My family and I watched a lot of Sesame Street during the pandemic. This means we also learned plenty of the letters of the day.
Is the song in your head yet? It’s been stuck in mine for years.
Do you know what’s interesting? When Sesame Street started, they had several letters and several numbers each day. That’s confusing. It’s too many messages in one segment. Now, they focus on ONE letter and ONE number, and really drive the lesson home.
And guess what, organizations?
THIS IS HOW WE NEED TO BE APPROACHING OUR CONTENT MARKETING.
A lot of marketers are putting out too many messages in a short period of time. This feels haphazard! What’s a better approach? To create ONE strong message — and then reinforcing it the whole month.
My Sesame Street Content Marketing Formula involves choosing one topic per month, writing a blog post about it — and then sharing pieces of that blog post the entire month to really drive the message home.
This approach to content marketing provides you:
Efficiency: You get more bang for your buck, and don’t have to come up with fresh content once a week (or drive yourself nuts trying).
Consistency: You can stay in front of your audience easily on social media all month long.
Connection: Your message has a much better chance of connecting because you will be saturating the market.
Visibility: You’ll get seen by more eyeballs and be there when they need you!
Expertise: This approach honors the value of your topic and presents you as a thought leader. It says: We’re smart. We’re thinking. We care about you.
Listen … kids aren’t the only ones who can learn from Sesame Street.
My Sesame Street Content Marketing Formula
When you write a blog or a newsletter, it takes a lot of time and energy or money. It’s important to maximize this content — but also to give your audience the best chance of actually receiving it. Here’s the formula:
Monthly topic.
Blog post: Write one, and post it on your blog.
Newsletter: Use the first part of the blog post as your newsletter, then link back to the entire post.
Social media: Share the post through your social media accounts.
Weekly social media posts throughout the month.*
* After you write your blog post for the month, you will pull out 4 (or 8) content pieces to post once a week (or twice a week) on social media. The pieces could be important statements, quotes, statistics or bullet points — anything from within your blog post that you think is powerful. All of your social media posts will link back to your original blog post on your website.
For extra exposure: At the end of the month, you can post your entire, original blog post on LinkedIn.
How to deal with fear of repetition
There is an old NBC promo that would play before reruns. Maybe you remember it? The promo said:
Guess what? For the members of your audience who haven’t seen your blog post before — it’s new to them.
And for those who have seen it — your weekly social media posts will drive the point home, and position you as an expert with a solid message that should be taken seriously.
The reality is, most of your audience members won’t realize you’re doing this. Most of them are super busy and may not have seen your post the first couple of times— so if you get them to really tune in once during the month, that’s a win.
Don’t know how to come up with topics?
The good news is — all you need is 12 topics for the whole year. The even better news? You don’t actually need to come up with them yourself. If you’re listening closely, your market supplies the ideas. Your job is simply to pay attention — and then write that great idea down somewhere.
If you’re really stuck, refresh an old topic. Remember, if they haven’t seen it before, it’s new to them! So, if you have a great piece of content from a few years ago — dust it off and share it again using this approach.
Don’t have time to create content?
You don’t actually need to have much time. You just need ideas. A copywriter can discuss your idea with you and write the post, then a virtual assistant can do the posting.
Content marketing can be so much easier — and more effective! Plus, you won’t even need a magic wand like Abby Cadabby.
Want to try this approach? Download our content marketing worksheet below.
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