Content Planning and Creation, how to permanently fix disorderly content - Teacher: Candice Davis-Blackman

If you cannot get people to stop and even pause on the content that you're putting out, you have no hope of them consuming your video or your carousel or whatever posts that you have. Your headline is the thing that helps hook them. .

This is Candice Davis Blackmon. a certified content and email marketing specialist who has helped clients across 11 niches and in three countries build lead generating strategies for their service businesses with content marketing and today on useful content, she's going to help us bring order to our content with content planning and strategy. We're going to look at how to use tools to enhance your content planning and creation.

Well, I have a whole bunch of tools and some of them people may not consider tools, but I consider tools, any templates, any enabler that allows you to build out your strategy.

Why you need to document exactly how you serve your clients in order to make effective content. 

If you are an expert, you're saying that you are an expert service provider, you must have some sort of process that you take your clients through in order to get the results that you are promising them. 

A better way to use artificial intelligence to create content. 

if you say you are an expert, there are things that you do that you're just not going to get from ai. 

Why repurposing and repeating your content is not a bad thing.

Because they only remember about what 10% of what you say anyway the sheer volume that people are consuming, they do not remember. 

and in our conversation, Candice says something to me that pushes me into a content rant.

and let me just kind of go on a little bit of a rant here, seeing as you kind of opened this door up a little bit. So, so one of my biggest problems with how people create content is that they,

let's make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. I'm your host, Juma Banister, and I'm a useful content teacher. And today we have a brand new teacher in the useful content classroom, Candace Davis Blackman. How are you, Candace?

I am. Well, thank you, Duma, for having me. I'm glad to be here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I'm glad to be here.

It's great to have you on. We got connected on LinkedIn back in 2021, but I somehow had a revelation of what you do because you shared something and I was like, eh, this is really great content.

This is educational. It speaks to, uh, somebody who might want to know about this. And I found it to be very, very good. And I love when people. Share educational content and uh, it really stood out to me. So that's why you are actually here today. 'cause I said, Hey, Canice has good stuff to share.

So you could you please share with the people what you do and how you create useful content for your clients.

Okay. Well, I am a content marketing strategist. I always have to make that clear because sometimes people call me a content coach and I say, no, I'm not a coach. No, that's, that's completely different. I'm a content marketing strategist, and what I do is I work with. Coaches, consultants, expert service providers, helping them to build their content marketing strategy using email and primarily social media that's organic and paid social media so that they can generate leads and clients more predictably without having to create new congen all the time.

Because that's an issue with this crowd having to come up with Congen all the time. It's something they hate. And it's something that you don't have to do all the time if you strategize it. Right? And that's something I help people do.

Yeah, that's a big deal. Like I think because of how content has developed in general, um, and particularly in the advent of TikTok, what has happened is that people have this idea that they always have to be creating something new. And that is, uh. It's not only a lie, but it's also a big problem because it causes people to get stressed out over what is a new thing, what's a new idea, what's a new piece of content I have to put out?

If you are not telling them to create something new, what advice are you giving these people that you work with?

I am telling them to repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. And you're right to know with TikTok came this. I'm posting 3, 4, 5 times a day even before TikTok. It was the same thing on Instagram. People would be giving you advice to post multiple times a day if you want to grow faster. That's the whole thing. You want more followers, you want more engagement, and you need to post multiple times a day, every day. And that's the advice that a lot of people are still getting today and it's wearing them out. So I even saw somebody posted on LinkedIn the other day. Don't worry. A lot of people are on the platform now in the first quarter of the year, but after the first quarter, probably March or so, they'll drop off because they'll burn out because of this feel this, they feel this need to have to create new content all the time.

So I'm saying that no, you don't have to create new content to know. You just have to repurpose what you have and if what you're starting off with is good. Good, quality, targeted content, then you can repurpose. And there's a strategy for repurposing so that you don't have to worry about sounding too repetitive is what you hear people say, but they say that they heard that before.

No, not if you do it a way that I show people how to do it.

Yeah, that's good. And I know you yourself probably got caught in that in the early days of creating your content, having to share multiple pieces of content and doing new things all the time, how did you escape from that and use repurposing to make your content now?

