270: The 3 C's to content marketing: how to build results from it

Posting on social media to a content calendar is NOT a strategy. 

There is more than the actual posting. So we are going to talk about these 3 C’s to content marketing. The ones that build results for you. 

When you understand that there is more to content marketing than just posting, then you can actually build something designed to give you the results. 

Think of it like planning your travels. 

You need connection to what you are doing and why

You need creation, the plan

You need to cultivate, actually to the thing 

We have a lot to chat about! 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

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KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

✨The 3 C’s to content marketing strategy 

✨How it can help you GET results with your marketing 

✨How to get started    

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 270, and I'm sharing the three Cs to content strategy that are gonna help you build results. Welcome to the Content Queen Podcast. I'm your host Mariah, entrepreneur storyteller, digital nomad, creator of Content bootcamp, and founder of Content Queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content, and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you.

Each week, I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business, and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey, along with actual steps to help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling, powerful line marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it. Hello? Game. Hope you're well. Hope everything is great. At the moment, behind the scenes of the business, I am deep in reviewing Content Bootcamp, which is the signature program content queen for small business owners that want to learn content strategy, implement it themselves and get the results.

So I've been working on. Making it better, aligning it with my current skills and knowledge and all the things that I've learned since I filmed it last in 2023. But then also, of course, what has happened since then. AI has come out, so I am adding in a special section into each module of using chat t to help you with your content strategy and help you probably.

Get those foundations down, that might be time consuming. And it's been really fun. It's been really interesting and I'm really excited to run it a live round in May. So we're gonna start the week of May 5th. What we do is we have a homework week and a call week. So the first week is homework week, and then we have a call and it goes for six weeks.

'cause we dive into each. Three Cs that I'm gonna talk about today. So we, we connect, we create and we cultivate. And that is how the sort of framework of content bootcamp comes into play. And we connect it with different elements of the content framework, which I've got a whole podcast on that. If you don't know what it is, I'll put it in the show notes and you can listen to it.

I'm very excited. So if you would love to join live the live round, you can sign up now and you will get access to. Content bootcamp when it goes live. So very excited for this, but I wanna take you through what are the three C's to content strategy and what this really looks like because posting on social media to a content plan, like I'm going to show up every day or whatever it is, is not actually a strategy.

This is more than posting. It's more than what you see on social media. There is. So many layers to it, but it's so learnable and it's actually not rocket science. So that's why I wanna take you through what the three Cs are and how you can connect your content strategy in and make it strategic, intentional, because when you understand that is more to content marketing than just post the actual posting, then you can actually build something designed to give you results.

And if you think about it, like planning a, a trip, some travel, right? You first need to connect to what you're doing and why you need to create the plan and you need to cultivate the actual thing. So you need to go on the trip and do the thing to then learn, oh, on my next trip or during this trip, I'm gonna do this or I'm not gonna do that.

I use a travel analogy because obviously. Mitch and I travel a lot, and every time we go on a trip, there's so much that we learn that we come back with. We gain so much knowledge from that that we, you know, it expands us and it grows us as people. There's no different with your content marketing strategy.

You put that plan in place and then you execute it, and then you learn from it, and it's a continuous cycle. Of learning, developing, growing. And that, of course is going to lead to results in your business. So this actually pairs really nicely to a book I'm reading at the moment, which is called Time Management.

Uh, sorry, mind Management, not Time Management. And he talks about the four stages of creativity. And when I was reflecting on it, I'm like, oh, well this is kind of how we do content, right? The four stages of creativity was described by Graham Wallace. I dunno if he's the creator of it, I'm guessing. So as preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

Now I'm talking about the three Cs of content strategy, but it's very interesting how these elements make up a lot of what we do, right? So. I really wanna talk about what those are and how they kind of can help you with your content strategy and what are the three C's to content strategy. Because really this is what you need to know if you're a small business owner creating content.

This is the stuff, this is the stuff we teach, right? And that really iterates the power of having a guide and a support person with you. So when we go traveling, obviously we do our things on our own, but we also have a, like, we'll go on a tour on the weekends or whatever, and we have a tour guide. And that really makes it, because you can learn so much, you can learn from that person's experience and you get to make sure you get fast track to the best places to go within that town, city, country.

