How to Streamline Your Content Strategy

These days, all social media marketing gurus are talking about how to help you streamline your content strategy. I get it. As a social media marketer who works primarily with home stagers and realtors, I know what a time-suck content creation can be. It’s one of the reasons why so many of my clients struggle with social media marketing and either avoid creating content or aren’t consistent with it.

While content creation might take a lot of time, it’s also essential if you want to attract your ideal audience and get more leads and sales from social media. That’s why, to be successful, you need to utilize some simple strategies to streamline your content creation so you can save time and still consistently put out content that your ideal audience loves.

Success comes from a combination of consistency and the creation of high-value content.

Which, I know, isn’t what you want to hear. We’re all about fast results these days; the faster, the better. Or doing it once and breathing a sigh of relief because you’re done. Content creation is a task that all entrepreneurs and businesses need to plan and create consistently to continue to drive interest, leads, and sales for their companies.

So, does that mean you should avoid creating and writing content for your ideal audience? Definitely not! It just means you must be smart about how you do it to save time and streamline your content strategy process.

When I was writing our Kitchener Home Staging Blog, I had both a process and a plan that enabled me to create content quickly. I created content creation strategies that helped me streamline my process and create content more quickly. And if I can do it, so can you.

To help you get started, here are the five strategies I use consistently to make content creation a breeze.

Content Creation Tip #1: Plan Ahead

Before you jump on the content creation machine, take the time to create a solid marketing and content plan in advance. This means defining your marketing goals, identifying whom you’re creating content for, and developing a content strategy that aligns with your business objectives. When you have a documented content strategy, you increase your chances of success by up to 538%, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

Here’s what it looks like to use a marketing plan to help streamline your content strategy and overall content creation process. First, you’d map out your marketing theme(s) for the next 60 – 90 days. I recommend doing this for each quarter as opposed to planning, say, the whole year in advance. This will help you understand exactly what kind of content you need to create based on those themes and also refine your content strategy based on the results and analytics you get from your audience.

One of the most important tools I recommend to do this is a marketing and content calendar. In it, you can easily plan, layout, and track all of your marketing and content in one spot. This makes content creation much, much simpler. If you’re looking for a marketing and content calendar that’s packed with done-for-you content ideas, then check out my Social Stager program. In it, I map out your marketing plan and give you a specific content strategy so you know exactly what kind of content you’ll be creating and the goals you want to achieve with it.

A Marketing and Content Calendar is a great tool to streamline your content strategy and keep you organized and on-track.

Content Creation Tip #2: Repurpose your Content

One of the best ways to streamline your content strategy is to repurpose existing content you’ve already shared. This is a great way to save time and reach a broader audience. How do you do this? Take a piece of content you’ve already created, like a video or blog post, and turn it into something new. According to HubSpot, repurposing content can save you up to 50% of your time and increase your content’s reach by up to 75%!

For example, let’s say you’ve written a blog post about the benefits of home staging for selling a home. You can then repurpose that content by creating an infographic that highlights your key points and statistics from that post. From there, you could turn that content into a video, where you discuss the benefits of home staging in greater detail and show some before-and-after photos of your staged properties for increased impact. The possibilities are endless.

Content Creation Tip #3: Use Templates and Tools

To help streamline your content strategy even more, I strongly recommend taking advantage of social media templates and scheduling tools. If you’re adept at creating or customizing graphics yourself, then Canva will be your content creation BFF. With thousands of templates available to help you easily create (and schedule – if you have the PRO version of Canva), this one tool will cut down significantly on time spent creating content.

If, however, creating content isn’t in your wheelhouse, you get overwhelmed when you’re in Canva (and don’t know where to start), or you struggle to create consistent on-brand graphics. Ready-made social media templates like the ones in my store will literally save you hours and hours of time. As a business owner who did all the marketing and content creation for my staging business, I can tell you that I WISH I had had social media templates available. They would have helped improve my consistency, cut my content creation time down to maybe an hour a week, and helped me share on-brand professional content that would have stood out.

And this is why today I create them for home staging and real estate professionals. If you peek into my shop, you’ll see packs of social media templates that are beautifully designed and will save you hours and help streamline your content strategy.

Beyond templates, you’ll want to use a scheduling tool or app. I have clients who use the scheduling tool in Meta and others who use an app like Buffer or Planoly. Our team uses Buffer for all our social media marketing clients simply because of all the great features it provides us. Regardless of which app or tool you decide on, using one of these scheduling tools will enable you to schedule all your content in an hour or so each week. Which frees you up to run your business without stressing over publishing content daily. Lifesaver!

Using social media templates and tools will help you simplify & streamline your content strategy.

Content Creation Tip #4: Batch your Content

Batching your content is the process of creating multiple pieces of content at one time. It’s a process that I recommend if you want to become more consistent with content creation and make the process simpler.

There are a couple of ways you can use batching to streamline your content strategy. First, you could batch content daily. This might look like setting aside 20-30 minutes a day to create a few pieces of new content. If you don’t have time every day to create content, then I suggest blocking off an hour or two each week for this task. This will allow you to focus on creating content without being distracted by other tasks.

And to drill down into every more detail, I recommend creating one type of content at a time if possible. It’s far easier to create one type of content, like real estate or home staging tips, at one time than to create a variety of different content. You’re far more likely to get more accomplished by approaching your content creation this way than if you were trying to create all kinds of different posts at one time.

When you set aside time consistently and focus on creating one type of content, you’ll find content creation much easier and more productive. This is one of the most effective strategies I’ve used to help both myself and my clients streamline our content creation strategies.

To streamline your content strategy, consistently set aside time to create one type of content at a time.

Content Creation Tip #5: Outsource Some of the Work

Maybe you’re not a great writer, or you don’t have the talent or creativity to create social media graphics. Not everyone does. Outsourcing some of these tasks can help you focus on the aspects of the marketing strategy that you enjoy (and are good at) and let the experts handle the rest. This could mean hiring a company like ours to create blog posts for you or working with our social media management team to create your content and manage your social media accounts.

Many of our clients are very capable of handling certain parts of their social media marketing. However, they come to us because they don’t have time to do both marketing and grow their company.

For example, let’s say you own a boutique home staging firm and don’t have time to create your own blog content. You could hire our team with experience in your industry to create blog posts for you. This would allow you to focus on other aspects of your business while providing valuable content to your audience.

By following the above steps, you’ll be able to streamline your content strategy and be consistent with sharing it across all your online platforms. You’ll create content your ideal audience wants to hear, which will help you build your authority as a trusted expert in your industry and generate leads and sales from your content.

How would you rate your content strategy? Tell us in the comments!