I started off, I always, in the beginning when I decided to post content for myself, because in my previous life at TEA, I was a social media manager. I did social media management. And I never did seven days a week, even when I was doing it for people, I would say no. The limit is five days a week. So when I started posting for myself under Social Rebellion Marketing, that's my brand. I did five days a week and I think. Putting yourself out there for the first time. You feel this kind of, okay, you are new beyond the block. Everybody's been posting for a while, and you feel this pressure to have to come up with something new to say all the time, new to be relevant because, oh gosh, they will say they heard that before, kind of thing.

So always trying to come up with something new week after week until I got probably a year or so into it and realized. People don't remember. They don't. You remembered in the beginning. Now I don't now I don't even remember what I posted last month. It's only because I have a, a sheet that says what I posted is the reason why I remember. But you realize people don't remember. Because they only remember about what 10% of what you say anyway, because of the sheer volume of content that's coming to them on a daily basis. I mean, if you look at the stats of how much content is being produced on each platform, probably LinkedIn is the least, the least competitive, but the sheer volume that people are consuming, they do not remember.

They simply don't. Either that, or maybe they. And they need to hear it several times for it to sink in. They need to hear it in different ways for it to really start to gel and come together and make sense for them. So I think it's, uh, it's not an issue that people should worry about in terms of feeling repetitive, and I felt that way and I discarded that when I realized I repurpose the content in that. I spoke about the same things in different ways, and nobody said, you said that already. Nobody said that. Nobody said that. I mean, the comments, the reactions were pretty much the same as if people were seeing it for the first time.

Yeah. And, and that's so true. I, I think that people do get caught up in this, you know, shiny object syndrome and I have to do all these new things and jumping on trends, which I, uh, that's one of my, I hate that thing the most. I can safely say that this trend, the jumping thing, and social media, some parts of it has, has some segments of, uh, social media and digital marketing has trained us like that.

So. They had to blame and we had to blame 'cause we accepted it. But I know that you are in very much into content planning and creation, and today we're gonna go deeper on how someone can plan content and create content in order to prevent that type of, of burnout outs and that type of, uh, not being able to focus on something that matters to their business.

So why do you believe that? Business owners should have a content plan before they start to create.

That is to save you from random acts of content, meaning you wake up. On a morning and you're thinking, what do I post today? And if inspiration does not hit you on that particular morning, you will not post. And then it may happen a second and a third day, and eventually you start to get this feeling of, oh gosh, they haven't seen near heard from me in the last week or so. And then you get into a rut. And you don't post it any second week and the third week, and then then all of a sudden you feel frightened about coming back and that kind of thing. So you get into a spiral and the whole idea of having a plan is to save you from having to get up on the morning and think about what you have to post that day. I mean, you are wasting time by doing that. Some people look at scroll, end up scrolling through social media to get inspiration. I. Or they're depending on what happened in their day and you just cannot really, um, systemize inspiration. I mean, you can collect it as you go along and save a bank of content ideas, but inspiration is not gonna hit you every day.

You are not going to be motivated either. To do that every day. So having a plan helps you to create a system around your content, and it disciplines you. It disciplines you because then you know, okay, Monday I'm going to post this Wednesday, whatever is your frequency. I always say, try not to go below three times a week. At least you know that today I know what I'm going to do. Right. And content planning is actually. One of the six fundamental elements, I guess, is what I, I call it in terms of building a content marketing strategy as far as how I approach it. Before you even get to content planning, you have to understand your business in terms of how you deliver your services and what's the methodology. You have for delivering your business. I'm not even going to, I used to say, start with your audience, but I've, I've pulled back. I said, no, no, no. Figure all the methodology, the system that you have for delivering your services to your audience. Because what you going to do if you don't do that is end up with content that is not related to the way in which you deliver value to. Your clients to your customers, right? So you need to first understand what it is you do, right? You need to document that, and you would be surprised. A lot of coaches, consultants, expert service providers that I work with have not yet done that. They have not really documented their methodology. Right. And then the second thing I say, okay, get to understand your audience.

And it's more than just knowing the demographic group. You start there, but it's more than that. It's a deep dive into their frustrations, their pain points, their interests, all of those things. And then we talk about your messaging. How are you going to communicate the value of what you provide? What makes you different, right?

