Have a case of Content Burnout?

Marketing Communication

Struggling to stretch your time across multiple platforms while juggling motherhood, a 9-5, and a side hustle? Finding you're hustling hard to create high quality, valuable content for your audience, but it's literally taking your entire business week to produce? You’re not alone. Here’s a practical guide to three smart content strategies that can help you achieve your goals without overwhelming your schedule or budget.

1. Create micro-actions for macro impact

Consistency is key... but make it easy

Meet Sarah, a freelancer who was also balancing a full time job in marketing, who turned her Instagram page into a thriving community. She started by sharing her journey authentically, and connecting with her audience on a personal level. She started gaining traction but quickly became overwhelmed with balancing the time she took creating content with her job.

One post would end up taking an entire day to craft. Once posted, its longevity would last 24 hours, and it felt like it would quickly get lost in a sea of scrolls and other content. She started to become despondent and asking herself — "why bother?"

As a result, Sarah started to adopt an all-or-nothing approach to her content. She'd go weeks, sometimes months without posting, then have another burst of motivation (often fuelled by guilt), post every day for two weeks, then ghost her audience for another month.

A key strategy for building an audience, especially when starting out with limited time is to just choose ONE platform and focus your energy on that. Create a simple strategy that you can stick to consistently and focuses on time spent over task. For example, you might find content styles that take 10 minutes to create, instead of 5 hours. Whether that's simply posting once a week, find a rhythm that works for you. These small actionable items that you can consistently stick to creates big momentum over time.

Action steps

Engage with your audience: Spending time engaging and personally connecting with your audience can establish connection and credibility at a rate of 10x compared to actually creating content. Respond to comments, participate in conversations, and create content that resonates with your followers.
Your daily Engagement Plan: Spend 10-15 minutes daily responding to comments, engaging with followers' posts and finding new aligned accounts that fit your dream audience.
Create a content calendar: Plan posts for the week, focusing on storytelling, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated content. You can access our content planners as part of the Marketing Club.
Use hashtags strategically: Research and use relevant hashtags to increase your reach and visibility. A hot tip for streamlining this is to develop a set of hashtags for each main topic you talk about; save these somewhere and copy and paste them into your captions or as the first comment. Rotate your hashtags every couple of weeks to avoid getting shadowbanned.
Collaborate with influencers: Partner with influencers in your niche to tap into their audience. You can start by identifying 5 influencers in your niche, craft a personalised pitch highlighting mutual benefits and plan a collaborative content piece.

2. Create a strategy that repurposes content

Forget trying to sell in your posts or creating separate content for each platform — focus on long-form value instead

Jane, a freelance designer, started a blog where she would share tips and tutorials on how to use Canva. Her well-researched, insightful posts quickly established her as an authority. But, over time, she quickly became burnt out by trying to create new and fresh content across five different social media platforms.

Each platform felt disjointed from each other and she thought she might as well give up. Even though she was seeing great results, she didn't want it to be at the detriment of her health and wellbeing and was heading towards burnout.

A simple and easy strategy is to create one piece of long-form content which can be broken into different pieces of content.

Action steps

Choose a topic: Find an overarching topic of theme that you would like to create your content around.
Create your long-form piece of content: Once you have your theme, create a long-form piece of content, like a blog, youtube video or podcast. These are generally 10 minutes or longer and have at least three key messages or points.
Repost as an email broadcast: Pulling the key points from the blog, republish the blog or parts of a transcript from your Podcast or YouTube in an email, followed by a call to action.
Generate 7-15 Pinterest posts: Using Canva, create a series of Pinterest posts that experiment with different headlines and graphics of your blog, podcast or video. This will create approximately 2 weeks of content for Pinterest and drive traffic to your blog. Link to your blog and remember Pinterest operates like a search engine. Use searchable keywords in your description.
Grab a quote or statement to create a short-form video: What is the key hook or idea that your blog or long-form piece of content summarises? Pull this out and using Canva, place this text over some B-roll footage and trending music to create a Reel and Tik Tok.
Summarise key points into an Instagram Carousel: What are the top 5 key points in your piece of content? Create a carousel summarising this with a link to your long-form content in your bio. This acts as a teaser and promotion for your long-form piece of content.

Remember, people often don't take action on your content until they've been exposed to the same message on average of five times. Therefore, don't be concerned about being repetitive in your messaging or re-sharing the same content again.

3.Direct call to actions to an email list

If you haven't already, start building your email content potential

According to marketing gal and guru — Jenna Kutcher— in her experience she states "sales magic happens in the inbox". Over time, she has proven that her ad spend and call to actions that focus on growing her email list have always resulted in a positive return on investment.

Jenna states her conversion rates on email content is over 5x more effective than any other content channel. When she focuses on investing in growing her email list, her revenue goes up.

Action steps

Choose an email marketing platform: Select an email marketing platform that is easy to use and affordable. After testing over ten different email platforms across various campaigns and goals, our top recommendation is Simvoly — you can sign up here.
Nurture your audience: Set up some basic automations that provide a 'welcome' experience for any new subscriber. This may include providing more info on who you are and what your business does, or provide a special offer for them.
Provide a free value offer: Entice people to sign up to your email list by providing something in exchange — whether it's an ebook, a planner or guide, find something that people find valuable and engaging.
Don't be afraid to sell in your emails: Emails are where conversions happen. It is your permission to be a tad more assertive in selling yourself and your product. Note: unsubscribes are a natural part of this process, but don't be disheartened — this is actually a good thing! It means you are paying less for your email server (with less subscribers), and you're refining your audience to people who genuinely want to hear from you and want to buy from you.
Set any paid advertising to direct to a free product and email list: In my experience, the most effective paid ad campaigns are the ones that point to a free value offer opt-in and builds my email list. This enables you to start building an authentic relationship with your audience and often creates a better ROI on your ad spend.

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Ali @ She Glows Creative