The 4-Step Process to Planning Your Marketing Content

One of the business consultations I offer is called a Review & Feedback, and it’s basically where I go in and audit a massage business’ website, social media pages, financial documents, marketing strategy, stuff like that. I tell them where they can improve, what to add, what to get rid of, that sort of thing. And one of the problems I see repeatedly is within marketing content. It’s so often a bunch of random stuff posted on social media, emails without a real purpose, and website content that doesn’t really do anything for the client or the business. Most often, these therapists are lost when it comes to what to share. How do you figure out what to post, email about, or otherwise share with your audience? So let me walk you through a super simple 4-step process to planning out your marketing content. This will help you do so really quickly.
 
 
#1 Choose your purpose

This is the most important! A huge problem I see over and over again, is content that doesn’t really have a clear purpose. It’s just some random stuff thrown out on Instagram about how great massage is for you, or website pages with crazy long descriptions of their services, and no indication what to do with all that information
 
Every time you speak to your audience, there needs to be a clear purpose. What action should they take after seeing it?
If you’re sharing pretty graphics and funny memes just to have something to post because you’re “supposed” to post X number of times a week, you’re wasting your time and effort.
 
Do you want them to book an appointment?
Do you want them to engage with your content to improve the algorithm’s efficacy?
Do you want them to read a blog post and learn something new?
Do you want to establish yourself as an authority so they feel more trust toward you at the end of it than before they saw it?
 
Everything should have a purpose, and it should be clear to both you and your audience.
So look over the last 5-10 social media posts you made…was there a clear purpose to each? Or did you post something just to have another pretty photo in the feed?
Look through your website…is there a clear purpose behind every page, paragraph, and photo?
 
So decide what the purpose of a piece of content is going to be first.
Choose one…
Educating
Selling
Engaging
Or Branding
 
Let’s say I want to educate my clients on something, establishing me as the authority on a topic.
 
#2 Choose a general topic and then break it down into specifics

So what do I want to educate them on?
This could be…
Medical conditions
Common injuries
Stretches
Exercises
Massage Styles
Massage Benefits
General Wellness
Body Facts
Mindset & Inspiration
Business Info
Client Progress or Feedback
Or
Self-Care
 
If I need to showcase myself as an authority, it needs to be something I am well versed in, and something that relates to a problem they have. So maybe a lot of my clients present with back pain. Great. That’s my general topic. Let’s get specific now, and say hmmm….what’s a specific condition that I see with people experiencing back pain? Bulging discs. There we go.
 
 
#3 Choose the type of content you’ll create for it

Will this be…
A brief point
A long explanation
A behind-the-scenes peek
Countering myths
Something humorous
Or
An answer to a common question
 
Since our topic is bulging discs, to start, I probably want to explain what a bulging disc is and isn’t, give some parameters around what massage can do, what exercises can do, stuff like that. Right? We’re educating them on the topic of a bulging disc.
If I need to do all that, then I probably want a longer form of content to be able to give myself enough space to really share a bunch of details. And that leads to…
 
#4 Choose the content format

So will it be…
A short text
A blog post
A graphic
A short video
or
Maybe a long video
 
Since I need it to be a long form educational piece, and I want it to be available on my website long-term, a blog post would be great.
 
That’s it. I got a piece of content planned.
But wait…there’s more….
So I write that blog post on bulging discs, right? I put in all the details, show all that I know on the topic (without going too crazy and getting lost in jargon), and get that blog post ready. But I can now take that same information, that same purpose and topic, all the information I just typed up in a blog post, and then just choose a new type of content and the format for it. So I already have #1 and #2 done, I can just repeat #3 and #4 again and again to come up with new content around the same topic, all with the purpose of education my clients.
 
So I started with educating my clients on bulging discs in a long format as a blog post.
Then I can take tidbits of that blog post and reformat them into new content.
 
I choose a brief point, like “what is a bulging disc?” and make a graphic for it.
I choose to answer a common question, like “what exercises help?”, so I do a short video showcasing a couple.
I choose to counter a myth like the term “slipped disc” so I maybe do a long video explaining more on that.
I choose to do something humorous, so maybe I share a silly graphic about bouncing back from injuries when you’re younger, but now you “throw your back out” by sleeping wrong.
And as a bonus….instead of just educating, I may want to also bring it into my work itself, so I choose to share a graphic of a review from a client specifically about how massage and exercises helped their back pain caused by a bulging disc.
 
I now have planned out 6 pieces of content.
A blog post.
A short video.
A long video.
And 3 graphics.
 
For some of you, that’s a month of content. For others, that’s a week’s worth. But you can plan out those pieces relatively quickly, and then get to work actually creating them.
You can keep following that format over and over again with all kinds of content.
And don’t forget, you can reuse a lot of what you already have and just reformat it in different ways. You don’t have to recreate the wheel each time. Take a blog post and break it down into a bunch of smaller pieces of content. Reshare something you shard a year ago, because I guarantee most of your audience either didn’t see it or doesn’t remember it.
This whole concept, I shared with a graphic back in 2020 in the My Massage World group, and I’ve shared it again twice since then to all kinds of new people in that same group who hadn’t come across it. And here I am yet again, sharing a bit more of an expanded version of it, in a different format. Reuse and repurpose content!
 
I hope this helps you get a little more precise with your content planning, and if you want to dig deeper into actually building out a real marketing strategy to implement all this, go check out my Develop Your Marketing Strategy class.