What are the benefits of what you deliver? Can you articulate that? Right? And then we get to content planning. You see how many steps.

Right.

normally when people come to me, they're thinking, oh, we are going to start content from day one. Nope. No. They say No, you're not ready for that yet. We have to document all of these things before we get to, okay, then what are your content pillars? What are those broad themes, content themes to which your individ individual content topics will align to? And those contemp pillars align to your methodology. So that's why we have to figure out your methodology first.

I'm very intrigued by the methodology. I, I, I think I know what you mean, and maybe I know it by a different name, but could you go a little deeper into a business owner discovering their methodology and maybe give an example about, about what that is for the people.

Okay. I'll use my own self as an example. Alright. My methodology, there are six steps. Six key steps. So what I call that onboarding analysis area. So I group all of that, understanding your methodology, understanding your audience as the first step, your messaging, understanding that, putting that together as a second step. Your funnel. Some people call it a client journey or buyer journey. It goes by several different names, but it's basically what are those steps that you are doing to nurture a prospect into a lead and a client? Your content planning, content creation, content distribution, and in distribution there, there's promotion. How do we get that content in front of your audience? And lastly, your analytics. How do you know that you've been successful? Right? So everybody that comes to me goes through these steps. That's my methodology, that's my system. In other words, if you are an expert, you're saying that you are an expert service provider, you must have some sort of process that you take your clients through in order to get the results that you are promising them.

Right. If somebody cannot do that or they haven't been doing that, then they are not a good fit for us to work together. 'cause I can't, I can't tell you what your process is. You have to have that. And I've, I've had instances where people have come on and they simply have had no process. If they're very new, they haven't worked out their process and we can't work together. You can't work. You know, I learned too, you know, from doing this thing and realizing, okay, that wasn't a good person to work with because they didn't have a process for what they take their persons through. And I'll tell you why that is so important for me. It may not be for others, but it's important for me because when it comes to coming up with your content ideas, my approach stretches you. You have to be able to speak confidently about what you do. And if you haven't really internalized that, know your system, know what you do to get people the results, then you're going to struggle.

You're going to be asking me for, can I just do a motivational post and I don't, no.

Oh my goodness.

Okay. Can do that.

I, I lo I love that, and I agree with you a hundred percent that knowing that, and, you know, here's the thing, the thing is that these people are experts. They're doing the actual job.

Mm-Hmm. 

They have done it for, a, many of them have been in the work for a number of years, but when you say, well, how do you do this?

They're like, well, and they can't, they can't articulate these steps that they take the, the, a client through. And maybe, uh, you know, uh, it's, it's, to some degree it's like. Helping them with their business processes as well. When you talk about what are the things that you want to focus on in these one step two step three steps, four steps,

uh, in talking about these content topics or talking about these themes surrounding, uh, your content pillars

and, um, and I'm sure a lot of people have seen business value.

In that as well. Have you gotten feedback on that? Uh, people seeing business value and going through their process of defining their methodology,

Absolutely. Absolutely. It helps them get clear. And you're right, it's not that, it's just that they've become such masters. Some of them, some of them, they don't have a process yet. They're some people like that. But those that who I would consider experts, they've just

become such masters at what they do. And maybe they just never documented it. And it is hard sometimes to place yourself in the position of the client not knowing, because when you know something, it's hard to unknow to place themself in that position and say, okay, what is this person showing me to be able to help me achieve that result?

And they, you know, when they're able to document that. It clicks, it starts to make sense why we approach content marketing strategy in that way. Then it, it, it, you know, it, it all comes together. And I say having a strategy is that you should see the pieces fitting together. Nothing you do should be wasted effort.

It should all be building into each other, you know, that's how you know you have a strategy.

Okay, great. Wonderful. That's good stuff. I, I like that. Um, alright, so we, we talked about the, the methodology, we kinda jumped over into the meter things, which is good. Right? We just flowed straight into it, which is good. Uh, and I know that you do believe that. If you spend all your time creating content and you don't have the, the right strategy and the right tools, it's, it's like a waste of time.

What are some of the tools that a business owner can use in order to help them create the right content?

