Whether you’re the sole marketer, part of a team, or the founder of a startup CPG company, creating meaningful content is crucial for the success and growth of your company. When done properly, content marketing can help you communicate your company’s mission, values and brand standards – all while connecting authentically with your target audience. This matters because “people don’t buy products, they buy brands.” So how you present your company and products through your content demonstrates to the world what your brand is all about.

The Basics

If you’re unsure of what a content strategy is, this section provides a basic overview of the areas you need to identify in order to create one. Your content strategy should identify your marketing and business goals, content distributions plans, and the type of content you’ll be producing. We recommend actually writing down this strategy so you and/or your team can revisit them moving forward. This will keep you aligned and succinct on your north star.

What are your goals?

To start, let’s focus on your end goals. If your marketing strategy worked exactly the way you’d want it to, what would happen? Would traffic on your website increase? Would you get more social media followers? Would you get a boost in revenue on your eCommerce shop? Whatever that end goal is, start there and work backwards to make a plan.

Where should the content go?

Your website / blog, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Amazon / eCommerce shop are just a few areas where your content could potentially live. And making the decision on where it will go will influence the type, format and cadence of the content you produce.

For example, it may be absolutely appropriate to write paragraphs of text in your blog but post that on Instagram and I can assure you nearly no one will read it. On the flip side, while it’s highly recommended that you post on social media a few times a week (at the very least), no one is expecting that you’d update your core website that often. And even if we get more granular - say, when talking about video content, the length and type of video you see on Youtube will be different than those on Instagram, and different still on TikTok.

In summary, it’s important to know where your content will go so you can shape it to the needs of the platform and the respective audience’s wants and desires.

What type of content should you create?

If your goal is to get more folks to visit your website, ask yourself: what would get them there? There would have to be some sort of enticing offer or valuable content that pulls them to your website. Afterall, you’re competing for their attention with the likes of Netflix, Instagram, and the millions of other things they could be doing on and off-screen. If you’re uncertain of what the answer to this question may be, consider the following.

Think of the last time you were on social media and decided to click on a link. Why did you do it? What compelled you to move away from the app and onto the website?
Who is your target customer? What’s their lifestyle like? What do they care about? What do they spend their time doing? How can you help make their life a little bit easier?
What are your company’s differentiators? Why would someone pick your product over another product in the same category?
Ask someone, who is not too close to your company, give you candid insight into what they found particularly interesting or valuable about your brand or products.

Whatever information you gain from the above questions / exercise should be the focus of the content you create.

Still unsure? Read up on the traits that make viral / high-performing content with examples on what other companies have done here.

Content that Scales

Now that you have a general content strategy in order, let’s talk about how you’re going to produce content in a scalable way. The truth is, most companies do not have the means to produce unique, meaningful, and relevant content, for every single platform out there, on a regular basis. Nor would that be an effective content strategy for a company’s resources. Instead, let’s talk about how your company can properly harness pillar content, user-generated content, influencer marketing and content curation to tackle marketing in an efficient and cost-effective way.

“Pillar” Content and Repurposing

Pillar content is defined as “..a substantive and informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivative sections, pieces, and materials.” So basically, it’s one big ‘ol (or highly significant) piece of content that you can repurpose across multiple areas (e.g., your website, social media, etc.). Pillar content is essential for creating scalable content because you can produce one piece and use it over and over again – thus, relieving you of the need (and resources) to create unique content for each social media platform, marketing material, etc.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you wrote an amazing recipe for spiced shrimp tacos with fresh pineapple salsa topped with your company’s incredible hot sauce. Not just that, but you were able to get some stellar images of the recipe and a video demonstrating how everything is cooked. You wrap all of this up in a blog post and this becomes your pillar content. Now what?

Here are the many ways you can repurpose that pillar content:

Take the recipe video and post it on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram
Take the images and post them over time on Facebook and Instagram (it’s okay to promote the same recipe a few times over the course of weeks or months)
Use pieces of the blog you wrote to caption your social media posts
Break up the video into shorter videos for Instagram Stories and TikTok
Pull the recipe into a larger “Cook Book” PDF that your audience can download by entering their email address (which you can use to build your email list for future newsletters and promotions)
Promote the blog post in emails to your audience / customers
Use the blog post and video when pitching to retailers and partners to educate them on how your products are enjoyed
Use the images from the blog post in other areas of your website, in your eCommerce store / Amazon, in sell sheets, your brand kit, etc.

And there you have it! That one blog post just became a million times more valuable through the way you repurposed the content.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content is any piece of content posted by a platform’s user. For you, it will likely be from a customer who has purchased your product and is sharing their experience. If it’s on social media, they may tag you or message you directly. However, in some cases, you may have to seek them out yourself through relevant hashtags.

