How To Bake Your Content Cake
Something you might not know about me is that whenever I get free time away from running my businesses, I loooove to bake. It’s a hobby I’ve always practiced, but earlier this year I really honed in on it. Situationship lore was so bad that I had to distract myself with baking to protect my last semblance of sanity!
Gathering ingredients, losing myself in a recipe, and seeing the fruits of my labor all brought me immense satisfaction. It calmed and centered me during a time when I thought I was truly going bonkers inside my brain.
It was then that I had the revelation: creating content for your business is a lot like baking a cake. There are ingredients you need and a recipe to follow that will yield the results you want.
To me, these are the ingredients you need to create what I like to call the perfect content cake.
Content Pillars: These are the key areas of your business’s content strategy that highlight aspects essential to your brand. By having these, you ensure you always have something to post, and more importantly, that your target audience cares about what you’re posting.
Aesthetically Pleasing: This might be obvious, but it’s so important. The same way people judge books by their covers, they’ll judge your business by the content you put out. Make sure it is visually eye-catching to create a good first impression with your target audience.
Entertaining and Engaging: People want to see content that interests them! Even if you feel like you have the most uninteresting business in the world, try and craft your content so that it holds your audience’s attention from start to finish. Being engaging, personable, and relatable can go so far in creating content that connects with people. At the end of the day, people just want to be seen and heard.
Relevancy: If you can play on a trend, even better. Not only does this help you perform better with the algorithm, but it also helps you connect with a wider audience. Also, is it relevant to your niche and target audience? Do they care about this specific thing you’re posting? The answer should always be yes!
Creativity: Finding a way to craft the content in a creative and out-of-the-box way can make the content go a lot farther than just mimicking what other people are doing. Sometimes putting your own spin on something is just what your content cake needs to give it that extra sweetness.
SEO Optimized: Making sure your content is hitting all the right keywords is essential so it isn’t being pushed out to just anybody. You want it to go to the people you want to see it, who will find interest in it! By doing your keyword research and applying that to your hashtags, captions, and on-screen text, you are more likely to see those views convert.
Call to Action: This is like the icing on the cake. All content should have a call to action. Give your audience an assignment, like “follow for more.” But I firmly believe that there is an art to crafting the perfect, subtle CTA. It just takes time once you find your unique brand voice!
Okay, you have the ingredients now. And you can go in haphazardly, not measuring, and hope for the best without a true recipe (a well planned strategy) or understanding of these ingredients. You’ll probably get something that resembles cake, too! It can be pretty on the outside, but if it doesn’t taste good and hit the spot for your target audience, what was the point?
You don’t bake a cake for it not to taste good; the goal is that the end product will serve its purpose of satisfying you. Just like baking, you shouldn’t post just to post if it isn’t contributing to and/or taking a step toward your overall business goals. It might look pretty, and people might even admire it, but no one is digging in. The goal is to make people want to gorge themselves on your content, buying into your brand.
The best part about a good piece of content cake is that everyone wants a slice once it is offered to them, even if they weren’t looking for it in the first place. Think of cake at a party: people will either seek it out, excited for it, or will take a piece once it is offered to them. If your brand is the host of the party, you want to make sure you have the most delicious content cake ready and on display for your target audience to eat up. Good content cake will have your target audience saying yes to a slice even if they didn’t think they were hungry.
And why should you care so much? Because just one bite of good content cake can turn a viewer into a follower, or a follower into a buyer. And a great piece of content cake will bring them back for more or have them asking you for the recipe ;)
It is my belief that perfecting the art of the content cake can truly take your business to the next level, whatever that may look like for you and your business. Whether that means making more sales or elevating you into a coaching position, a planned-out content strategy can take you there.
Like baking, you might be reading this all feeling so overwhelmed. If so, my advice is that a great first step towards having a more organized approach to your content is to plan, plan, plan! Instead of waking up each day and scrambling to find something to post, take some time to sit down and plan out your content at least for the week ahead. By doing this, not only will your feed most likely look better in appearance, but you can also be sure to create content that is strategic for your business goals, attracts your target audience, and has a better return on the time investment you put into it.
You don’t even need to create or collect your content all on that same day, but just having a plan to work from will show you an instant difference in the quality of the content you create. It will give you more time to ideate what you want to create, and how you want to execute it!
Lastly, don’t let this discourage you from just baking, or creating your content. You don’t need to wait until you have your recipe down pat, or all your ingredients gathered. Substitutions are always available, and experimenting can sometimes be the best part of the process. Go ahead and work with what you have on hand because having something in the oven is better than nothing at all.
And don’t worry, this is just the start of this series. I’ll be breaking down each ingredient in my perfect content cake recipe on the blog over the next few weeks, giving you a crash course so you can become the head chef of your business and learn how to bake something beautiful for your brand too!
Maybe you feel like you don’t need help in the content kitchen at all. You might just have a knack for creating good content and don’t need to follow a recipe to get the results you want. BUT what takes something from good to truly great is the ability to identify your processes, perfect them, and replicate them time and time again with the same results.
So, get your whisks and your aprons ready because cooking class is officially in session!
Lots of love!
Matea the Marketer
