Episode 287: Everyday content ideas
In this episode, Fiona gives a quick tip on how small business owners can bring the everyday into their marketing content to humanise their brand and create better connections with their audience. She shares her experience using different marketing platforms and highlights the importance of thinking beyond just the product or service offered. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Importance of Using Multiple Marketing Channels
Humanizing Your Business Content
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 287 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today you're reading a quick tip episode, and that's where we give a tip, tool, or tactic that you can implement immediately in your creative small business. Before we get stuck into that, I wanted to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this beautiful land on which I get to live and record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded, and pledge to work in ways that aid in true equality and equity for First Nations people.
The other thing I wanted to mention is we are changing the name of this podcast very slightly. We are changing the artwork. I don't know exactly when that rolls out through Apple and Spotify and all the places that you listen to, but just keep an eye out for it. If you have any questions or you're trying to find an episode or anything like that, please just email us at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. That email address will still work even after we change our name. Let's get stuck into today's quick tip episode.
If you are like most small business owners, you will have between, let's say 5 and 10, or maybe like 6 and 12 marketing platforms that you use regularly. If you might be thinking, “No, I just use Instagram, or I just use TikTok, or I'm just on Facebook.” Then think again, I teach people marketing all the time, and I often say we don't do a huge amount of marketing. However, the marketing channels that we do, we do deep, and I think we do pretty well out of those. Our marketing channels are this podcast that you're listening to. We have Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, and new people come and say "Hello." I've been on TikTok for a long time but just recently started posting and I am enjoying the platform so far, testing a lot of different things on there.
If you're interested in what I'm learning, make sure your email is subscribed to our email, which is another channel, and you can subscribe at mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe. Let's recap them again. For this podcast, we have Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, email, and a website. I do events and speaking. I sometimes do media very little at the moment, but I've done a lot of media in the past. I would say collaborations with media have been huge for my business. What else do I do? I probably, let's say that is eight marketing channels, and that's for somebody who doesn't think, we also have a Facebook Group. I completely forgot about Facebook. And that's nine. I could easily probably go up to 10 or 12 if I think about every single thing that we're doing.
For most businesses, that's standard. When it comes to creating content for those, or coming up with content ideas, so often people can get stuck in one of two phases. One is thinking that they only can talk about their product and service rather than thinking about bigger things. And the other is being stuck or feeling like they're repeating the same content over and over. Now, firstly, there's nothing wrong with repeating. You have this concept of core content, create once repurposed everywhere. I'm all for repurposing content. This podcast gets repurposed in emails. It gets repurposed as a blog. Forgot about that one too. And we use snippets of this for social media. Repurposing isn't a problem. It's when you get stuck in thinking one of those two things. I can only talk about the product or the service, or I'm just repeating the same thing over and over, and even I am sick of it.
Now, the second one, I would take a little more lightly than the first because it's not so much of a problem. Sometimes you think you're saying the same thing over and over. Sometimes you need to repeat those messages for people to get them. But the first is where you think I only can talk about the service or product, rather than remembering that just like you, the people that are following you, the people that are subscribed to your email or following you on certain social media platforms or are coming to your website, they're human. And yes, your product or service might be the best thing in the world, and it's changed their life. However, other things are going on in their life as well. What you want to do is draw a connection between you or the people in your brand and whatever it is that you sell, rather than just talking about the product, you want to humanize it.
One of the best ways to humanize it, which is today's tip, is to bring every day into your business content. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, observing things that happen in your day-to-day living that are going to help you with storytelling when it comes to your product or service. For instance, I'm a business coach. I talk to people a lot about money, mindset, marketing and brand systems and processes, and a whole bunch of other things. However, all of my content is not just on, let's look at Notion versus Monday or some other content management system versus another content management system. Yes, that's a part of it, but how do I tell the story of that? I may choose to have a look at my day and think about, does anyone else gets stressed when the school holidays are over.
You have to systematize lunchboxes suddenly. I'm bringing in what is happening in my every day as a mother with two children. One of the best things I've learned in business is you can systematize things. And one thing that helps support that is having a great project management system. At the moment, we use Asana, but I've been looking around, and here are some things I've learned about Notion and Monday. That brings it in very seamlessly from, this is my everyday observation of something happening in your life. How can I bring that into what I want to talk about and what do we want to be known for? For example, in this instance, it was systems and processes. I hope that makes sense. One of the things that I recently did was I passed 300 emails.
