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If you find yourself complaining because you're tired of content creation, know that you’re not alone! Coming to terms with the content marketing aspect of running a business is one of the top challenges small business owners struggle with.

You started your business so you could help people. You likely didn’t have a clue how much goes into marketing, and even if you had some idea, chances are you’ve been surprised by the constant pressure to create quality content.

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The good news is that you can avoid burnout by developing and managing your content creation strategy.

Face it: You Must Be A Content Creator To Achieve Success

You’re a business owner, and if you’re juggling all the balls, you’re likely feeling the constant pressure of the content creation hamster wheel. There are so many aspects to content creation, but before you even begin creating content, you need to make sure that you thoroughly know who your ideal client is and what matters most to them.

Creating content that *you* believe is good won’t cut it; you’ve got to create content that answers questions your ideal client has or provides a solution your ideal client needs. But you can’t stop there! Good content helps your audience take the next step in the customer journey.

It would be a wonderfully simple thing if all we had to do is share what’s top of mind for us, but for your marketing efforts to be successful, you need to develop a content strategy. We help you do just that during our Marketing Methodology Workshop, where you’ll learn how to develop your content plan for the next twelve months following our simple three-step framework.

How Much Content And How Often?

One of the top questions people ask is about the amount of content they need to create. This depends on many factors, two of which are:

  1. Who is your target audience?
  2. What social media platforms are you on?

If your business serves other business owners (B2B), the type and amount of content you create will be very different from someone who serves consumers (B2C). The same holds true for which social media platforms you’re on. Hopefully, you already know your audience very well and are on the platform(s) they frequent. Business owners are generally going to be too busy running their businesses to be hanging out on social media as much as consumers might be. Some might limit social media to LinkedIn, or they might not be on social media at all. It all depends on the industry you’re in.

The creative work required for content creation doesn’t stop at creating content. Another thing you’ll want to keep in mind is that you always want to strive to reach a wider audience. This means you need to incorporate visibility into your content marketing strategy. Creating new content for the same people over and over again will burn your audience out and reduce the effectiveness of your efforts.

Tired of Content Creation? Effective Ways to Manage Content Creation

The amount of work involved in creating content can seem monumental. What you’ll learn as you navigate the content-creating process is that you’re embarking on a creative journey. If you don’t consider yourself to be creative, don’t worry. Content creation is simply sharing your expertise. Marketing, in its simplest form, is communication, after all.

If you’re helping people, you’re communicating. The creative aspect comes into play when you make sure that what you share matters most to your audience. This is a matter of having done market research which requires zero creativity. The creation and design of graphics are creative, and if you’re truly not the creative type, you can use pre-made templates in Canva or hire a designer to create branded templates that you can use.

Canva is also a great way to manage your content creation at the individual or team level. They offer many features that help to make content creation and management efficient and effective. You can even post directly from Canvato social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and more.The image below shows some of their features in their menu:Image of Canva Menu

Regardless of the tools you use, you’re going to want to create your own schedule that allows you to set aside time to create the content and post on a weekly basis. The various social media algorithms favor frequent posting. How often you should post is dependent on the platform you’re posting to and on your bandwidth.

We don’t believe anyone should set unrealistic expectations for themselves when it comes to social media marketing. The importance of social media marketing to your business depends, again, on your audience and industry. It’s important to have a solid social media presence so that when someone meets you or hears about you, they find relevant content when they research you online.

Seed Content to The Rescue

Seed content is one piece of good content that you pull from to create social posts and different forms of content. Seed content can be a blog post, video content, or podcast. When you focus on one piece of good content each week that you pull from, you’ll be able to come up with new ideas easier than if you overwhelm yourself with having to come up with multiple ideas each week.

Once you post the seed content, you can turn pieces of it into social media content. This allows your content to focus on one theme or topic, one week at a time. You can also focus on one theme or topic each month. This is what we do at Encore Empire.

Measure, Track, Assess, Repeat

A major aspect of content creation is measuring the results all your hard work is yielding. This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come into play. If you’re not measuring the success of your marketing activities, it’s going to be easy to burn out. To be successful in anything, you need to be intentional about what you’re going to do and do it long enough that you can collect data that informs you how effective your actions are.

