5 Tips on How to create content fast

Content Marketing has been around for a while and became as essential as a standard advertisement – if not more. It allows a brand to tell a story and connect with customers, building trust and engagement that can result in valuable leads. However, creating content isn’t an automated task that you can handle simply by pressing a magic button and leaving it to work by itself.

Good content takes time, sometimes, a lot of time. So how to make that process faster, genuinely productive and fulfilled with brand purpose? Check these simple five time-saver steps while creating your next batch of content.

1. Make short notes

The month before content needs to be rolled out, write down bullet points of topics you find relevant to your audience. If you run an Instagram account about art, keep an eye on free exhibitions. If you run a business selling cakes, make a series of short recipes with beautiful images to go with it; subsequently, people may even try baking at home. It is much easier to create a variety of content in one go when you surround yourself with notes to inspire the process and speed up production.

2. Check seasonal dates

Every day, something is happening somewhere in the world, sometimes closer to you than you think. Besides the unmissable big dates (Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, etc), research other celebrations in line with your social channels or business. One site that can help you with this is daysoftheyear.com and you can also find valuable information signing up for your local council’s newsletter.

3.Gather meaningful #TBTs

Four of your monthly posts can be related to the Throw Back Thursday tag (#tbt), sharing cool images of a past event, a previous trip, or something that you learned, either as a creator or as an entrepreneur. Save all these moments and turn them into containers to save you time, and also to engage new individuals through a powerful hashtag selection.

Lot’s of your throwbacks can be behind the scenes of past campaigns or events. I always keep every little piece of imagery captured in between official takes because they can be turned into a unique content. Although leftovers aren’t always the perfect glossy picture, it still enables you to dive into storytelling in a meaningful and fun way.

4. Start with images

If you have access to quality images, be it your company archive or a friend that is a photographer and would collaborate with your content calendar in exchange for a small fee, always reserve some time to go over these images and find the ones that inspire you to create meaningful and engaging stories. It could be an image to go with a quote or a #MondayMotivation post, for example. Don’t give up if you think an image doesn’t match your feed at first. An image worth a thousand words so use your creativity and create a template to make it work.

A good chunk of images to be used can be created at your own desk if you know what you are looking for. This image below, published on my own Instagram account, took me less than five minutes to shoot a few versions using white cardboard as a backdrop, my diary, my headphone, my laptop closed and a little piece of the ornament I bought at the corner shop for £ 0.25p (approximately $ 0.30 cents).

5. Gather user-generated content

You can easily boost your monthly content calendar by gathering content generated by your followers, clients, and employees, as long as you have a community that is reasonably active.

Start small, asking easy-to-answer questions and progress from there.

You can also ask your fan-base to do things like submitting pictures about a specific topic, send stories they find particularly pertinent, among many other forms of interactions.

Are you ready to roll back your sleeves and work on your new masterpiece calendar?

Photos: © Marcio Delgado