Once you find these folks, you can direct message them to ask for permission to repost their content on your account. The average account will likely agree, in which case you’ll have free, authentic content to share and provide social proof how your products are enjoyed by real people (just be sure to credit and tag their account).

The best way to get this type of user content is, of course, firstly to have an active account on all platforms where your target customers are. Secondly, you can encourage (through your own posts) the use of a unique hashtag when customers post about your products or tag you directly. Lastly, you can send free products to people and ask them to post about it. Indeed, this can be costly. However, I can assure you that unless your product is highly premium (e.g., dry-aged steaks), the cost of providing samples to people in exchange for free content will likely be worth the trade.

If you’re a smaller company, you might have little user-generated content to work with in the beginning. Which means you’ll likely be more open to repost every customer image with your product. The tricky thing about that is that everyone will be producing a different type and style of content. As a result, if you’re reposting every piece, your social media feed will lack a sense of cohesiveness and consistency– something that is needed when building a brand.

The best way of avoiding the pitfalls of having a hodgepodge-looking feed is 1) be selective in the type of content you choose to repost by choosing only ones that align with your brand style, and/or 2) repost the content more intermittently with most of your feed taken up by on-brand content that you’ve produced internally or in partnership with some sort of content production / photography company. The latter approach requires planning ahead to see how your feed will look based on the type of content you post and when you post them. Tools like Planoly can help with this.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is when a company partners with an individual, typically someone with a substantial social media following, whose values, lifestyle and audience aligns with their brand. For example, if your company sells plant-based snacks targeted at busy millennials, you might partner with a 30-year old, hard-working vegan. Below are a few reasons why you’d want to do this:

To get in front of that influencer’s audience since they are likely also your target customer
To gain access to the influencer’s knowledge and expertise (perhaps they’re great at creating recipes with your snacks, for example)
To have relevant content produced for your company

That said, the influencers you choose to partner with should also have the ability to produce visual content (photos and/or videos) that align to your brand. Just take a look at their website, blog or social media account. If you don’t like what you see, they are probably not the best fit to produce content for you.

The thing about influencer marketing is that it can be quite expensive. Based on the person’s follower count, experience and expertise, you could pay thousands just for one post. If you don’t have the marketing budget to spend, you’ll need to find folks who fit your needs but settle on those with a smaller following.

Curated Content

Curated content are those produced by others that you handpicked to share with your audience. Things like sharing an article that you found helpful, an inspirational quote or a beautiful image can be considered curated content. In other words, it’s anything that you vetted and deemed worthy to share on behalf of your brand.

To be clear, curated content is not plagiarism. All legal rules apply when reposting someone else’s content. If you’re sharing a link that leads directly to the original creator’s site or account, that’s generally okay. If you’re unsure, play it safe and don’t use it. Or ask for written permission before you do.

Many platforms such as Youtube offer ways to easily share content – given the creator set the permissions for you to do so. Certain images and videos will also be marked with Creative Commons licensing that allows you to use the assets. And sites like Pexels and Pixabay offer completely free assets for you to use. While sites like Envato Elements and Storyblocks have paid subscriptions where you can access more premium assets for a monthly fee. We also offer some paid stock images of our own here (toot-toot).

As a professional photography and video production company, we believe whole-heartedly that custom content featuring your unique products trumps all. However, we also understand that sometimes you have to make the best use of the marketing budget you have (and sometimes, that’s no budget at all). In these cases, stock imagery sites paired with careful curation can be a great help!

Measure, Review and Adjust

Let’s reflect back on the goals we discussed in the beginning of this post. Now it’s time to take your goals and track your progress on a regular basis - whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. If you were looking to increase traffic on your website, make sure you have analytics in place that allows you to oversee the amount of hits you get per month and ideally where those folks are coming from. If your goal was to increase your Instagram post performance, take a look at which posts got the most likes and comments.

When it comes to social media, you should also pay attention to the day and time that you post, as well as the hashtags you use and your own engagement with others – all of these factors will impact performance so context is important. For example, that summer pasta post you made at 2am Tuesday morning may have been a better piece of content than the bowl of chips you posted at 9am on Friday, but the chips may perform better just due to the timing.

The goal here is to understand what you should be doing more of, less of, or abandon all together. Without proper data and tracking, you are simply shooting in the dark, with each piece of content being a mere guess. This, in turn, wastes time and resources and limits your company’s potential for growth.

The very last thing to note here is to properly set expectations. Building a brand, growing your social media following, connecting with your audience, and growing your company are all long-term plays. Significant increases will not happen overnight. In fact, they likely won’t even happen in a month, or three, or six. It’s a lot of work, consistently and daily, over long periods of time. However, when implemented properly, successful content marketing can have a profound and lasting impact on your company and brand!

Julee Ho Media is a boutique photography company specializing in CPG, food and beverage brands. Click here to get a quote and discover how we can help elevate your brand.