Well, I have a whole bunch of tools and some of them people may not consider tools, but I consider tools, any templates, any enabler that allows you to build out your strategy. So one of them. Absolutely. Your ideal client profile. Right. Some people call it a buyer persona. Different names, right, that you'd hear it by.

But basically what that is, it's an overview, a deep dive into who your target audience is. And I think everybody should have one right there, Danley. 'cause you're going to be referring to that. You're going to be updating that even as you go along and you produce content, right? So that's one thing that's very important. Another thing that I use is, um, a brand messaging template. Because that helps, um, me in working with my clients to pull their brand message together. When you have a template that you can use, and it's not that you have to completely follow the exact wording when you use your. Um, when you've articulated that message, but it helps in pulling it succinctly together.

What do I do? What value do I provide? How am I different? Right? What are the benefits of my services? That sort of thing. And then of course, I. I use a content planning worksheet. Now, this, I wish I could show it to you, but it's very in involved, this worksheet, but it, it allows people to categorize their content into their content pillars, into the topics that their audience is interested in. The purpose of that particular piece of content. So is it to generate engagement through comments or through direct messages, or is it to promote something? Are you promoting a freebie, some sort of free resource that you'd like people to have in exchange for their email list or? Whatever sort of list you're building, you can build different types of lists or are you directly pitching your services?

So what is the purpose behind the content? And then I have a little section there for headline. You know, I once had a client that told me the headline is not important, we just need to.

Oh my goodness. I, I, I hope, I hope you are able to change your mind.

I said No. I said, no, no, no. Lemme correct you there. No. Your headline is important. If you cannot get people to stop and even pause on the content that you're putting out, you have no hope of them consuming your video or your carousel or whatever posts that you have. Your headline is the thing that helps. hook them So it's very important and you need to spend some time on it.

I spend probably like 10, 20 minutes just crafting headlines for the particular post that I have. You know, I've even come up with a whole sheet, a list of headline hooks that I refer to sometimes to help with that process. So the headlines are important, the key message. Key message for that piece of content is important. Boy, is that important. You know, sometimes people create content and they rush to start writing or recording a video, and they have not ironed out what is the key message that I want my audience to walk away with. And that is what makes, I find a lot of the times I'm realizing that is what makes content creation so difficult.

Content writing, formulating the content so difficult for a lot of people, they haven't quite ironed out in their head what is that thing that they want people to walk away with. So I realized, okay, you have to put this in. People need to know what is the point of this particular piece of post in terms of what's the key message and the takeaway. Right. And then what you call the action, and then where are you going to distribute that content? So that's, that's my content planning sheet. Um, I also use AI as well. I do when chat g PT

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on. I, I, I wanna talk about ai, but I, I, before, before you go into ai, well, let me just say I'm so happy that when I asked you about tools, you didn't talk about software or things of that nature, and I want, I want to highlight this because it's so very important, the systems that you build.

The things that you create in order to make your content process more efficient

and to extract the exact thing that you want out of the process are your tools. Those are part of the tools that you create. So if you want brand messaging, it's a tool for that. If you want to plan your content, there's a tool for that.

And I'm so glad that you didn't, when I asked you if you, um, what tools you use. You didn't say cap cut and, uh.

oh yeah. Yeah.

That's a different category. I, I just wanna highlight that and I want, you know, business owners to know that the software is not the only tools that you use. The systems that you have, that you create in order to make the, uh, process more efficient.

You know, that I get at very specific things. That is crafted in order to take you from, uh, not being able to talk to your ideal customers, to being, being able to talk to your ideal customers. Those are all the tools that sometimes people, uh, they don't get, they don't know about. And when it comes to someone like you, then they discover, oh, this is how you actually do it.

It's not, it's not just pulled out a thin ear. You have a system for doing it. So I just wanted to highlight that before you jump into to ai. 'cause I think it's very important that we don't miss that point in all of the things you were sharing that we don't miss that point that you, that you brought across, not directly, but you brought across in the sharing these different tools.

Well, that's good because sometimes I guess I could take that for granted. So thank you for pointing that out, that out, because you're right. Um, people would normally go to those tools, those external tools, but I think of every template, every worksheet, every guide that I create as a tool. 'cause this is really the thing that helps you actually create all those other tools, help you to refine and so, and put the last polish together. But the trouble and people can learn those things. Trouble is that how do I come up with the content? How do I actually write it?