Right. And it's the same with when you're working on your content and your content marketing, having that guide will fast track you to better results and it'll help you know. What's gonna be more aligned and how you're gonna get those results for your business. So that's why I do content bootcamp live, to be that guide.

To sort of fast track you a little bit further into understanding that content strategy. So tour guides are amazing and content marketing guides are just as amazing too. So you gotta find the right one for you. So the first one in the three Cs to content strategy is to connect. Connect with your audience and vision.

Connect with the right platforms. Now, if we think about the. Uh, four stages of creativity. This is the preparation and the incubation stage. So you're preparing, you're learning who your audience is, you are understanding your own. Goals and your content marketing goals and where you want to go, and then you're understanding what are the right platforms for you.

So you're preparing what is then gonna be the next step, but you're also giving it time, right? There's lots of research involved, so you've gotta let that simmer and incubate, like with when you've got goals, all these things, we often need to give those time. So when I talk about this first C, which is connect, I pair this with my content framework, which is C-O-N-T-E-N-T.

And within Connect you've got connect with your audience and vision and optimize your channels. So that's the CO in content, but it makes up. Connection, connecting with the foundations, connecting with the exact person you need to talk to, the exact goals that you need to focus on and the exact platforms that are gonna help you reach that audience.

So there's three elements within that, and this is really about that research preparation, allowing you to really, really understand. And then the second one is to create. And this is this illumination, this is the doing. It's very creative, right? And this is where we nail our strategy. So that's the end. In content, we really understand where we are posting, 'cause we've already picked up on those platforms.

But what days and what types of content are we creating? What's making us unique and how are we aligning this to our sales plan, to our. Campaigns to what we're actually selling. So we are nailing that strategy. We're really understanding, okay, on these days, this is the type of content I need to create and this is the type of topics that make me unique and these are the things I need to focus on, the topics that I need to focus on.

And then we have tell our story and what we wanna be known for. So storytelling, creating stories, capturing people's attention, understanding our story. Understanding our brand, understanding even the types of content. So if you are doing Instagram and you wanna create Instagram reels, what kind of reel are you creating?

Is it a mixture of different types of formats do you think you know of having conversation? In my WhatsApp group, our Ask Me Anything WhatsApp group, which you can join for $30 and it's 14 business Days. Access to me as your guide and. The people in at the moment are navigating, oh, okay. What channels make sense to me, you know, and what types of content?

I don't know, do I wanna show my face as much? I think I could do some really good voiceover. So they're navigating those actual types of content they're creating that is aligned to them. It's very important to understand this in this illumination phase of. Yeah, what am I doing? What am I creating? What does that look like?

What days, how often? All those things. And then what stories am I sharing my story, client stories, all those things. Within this create section, we also look at marketing funnels, top, middle, and bottom funnel content. When I look at that funnel. What types of content am I creating? When and why? What is the purpose?

So it's not just that posting schedule, it's that intention behind it. So that's the create phase, illuminating your actual plan. And then the last one is to cultivate. So this is the verification stage of the four stages of creativity. This is why we put it out there. You could connect with your audience, so well understand your goals.

Know what platform you wanna show up on. Create that Monday to Sunday schedule. Know the stories you wanna share, like really? And then if you don't do it, none of that matters if you don't put it out there. So that's where this cultivation comes in. We wanna put it out into the world and we wanna ver verify whether it's worth anything, verify if anyone's gonna actually care about it.

Right. And within this part, we have three different things we do. So there's three parts, right? We want to. Expand on channels. So create that digital footprint. We want to navigate the process. So understanding how am I gonna get this stuff out there and we wanna test trial and measure and see what works, right?

So we are really cultivating to expand, to navigate processes and to test trial and measure. So that is the e. The N and the T of content. So that is the content framework as well within the three C's of content strategy. So basically we wanna work out repurposing how we. Going to make sure that our channel, our, the content we're creating, the stuff we're putting energy into, the ideas we have, we can be on other platforms.

We can expand our digital footprint because we know we need multiple touch points for people to see us and go, oh yeah, this person sounds interesting. I wanna learn more about them. It's not just showing up on one channel, so we wanna make sure, and we don't wanna be on all of 'em, so we burn out. But also, how can we create a.

