Understand the value of expanding content across different platforms!

There are so many reasons why learning how to expand your content across all your socials and website is beneficial. You will learn how to shape content to different audiences and save lots of time coming up with ideas and content creation.

Here’s our step by step guide on how to plan 6 months of content across all your digital platforms in just 2 hours. Once you know how easy it is, you’ll never go back to your old ways.

1. Decide on your 4 content pillars.

Content pillars are a way to strategically organise all the content needed for each social media and web platform. Every brand should select between 3 and 5 content pillars in total and they should reflect a broad range of posts, each aiming to achieve different social media or business goals. These goals can include increasing engagement, enhancing brand presence, educating audiences, generating sales etc.

Each content pillar should reflect a percentage of the total content going out across platforms. The percentage of each pillar can change over time depending on your overall goals, for example, if a skincare brand is having a Christmas sale throughout December, they may have a sales pillar that covers 30% of content when it would usually only cover 10%.

The best social media strategies have content pillars that each bring forward something that uniquely provides value or engagement.

Skincare brand content pillar example

• Our brand & our value - Information about the products and brand.

• Skincare tips & tricks - Providing value to the viewer by helping them with informative content that’s relevant to the brand’s products.

• BTS of our small business - Giving insight into the team and behind the scenes of a small business.

• Interactive content - This allows audiences to engage with the brand through comments, stories, DMs and likes.

2. Brainstorm content ideas within those pillars.

Now that you have your strategy and content pillars, it’s time to put pen to paper and think about the specific posts, emails and other content that will be going out under each pillar.

The key here is to have a broad range of different types of content so that nothing feels repetitive for audiences. The easiest way to break it down is by creating a spreadsheet with each pillar in 1 column, below each pillar brainstorm things that would work across all platforms.

Skincare brand content examples

• Our brand & our value - Photos of products, details of packaging, brand values.

• Skincare tips & tricks - Influencers using products, how-to videos, infographics and skincare facts.

• BTS of our small business - Packing order videos, behind the scenes photos, facts about our founder.

• Interactive content - Polls, stories, questions for the comment section.

3. Consider differences between platforms and audiences.

Now that you have your content ideas ready, it’s time to think about how you can amend all these ideas to match the file types and copy style of each platform. Think about how your style of writing would differ for each social channel. The text would change through tone of voice to suit slightly different audiences and length of caption. Content can also change by changing the dimensions of graphics and utilising videos on relevant platforms.

The best way to stretch your content is by first planning the content for your primary channel (your most sed channel) and then thinking about how the ideas, text and imagery can be translated across channels. For example, a skincare brand may use Facebook and Instagram the most, so they’d plan their posts for those platforms first, then taking some of those pieces of creative and amending them for TikTok and their blog.

Platform tonality and content cheat notes:

• Facebook & Instagram - These platforms can be either formal or informal and can be reflective of a wide range of audiences. Content should provide a vast array of information across all pillars with a consistent tone of voice with the brand. It’s often easiest to plan the Facebook and Instagram content first and then use this to expand upon other platforms.

• LinkedIn - Often a more formal setting including longer informative captions with a professional tone of voice. Content should provide the reader value by giving them knowledge of your brand, business or product. This can be done through videos, diagrams, infographics, photos and text only posts. Typically readers will take more time to read interesting posts on LinkedIn.

• TikTok - A fun, uplifting platform with a typically younger audience. All content ideas must be turned into short 30 seconds to 1-minute vertical videos. The videos should be light-hearted, snappy and engaging. Captions should be minimal.

• Blog & Website - These platforms should hold the most valuable content for your most engaged audiences. The content should provide value to readers in exchange for their time in reading. Blog and website content can be time-consuming to create properly, however, your audience should grow a love for the content and a deeper connection to your brand from it.

• Email - Each email should have a clear call to action, tonality should reflect your brand voice and sentences should be kept to the point to drive readers to action. We recommend selecting 1 to 2 content ideas to include in your emails at a maximum so that it’s easy for your audience to follow along.

So, there you have it, a step by step guide on how to stretch your content across all your digital marketing channels.

Of course, this will save you heaps of time creating content, but if you’re looking to add a professional edge to your online presence, book a free 15min consultation with us to find out how we can help you.

Until then, watch this space for monthly updates on the latest digital marketing trends.