That's, 

or how do I script it? Or however, you know, your final product is, that's, that's the thing that stumps people.

and let me just kind of go on a little bit of a rant here, seeing as you kind of opened this door up a little bit. So, so one of my biggest problems with how people create content is that they, if you're doing marketing. You know that you're supposed to start at the top. Um, what's the, what is the market like?

What is the, the total addressable market? What's the space? You do diagnosis and then you come down the line into execution. A lot of people, when you start talking to them about content, they're thinking about what content can we make? What are going through the process, like ideal client personas, all those different things are coming down that line.

So I, I'm so glad that you're, uh, highlighting those things because I think we could take it for granted as people who create content.

And I think because other people don't know, they kind of shocked us to say, oh, you just didn't come up with this idea. No, there's a process behind it.

Yeah. There's a process behind coming up with these things.

So I want to highlight that and appreciate that that's actually the, the case. So that's, that's good stuff. Okay. Continue on now. Sorry for the interruptions. Continue on.

Ah, okay. And then we get into those external tools like, so I started to talk about AI and how I use ai. Now when chat GPT came in and it was all I rage, I was, I was hesitant. I was like, what? Because I honestly view that as a threat to what I did. I'm like, oh my gosh, tools that help you create content, but what's going to become of us help people actually come up with content, right?

And then I realized, okay, no, let me start to experiment and play with this, and. Come from an in informed position. When I talk about AI and I play with it chatty pt, like, okay, let me see what this comes up with. If I say create a post on, on repurposing, let me see what it comes up with. And it came up with what you would find if you're Googling something, but that's just a thing. It, it's very robotic and dry, even if I know everybody now has my son just , ran into the room.

I am still gonna leave this in, but go ahead.

Right. Um, I was saying that it's, it's pretty robotic and dry. And even if you say, well do it in a tone that's conversational, or you feed it a, a piece of content that you had before in your own tone and say, copy this tone, you know, all different prompts people have come up with to make AI sound more human right. And still, it just doesn't do the job. Particularly because you have, again, I come back to methodology and that's why that's so important. You have your own way and approach and process and whatever you call it, methodology for doing what you do and AI cannot tell you that you have it. I came from your years of experience of working with different clients.

You can't AI. What's been out there and what's been said and, and, and what's expected, that kind of thing. So I've found that the best way to use it is you create, you start with your original piece of content and then let AI help you in terms of editing it. Because when you write, you may be very robust and wordy, and there may be ways that you could see things simpler and shorter and get to the point. Use AI to help you do that, to edit the work. Don't use it to help you come up with original con because it can't, if you say you are an expert, there are things that you do that you're just not going to get from ai.

Mm-Hmm.

So, but the thing is, um, we have folks creating content and they're not confident in what they know.

They're not confident in, they think, ah, what I do doesn't measure up to what other people do. And so they're using AI to validate what they do. They're scared really.

Yeah.

Right, and so and so that happens and they use AI as a crutch, but I found it just, and you can tell, you know, you can tell AI content. One of the things I hate about it for any marketing field, unleash time, I say the word unleash

Oh, really? That's a.

Unleash or unlock those words, ai. To get around those words in the marketing space, you know, so you always have an idea when something is AI written versus versus when something comes from the person. 

And I say the better way to use it as far as content writing is to edit, but I also use AI as well to help me generate images. So I use Canva a lot. Canva is my go-to graphics tool. I'm not great graphics person, right? Canva works for non-designers like myself, and they've brought out a whole bunch of features, AI included, and ones where you could generate images. And I found that that works a lot because I used to spend a lot of time searching for images in these, um, search banks.

And now I'm glad that I could type in a word and say, create this image for me, and it does that. So I use AI for that. Those are the two ways in which I use it. But when I work with clients and they say, no, if we do it this way, you are gonna be 10 times better than what AI could produce for you. They'd be like, much.

Yeah, I, I agree with that. So there's so many little points you made inside of there. I think one of the major ones I want to highlight is that if you create the content. Then you can take that content and use AI to categorize, to refine,

to enhance the content.