Repurposing strategy. That means we can be in multiple places without burning out. And then the process is really important for me. I've mentioned this before. I use Clickup. Some people use, you know, Asana notion monday.com, whatever. But creating these processes so we know when we have to market our business exactly what we need to do to make sure that happens.

Every little thing that needs to go on. And then who's playing that role? If you eventually outsource to va a content marketer? Um, or if it's just you, what days are you responsible for what? Okay, some days I'll do just videos, or some days I'll do the writing. Like how do you put all that together to make sure it gets packaged up and put out there, but without burning out, without going, oh my God, I can't keep up.

And then I finished, and then a new week starts. So this is about. Going through the process of what needs to happen and when you can realistically get it done. And then the last one sort of comes as you start pushing things out, seeing what's resonating, seeing what is working, and tweaking your strategy as well.

Oh, I've learned this new thing about my audience, or I've realized this is kind of the pathway that I wanna take. These are the platforms I'm really resonating on. These are the stories that I like to create, or this is the type of content I'm really enjoying. So this is where we start to. Think, reflect, look at the numbers, but then also reflect within ourselves and see what's actually working, test, trialing and measuring.

And this can also happen at the end, but at the beginning of starting the cycle again. 'cause I see these three C's as like this cycle, right? And you keep kind of going through the motions. So you come towards the end, you've been putting stuff out there for three months. It's try time to test it, see what's working, and then kind of go through and.

Reflect and edit, and that's what I do with my clients. So kind of go through this process in a way. Sometimes we kind of jump between once we've already got the strategy, but it just allows you to go around in that cycle because this stuff is never done. Marketing, your business is never done. Just like building your business is never done.

Just like working on your mindset is never done. It's just like a journey. I know some people don't like that word, but it is, it's a journey and you've gotta keep going through the motions and learning and picking up things along the way. Just like in travel. Right. So if we circle back on this in this kind of travel analogy, a guide can really make your trip.

We've had amazing experiences with tour guides that have helped us so much in making our trip. More memorable in helping us, it being more effective as well. 'cause we would've wasted so much time if we didn't know the things that they knew. Having that guide along your side in any country while you're traveling does make a difference.

When we're in the Philippines, we had my beautiful VAs giving us support and you know, sharing tips and things. Course we invested in tour guides with Vietnam. I'd already been there before, so I was like learning from past experiences, but then also at the same time. Asking locals, what do you recommend with this?

What do you think about that? So having that person on your side does make a massive difference when you are putting together your marketing and content marketing plans. So I just wanted to, you know, encourage you to find someone that resonates with you, encourage you to, yeah, find that mentor. Whether it's consuming their content online, whether it's, you know, buying one of their courses, listening to their podcast, whatever that looks like.

Having that guide definitely makes. The world of difference, but I just wanna iterate this, connect, create, and cultivate, and how the four stages of creativity kind of bring this together. So we're preparing, we're understanding who our audience is, our vision, our platforms. We are letting it simmer as we like learn, which is that incubation phase.

Then we come into the creation, the illumination, finding out. And working out where we're posting when, what types of content, what stories we're gonna share, sort of that meaty part. And then we're cultivating, we're verifying whether it is worth something, whether people are gonna resonate with it. And then you kind of just go along that journey until you stop doing business.

Basically. Always learning, always growing. So be a content queen or king. And remember that developing your strategy and your story develops your business. And I have a little bit of an offer for you. If you did wanna join bootcamp, you can join now at the. Current price that it's at, which is 300 a UD, and you can do the old modules if you want.

We're gonna be rebranding it and refreshing it and rehashing it for the live round that starts. At the start of May, so you will get it for the price before the price rises in a couple of weeks, and then you can sit back and wait for the new content to drop and then you can join the live round. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Insta Stories and tagging me at content Queen Mariah, or just simply tell 'em about it. If you do rate and review on whatever platform you're listening to this on, it does help. Get amazing guests on the show, continue to create great content and yeah, so if you haven't left a radio review, I would love you forever.

If you did, follow us on Instore or TikTok and let me know if there's any topics you want me to talk about in the future. I am all yours and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment