In our last post, we introduced you to the concept of content marketing and how it could be useful with your direct sales business. Now we’re going to give an overview of how to do it.

As a refresher, content marketing is a strategic effort focusing on consistently creating and sending out relevant information to a specific audience that ultimately wins you more paying customers. It can be fun, entertaining, educational, or all three. It can be in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media posts. Or very often, all of these working in tandem with each other. Content marketing is all about creating a memorable experience for your customers so they’ll keep coming back to buy your products. It’s about keeping your current customers engaged and gaining new ones.

So, how do you make this happen? You do it by creating a content marketing plan.

Here’s how you do it.

Decide Your Audience

Before you start creating any kind of content, think about who you’re creating that content for. Who is and will be buying your products? Think about the people you’ve talked to who’s shown interest in what you’re selling. What kind of problems are you solving for them through your products? What are they looking for when they buy from you and why? As you think about this, jot your answers down in a notebook, as these will be your seeds of inspiration when it comes to brainstorming ideas for the content you’ll later create.

How Will You Distribute Your Content?

Once you’ve decided on who your audience is, you’ll need to figure out how you’ll distribute it. Will you write blog posts on your website? Will you make videos and post them on youTube? What about a podcast? Or will you stick strictly to writing social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Or, will you develop a strategy to use all or most of these methods to maximize your message reach?

How Often Will You Post?

As you come up with ideas for blog and social media posts, podcast episodes or video, think about how often you should post your content. Be aware that it will also depend on which channel you’re posting content to. If you’re planning on utilizing multiple channels, then come up with a posting schedule. Start off simple. Maybe begin with posting one blog post every other week, and once a day on your social media channels. Then, as you become more accustomed to it, start posting twice or three times a day on social media and one blog post a week. Then, as you excel at your business, play with other formats such as video and podcasting to ramp up brand awareness. There are plenty of tools to help with social media posting such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and  TweetDeck.