So for example, when I record like this podcast that we're recording right now,

um, of course for every podcast it's recommended that you write show notes.

Yep.

Um, I used to manually write show notes and I made a video about this. But when we record this, I'm not gonna manually write the show notes. We've already said everything that we need to see. We've given all the value inside of this, this podcast. So I'm just gonna tell the ai, which is built into the software I'm editing with right now,

write the show notes.

I. And it will go through, it will write a summary and it will list all of the timestamps based upon the topics that we talked about. And then it will give if you wanted to, it can give a conclusion as well. I will go back in, I will look at it to remove all the word language that it sometimes puts in and I'll refine it, but I have a base.

A base product based upon what we already spoke about. It didn't generate it from scratch. It took what we spoke about and it created a summary from it. So I think, so what you're saying is so, so true that if you take something that you created that came from your mind, from your expertise, then you use the AI to refine that.

That I think is the optimal way for people to create with AI now. So, so I agree with you a hundred percent. And the other thing I think that you said that was really, really stood out to me is, uh, we came at a methodology and, uh, generally when we create content strategies and we talk about who you are as a part of the, the who part of the content strategy, it's about you and it's about your clients.

So identify ICP, that's the who, but the other who is your. Uh, the person and that is your values, your expertise, and your story, those three parts and inside of your expertise, like how do you do the thing that you do? Which, which is why when you said methodology earlier, I was like, I think I know what that means.

And so it's, it's like the same thing is the way in which you deliver this service, the step, step-by-step process. And I find that to be that's so true that the AI does not have your expertise in that way. All. So you kind of deliver on that no matter how it tries. It's unique to you, it's unique to your company, it's unique to your values, your journey.

And so that's you. That's the leg up you have on delivering to your clients as well. Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, that is definitely the leg up and I think that that's, that's how you can work with, you don't have to look at it as working against you if you are in the content space, a social media manager, that kind of thing. You can work with it in that way. I also use it to help the repurposing element as well.

And I Explain what I mean by that. Let's say you have a content idea. And when I talk about repurposing, let me just step back a little bit. I mean it in two ways. So one, you can repurpose the format of the content. So we have this podcast, and this podcast could become individual shorter clips, and that's a way to repurpose, repurpose it, um, or the, the. Transcript could become a part of your blog. That's another way to repurpose it and, and on and on. So you can repurpose the format of it, but you can also repurpose any sense of changing the angle. From which you approach the particular message or topic. So let's say I created a post about how to come up with content ideas that generate leads. I could repurpose that into the real reason why you are not generating leads and the key message. Say it's the same, but I'm approaching the same message from a different angle. And a lot of people don't think about repurposing content in that way. And AI can help you come up with those different angles. If you and I have a whole list, that's another tool that I use. I have a whole list of different angles and it's categorized according to the purpose. Whether I want to generate awareness or generate leads or generate book calls or that kind of thing. And I would. Put in a prompt, like, Hey, come up with different angles based on this list, these list of angles that I give you for a particular topic, like how to generate content topics.

I generate leads and it will spit it out based on the list of angles that I gave them. So it gives me all the different. Potential headlines, right? Which are basically the different angles from which I'm approaching the same message. So that's something if you did manually, would take you some time. But here's, AI is able to speed up that process for you. And there one topic to turn two 15 plus pieces. You know, it's 15 topics just from one topic using AI to speed up the process. But of course with ai, the better the input. Better the output. If you don't know what the different angles are, I suppose by now it can do it. 'cause it's learning by now. It could probably come up with different angles for you if you don't feed it. But because I know what angles, suit, different stages of my bio journey, I feed it what I want. See again, methodology, system. Process. I feel what I want to get back, what I want out of it. So that's another way that I use AI to help with that. Put percent of contact.

I have a question.

I, I, I I love what you're sharing and how simple you are making the process of using these tools sound, and not just the simplicity of it, but why I. It's better to do it this way, um, because, uh, as you said at the very early beginning of the podcast, avoid random, massive content. And so we are learning how we can do that, by using these tools to structure things.

Uh, you did mention inside of what you said just now, you did talk about let's, it, it could turn this into take different angles and create, let's just say 15 different, um. Headlines or different types of content? Are you, are you kind of a, are you concerned, are you afraid that some of it might just be too much and it might overwhelm a client?

