Michelle L. Evans

Episode 110: Building A Better Content Strategy With Facebook Ads

When you hear the term “content marketing strategy,” what do you think about? 

Well, unless you’re a writer that LOVES churning out blog posts and emails, you’re probably thinking it’s a lot of work, and you’re not sure if it pays off. 

And you’re right.

Look, if you go google “content marketing strategy” right now, you’ll find 254 MILLION pieces of content. 

Trust me — I just googled it — BUT if you want to fact check me, go ahead.

I skipped the ads at the top of the page, and I took a look at the top five articles google served up to me about content strategy. 

There are some pretty good articles written by well-meaning companies and people. 

Here are the article titles that came up for me: 

If you read these articles as I did, you’re going to get overwhelmed and feel like there is NO WAY you can create good content. 

The massive problem with all these articles, these strategies, and these approaches? They're geared toward bigger businesses, businesses with tens or hundreds of thousands of website visitors a month. 

If you don't have that kind of volume, these strategies are not going to work for you. These businesses have hundreds of thousands — or even millions of dollars — in advertising funds and teams of people to do research, to monitor social media, to write and analyze the content that they're creating.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars for content advertising to spend a month. And THAT is why we need to be smarter about what we do to get great content out to our audiences and NOT waste time naval-gazing and hoping some brilliant content marketing idea jumps out of the sky and into our brains.

One piece of advice that I wholeheartedly agree with is that content can be the key that unlocks your audience for you. 

I don't think that at our size of businesses, content strategy should be wasting time going through weeks and weeks of research and hoping that some brilliant content marketing idea jumps out of the sky and into our brains because it's not going to happen.

When I work with clients and students, a lot of times, we'll do this process backward because we're trying to get good insights before we dive into the expensive and time-consuming process of creating a content strategy. 

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Biggest Show Takeaways:

  • Have a goal 
      • You need to know what it is you're trying to do.
        • Dr. Michelle Mazur’s 3 Word Rebellion really helps you understand how to come up with a message, a message like Profit Without Worry, a message like that that you can really test to see if it's working for your audience.
  • Test your message
    • What's something that you could challenge people to think differently on that could help you stand out from the same old answers that people give that aren't serving your audience? 
      • You don't want to take exception to advice that works. But if you're like, “I've heard that advice before, but it really doesn't work for the kinds of people I want to work with,” I'm going to step in there with maybe a slightly rebellious kind of answer and really challenge people to have a conversation and to think about this differently. 
        • If it's crickets and nobody engages with you, okay, so that didn't land. That's okay. You just did a test. 
    • If you start seeing engagement and people saying, “Tell me more,” or, ‘This is interesting,” or, “Even you're wrong, and here's why,” that's awesome. It means that people are paying attention. 
      • You can just put a stake in the ground, draw a line in the sand and say, “You know what? I stand on this side. Everybody else is giving you these pat answers on the other side that aren't working for you. Listen to me. I've got a little bit of a different perspective about this.” 
      • When people start leaning forward and saying, “Tell me more,” you know you're onto something.
    • Be willing to test out your ideas. 
      • If you get crickets from one area, maybe your audience isn't there, and you can move on to another area. 
      • As you're going out there and challenging the common wisdom, you’re going to see where you get engagement from, and that's going to give you a clue of where your audience is. 
  • Test your audience
    • Facebook ads can come in to really help you accelerate this. 
      • Put together a quick video, or a quick blog post, or something like that.
      • Do it, and then do some ads. Put some money behind it and see what audience is really responding to you. How is it really going?
      • This is what I do to help my clients who've had a really hard time finding their message and their audience. 
        • It doesn't take a lot of money, but it does take paying attention to what people are asking, what they're talking about, and then putting your own voice in the ring — not another same old, same old voice that everybody else is hearing, but your own unique spin. 
  • Find out what people want to learn more about
    • Test until your audience tells you, “Yep, I want a lot more information about that.” And that's when you know, ding, ding, ding, this is the content I'm going to focus on. 
    • Once you get a winner, you might have an opt-in, some videos, some blog posts, some emails, or a combination of those, and it helps attract the right people in and gets them more information so they're ready to make a buying decision. 
    • You have to be brave enough to get out there and share something that's maybe not totally baked behind the scenes. 
      • You WILL need to stay on your message about what your business is. But within that, you can do a lot of testing. 
        • You don't want to be randomly all over the place just challenging everything. But if you stay within your business and stay within the kinds of people that you want to serve or the kinds of problems that you want to solve for clients or customers, it's really easy to get in there and test and to find your audience. 
        • They're going to tell you who they are because they're going to be clicking on your ads. They're going to be reading through your blog posts and your emails. They're going to be commenting on your videos. They're going to share. They're going to ask for more insight. That's when you know that you have something that really catches on. 
  • I’d love to hear how this goes for you! What do YOU think of when you think of content creation? How could you re-frame content creation to work better for you AND be more manageable? 

Create Profit Without Worry – one system at a time. I’ll show you how to attract a steady flow of buyers without all the hustle with this free download →  5 Steps to Profit Without Worry.

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