I send an email every single Sunday, and we got to the 300th email. I wrote down in that email a couple of things that I'd learnt, and we got so many replies to it, thank you. But one of the things that people replied to was, I don't use them every day in my content and I'm scared to use them every day in my content, or I've just never thought like that. I have to say that a lot of the podcast episodes that I put out on this, this here podcast are observations that I've had in my day-to-day living that I have then been able to connect. A thread between that observation and business content.
For example, I did a podcast a while ago on Don't Be the Fly in the Window. And I was opening a window and this fly just wouldn't leave. And I was like, "Get out of the window." And it reminded me that in business so often we have a way forward, but we just can't see it. We get stuck in the same pattern or the same area of our business, rather than seeing, “It could be an alternate route here.” Just like that fly that was stuck in the window. Another example of a podcast that did well for us, in terms of downloads, was when I talked about staying at an Airbnb and maybe it was staying at my sister's house, I can't remember, but my sister does this. And people who had sheets that you were about to put, like the linen that you're about to put onto your bed covers. And they had done up the buttons inside the linen closet, and I was like, "Why would you do up the buttons on sheet covers when you're about to put a doona or a duvet inside them?"
It makes no sense to me. But bringing it back to business, so often we make things more complicated than they need to be. Or in another instance, if you're putting sheets on a bed turning the sheet inside out, when you fold it from taking it off the washing line, helps you put it on the bed easier. Again, putting that into business, what can you do today in your business that is going to help you tomorrow? That might be cleaning your desk at the end of the day. It could be doing 10 minutes of emails at the end of your day so that you are getting rid of things. It could be writing a list and getting things out of your head so that you can shut the door in your business at the end of the day. And you know that you've captured everything that's in your mind.
You're helping your future self in the same way that if you put your linen away in a certain fashion, it is easier to make the bed. I know this might sound like, "Oh my gosh," but I think so often when it comes to content, I see it all the time. People get stuck on ideas or series or say the same thing over and over, as opposed to when I say, "Tell me about your day, what have you done today?" And then they tell me the most interesting stories, and it just comes out naturally. If you can take some of that stuff that you're doing in your every day, tell a story, and then relate it to whatever it is that you have in your business or that you want to be known for in your business in terms of content themes, you're going to be able to make content that much easier and it's going to be more enjoyable for you because you're telling a story, which so many of us enjoy.
That's why we conversate. That's why we get into these fun discussions with people because we like storytellers naturally. That's how humans connect, and we socialize through that medium. If you can take what has happened in your day-to-day life, just think about the last seven days, what has happened? What are some really interesting things? What are some moments that you know had a big impact on you? I know the one that I've just recorded a podcast on recently, and it'll come out soon, the Lollipop Man in Australia. I don't know if that's what they call them everywhere, but we call the person who helps children get across the road during school hours. A lollipop person or a lollipop man or woman or person. And the lollipop man for my son's school always waves when you see him, he always waves to every parent that is dropping their kid off.
It can be pouring rain, it can be freezing, it can be boiling. He is there every single morning and he waves. Some mornings I have to say, I might be stressed or running late, or whatever it is. And that simple act that he does of a smile and a wave, makes the day better. I have done a podcast on how can you have small things in your business that make your day better. I'm taking a thing that happens every day when I drop my son off at school, all my husband does, and then putting it into a business perspective using an everyday occurrence or situation with a business lens. And then how do I story tell that? That is the tip for today. It's bringing every day into your content.
It not only allows you to create unique, original content, but it also allows you to engage on a human level and connect, which is all about what marketing is. It's connecting with your audience because no doubt there are other people, other parents, or other people that are driving their kids to school or kids in their vicinity to school, and they're also having that lollipop man. Or maybe they have a horrible lollipop person who never waves. There's a connection, there's a chance to chat about these things as well as utilize that storytelling to guide people into something that you want to talk about, in my case, in business. I hope that has helped. I hope that if you're struggling with content ideas, just think about the last seven days or even the last 24 hours, what has happened, what's been interesting, how could you connect that to whatever it is that you sell, or to the content themes or messages that you want to be known for.
I hope that's helped. If you found it interesting, please, please take two seconds to leave a review. If you want to go through this again in text format, you can find the show notes over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/287. Thanks so much for reading. I'll see you next time. Bye.