What does a client say when they, uh, have all this content now and they're thinking about, oh my goodness, how am I going to actually use this and distribute? What, what is the challenge with having all of this content now?

Oh yeah, because after I'm done with a client, they have at least 60 content topics and that is overwhelming. When they look at it, they're happy. Ah, because that's what they sort of wanted coming in, right? That's what they think is the output. Oh, I'm gonna get all these topics. But then when you see it, the next natural question is, okay, well what do I post first?

What do I post when? And so that's where another tool comes in your content calendar. What do you post when? Now I always say marketing is about delivering the right message to the right people at the right times, essentially when it boils down to it, right? No matter what type of marketing that you practice. And so that's where understanding what types of content you create becomes when becomes important. So how do you determine, what do you, how do you determine what you post when. That is directly related to your funnel or your buyer journey, or your client journey, whatever terminology that you apply to it. Basically, what are the steps that you have to decided that you are going to take to nurture a stranger into a lead and a client? Right? So. For me, I started awareness content that I want to get in front of new eyes, people within my audience. So there are top, so if I decide that within, over these, these. Three weeks, four weeks, that this is my goal. I'm at this stage where I want to attract new eyes. This is the season that I'm in. I need to bring in fresh eyes, right as the largest. Pool within your client journey as the largest group and you need to keep bringing in fresh eyes, then I know I need to prioritize content that focuses on attracting new eyes.

Right? So that's, it doesn't mean that I'm only producing content that does that. I'm just saying that the majority of the content pieces that I put out will be geared towards that. So that helps me determine that. And then let's say, okay, I want to know, I want to start generating booked calls. I want to start generating subscribers. I know I need to go into promoting my lead magnet if I want subscribers. So I have different types of content that promotes the lead magnet that I have, or if I want booked calls, booked Calls for me are in two ways. I do book calls to nurture relationships and qualify leads. And leads for me are people who join my email list. So I have their contact information. They've shown interest in my business, but I need to qualify them. Those are unqualified leads. They came in because of, I offered them something that solved a very specific problem, but I don't know if they're the right fit for me. I need some more information. So I do booked calls.

So in those booked calls, I offer something very specific that lets me know that if they put up their hand. To want this, then they are probably the right fit for me. It's the right time for me to make an offer to them. 'cause I do believe sometimes you can make an offer at the very wrong time when they're not ready. Right? You need something that tells you that, hey, if this person is asking this. Then they're gonna be a good fit for the type of services that you have. So I have book calls that do that. Sometimes people do it with workshops, master classes. All of those things are things that help you qualify. Right? Or entry point offers sometimes is what people call it. They can be paid, they can be free. All up to you, all up to the chart D in terms of how you customize it. And then you have your, you have the straight out sales. Sales calls where people come on because they know they want your service and they're just trying to figure out what's the details, how do we actually work together?

What's your price, what's your, you know, all those things that you work out there. So I'm saying depending on where you are at in the phase. Of your Biogen, your client journey, you must know the steps that you are passing them through to come from stranger to client. Then you focus on more of those content pieces that serve that goal. Right now, the thing is, when you are on social media. You can be talking to people at all different stages of that journey. I'm talking to people who on my list, who've been on calls with me, they all this mix up Kalu, right? So you're sharing, but again, you determine what's the goal in your mind. Now, the real way to get more precise with that timing I always tell people is getting into ads and getting into your email marketing. That's why I don't do a content marketing strategy without email, and I recommend ads. Not everybody does it because they're not ready or for many different reasons, but ads helps you to get very specific in the types of content you could show people based on the content they've already seen. But I don't wanna get into that.

That's.

That's a Yeah, and I'm not an ad person. I, we really focus on organic growth, so that, that probably could be a discussion we have on specifically on ads. 'cause ads are very interesting. I've, I've had a couple discussions with people

about running ads and, um, I know ads are a whole thing, especially, uh, since, you know, Facebook change this whole system and, uh, you know, it's, it's interesting.

It's very, very interesting. Alright, great. So, so we, we are coming in to the ending here.