Tired of Content Creation? Content Fatigue Vs. Creator Burnout

If you’re tired of content creation, you may be burned out. Creator burnout is the number one factor in content fatigue. Content fatigue is what happens when your audience becomes numb to your content. If what you’re sharing isn’t connecting with them on an emotional level, it’s going to be easy to ignore. The last thing any business owner or marketer wants is to be ignored.

When you feel that content creation is becoming difficult and is no longer fun (if it ever was!), you need to figure out how to reverse your lack of motivation. If we look at the tasks we have to do, such as posting content, we need to find different ways of viewing what becomes rote or boring. We need to infuse purpose and passion back into marketing if we want our audience to feel inspired by what we share.

Social media burnout is real. If you’re spending too much time looking for positive feedback and fielding negative comments, you’re going to lose objectivity. When we begin losing our motivation for the work we’re doing, and we push through regardless, we’ll end up burning out, no matter what aspect of the business we’re talking about.

There’s some truth behind the adage, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” As the CEO of your business, you need to be able to push through resistance. Things go awry, however, when we ignore chronic stress.

Chronic stress comes from deep dissatisfaction. This can be with anything in your life, from relationships to work. Your job is to identify when and why your work becomes deeply dissatisfying and address your needs. You might have way too much on your plate. Social media managers can help remove the content planning, if not the creation activities, to give you back some precious time.

When hiring a social media manager, you’ll want to make sure you hire the right fit. If you need someone to create content for you, you’re going to need to invest more than you would if you hired a social media VA to plan and post the content you create.

Tired of Content Creation? Set Boundaries to Preserve Your Personal Life

You don’t want to wait until you reach the breaking point of physical exhaustion from chronic stress before you realize you need to set boundaries. The most important thing you can do is protect your energy. At the end of the day, you are your most valuable asset. Ignore the warning signs, and you put your physical and mental health in jeopardy.

Just as fences make good neighbors, boundaries make happy people! It’s not just the person setting the boundaries, either. People on both sides of the fence (pun intended) benefit from the clarity of knowing how far they can or should go.

Most women spend too much time worrying about how they come across to others when they advocate for themselves. The truth is that other people spend little time or no time thinking about us! We encourage you to build boundaries in every aspect of your life and business.

Protect Your Time, Protect Your Energy

At Encore Empire, we fiercely protect our time. We schedule front-facing activities such as connection calls, consultation calls, coaching calls, interviews, live videos, etc. Tuesday – Thursday of the first three weeks of every month. We block availability to our calendars every Monday and Friday and the fourth week of every month.

We’re still working during our protected time, but by creating our schedule the way we have, we’ve built in islands of calm. We know we have plenty of focus time to work on things that need to be done without interruption, or we can decide to take a week off and not have to juggle appointments on our calendar. Until we did this, we felt like we were on the never-ending hamster wheel of doing all the things.

Something wonderful happens when you make your needs a priority:

  • You’re able to appreciate what you do.

  • You’re able to take much-needed breaks and recharge your energy.

  • You’re able to plan fun things that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.

When you put yourself first, you gain confidence, and you build in the time to rest and recharge. You know it’s working when you have more energy all the time. Who doesn’t want that? And getting there doesn’t require some secret code; it simply requires you to put yourself first.

Part of protecting your time and energy is setting realistic expectations. Follow these tips to ensure your final product is your best work, not THE best work, just your best work at the time, considering what you have to work with, energy, and all.

Good content is enough! It’s easy to get caught up in thinking we have to be revolutionary, but that’s not true. Your audience doesn’t have the depth or breadth of knowledge you do. This means that anything you post that shares your expertise is going to be valuable.

By giving yourself permission to create content that is good enough, you alleviate adding pressure to your life, and that protects both your time and your energy.

The Marketing Methodology Workshop

A Simple and Easy FRAMEWORK

How would it feel to ditch the marketing overwhelm so you can spend your precious time growing your business?

Build out your custom marketing framework and create a simple-to-follow system to achieve your business goals in three easy steps.

Carmen Reed-Gilkison

About the author

Carmen Reed-Gilkison is a certified Online Business Manager and Whole Person Coach with 25+ years of marketing experience.

Deirdre Harter is a Certified Public Accountant with 20+ years of experience auditing and advising businesses of all sizes about how to build sustainable profitability in their companies.

They are also the co-founders of Encore Empire. Click here to learn more about their mission to help female entrepreneurs who happen to be over forty step into their power

To send a message to Carmen and Deirdre, click here

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