones about that topic. So I could take like a hundred or two hundred Swiss cheese uh social posts and feed it to one of these really fancy AI tools and have it write a hundred a hundred more social posts on various cheeses. So that's how you keep stuff fresh. Have use the data, forecast with the data, and create your content based on what you know people are probably going to be searching for in the next days, weeks, or months.

Shameless plug. If you need help creating these forecasts because you don't have uh machine learning and data science people on your team, give us a call. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.