Is there anything, so what you've shared so far has been great. Is there any last points that you would want to share with the people about their content that you want them to know before we, we close off?

Ooh, what do I want to share? Um. I wanna say that, you know, a lot of what I do and I'm, you know, everybody in this space does is social media marketing, right? And with that count, it's great. It's a absolutely great tool, but it comes with certain things that you have to watch out for as well that I've seen, especially with the clients that I've worked with. One of them is comparisonitis, and you get into that doom scrolling. And maybe you find that the results are not coming fast enough and you start looking at other people, but, and then you say it to yourself. But what are you saying? Not even as good as what I have to say. And look. Look at all the comments.

Look at all the likes, look at all the followers. What am I doing wrong? I can't figure this thing out. And then coupled with that, you have a million people telling you, this is the way, this is how you go from zero to 10,000 followers in 30 days. And you have that thrown at you, it's easy to get discouraged and give up, and a lot of people fall away.

They start, you know, content. It's, it's, it's, it's an investment, you know, of your time, your creativity, and everybody wants fast results. We, in the fast culture, everything quick and all the tools are coming to help us do things quicker and we expect results quicker, but organic. Particularly organic content strategies.

Organic content marketing takes time, right? If, if that's what you commit to do, I always say, then you know that you have to give it time. You have to stick with something long enough. Don't abandon it after one week or two weeks and say it's not working. You have to stick with it long enough and you have to tell yourself, okay, they're doing that, but you don't know their audience is different.

The people who you see with the 10 million, they may have been in the game a lot longer than you.

They, they've built their audience over time. You were not there when they were doing that. And so you're seeing them at the peak and you're wondering why they're not there yet. Run your race. Run your race, stay true to the strategy that you have.

Don't abandon it. Don't go after shiny or, and that's where the desperation comes in and people start looking for, maybe it's this, this is the silver bullet, this is the silver bullet, this is the silver bullet. And I have to say. We, I guess I'm a part of the field marketers. We, we've done a poor job of that.

We, we are selling silver bullets, but there are no silver bullets. There are different elements that come together to make something work, and the pieces of content that you hear from us that we put out just one piece of the puzzle to help make your strategy more effective, it's not everything. If you want to know everything, then invest. Go to a strategist, go to a marketer, go to whoever to understand all that it takes, because when we put out content, we putting out bite-sized pieces because that's all you could take. We can't give you everything in one. It's impossible. We have to feed it to you in bite tight pieces, and we are not even feeding it to you in the order that we do it. Because there are other things at play, so you need to understand that. And when you get hold onto a strategy, hold onto it for as long as you need to give yourself that timeline. That's why performance analytics are important. Know how long you're gonna stick with something to know, when you have to pivot, do something different.

Change up what you're doing. Right. Don't fall into the trap of happen. Look at them. So much of them lying to you. Anyway, so I,

I. 

you're doing. Right. Don't fall into the trap of happen. Look at them. So much of them lying to you. Anyway, so I, I. That's true. So these are great and powerful words to finish off our conversation, Candace and I. Sure that will help the people so much, and some people may want to get in contact with you. Based upon everything that you share today. Could you tell the people where they can find you online?

You can find my website is cd blackman.com CD B-L-A-C-K-M-E n.com. Or they can find me at my handles are at Social Rebellion Marketing. So you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Instagram. Those are primarily the two platforms that I hang out on. I have a presence on Facebook, but organic. Yeah, we know what it is on Facebook.

so.

Yeah, right. So yeah, I, yeah, so it's really Instagram. I actually recently returned to LinkedIn and I started in LinkedIn and then I stopped. That's a whole other conversation, and

I came back last day around November 26th, so you'll find me there. LinkedIn and Instagram at Social Rebellion Marketing.

that's what I noticed here. I think

so. So, so thank you so much, Candace, for being on here. And thank you students for being here with us on a podcast today. Useful content, classroom dismissed.

And we are clear. Good stuff. Good stuff. It's, there's, there's lots of stuff I wanted to ask you, but we, we 

Sorry, I was talking too much. 

we run outta time. You talk. 

You 

know, 

so.

Yeah. Yeah. You get, you get excited. It is like what these people doing all the wrong stuff. That's so good. That's so good. Lemme stop the recording. Uh,