Planning your content
Getting to the level of interaction that The Happy Pear has developed with their fans takes time. But if you are going to be putting a significant amount of your energy into creating blog posts for your monthly email, or recording videos to share on your social media channels, then you will engage with your fans and potential customers a lot quicker by taking a page out of their content book – instead of pumping out ’10 reasons why…’ or ‘7 top tips…’ blog posts that less people will get excited by.
Your content is also the place where small vegan businesses can beat huge commercial companies. For example, TUI package holidays produced a blog post called ‘Best Vegan Holidays’. It’s obviously written by a non-vegan member of their marketing team using Google to find out what places in the world are vegan friendly. It’s a short blog post, suggesting ‘Greece’ as an idea and dedicating a whole 7 lines to the country’s vegan scene. Compare that with Vegan Travel’s Greece page that has over 40 guides, video blogs and suggestions for a vegan traveller in Greece, from reviewing what you can buy at the Athens Greece Farmer’s Market to spending a day at the Animal Welfare Association’s centre on the Island of Santorini. Which company is going to connect better with the vegan traveller? Which proves they know their subject and customer intimately? Your specialist vegan knowledge, and understanding your customer, should shine through in your content. This means that you can, and will, beat your much larger competitors in winning the hearts and minds of your customers.
If you don’t have a structure to your content then you will soon get lost in it. You will be either scrambling around each week to work out what you can put out on Facebook, or putting time into content that people don’t really interact with. And again it all comes back to knowing your customers. You need to know them and what they will interact with. You should create content that answers what questions they will have about your product, or that will help them with a unique problem that you know they have (ie choosing a good vegan holiday destination).
And, again, like everything else in promoting your company: it will be far easier to manage, and of far higher quality, if you have a plan.
A good content plan will work on a number of levels. First, it needs to be realistic. If you only have one pair of hands and a busy business to run then you’re not going to be able to start producing your weekly cookery show on YouTube any time soon. There will be a lot of work you need to do to get you there. Second, you need to have long-form and short-form content. Short-form might be a short blog post or an update to your Instagram story. Long-form might be recording a longer video interview, producing a guide, or creating a podcast that a follower will have to invest a chunk of time in consuming. And ideally, you should mix long-form and short-form in your content plan. Returning back to the example of a vegan travel consultant, you might plan your year around creating 3 really good video pieces reviewing the vegan scene in 3 great vegan holiday destinations. But you might also create shorter ‘Top Vegan Holiday Destinations’ blogs that you put out every month, but they won’t be as generic as what TUI produce. They will suggest non-obvious places that you have personal experience of where you can guarantee a great vegan experience for visitors. Or they may even be more niche than that, for example: ’10 best holiday destinations for WHOLEFOOD vegans’.
Your short-form content can also create long-form content and vice-versa. Think about your favourite TV series – you watch each episode separately, but put them all together and there’s an overriding story arc to each series. Your content can be the same. You might feature one of your team each week in a short blog post where they talk about their vegan journey. Released episodically over time each is a five-minute read, but it will build up a page on your website of your staff’s vegan stories that will eventually take someone an hour to read in one go. Short-form becomes long-form. And in reverse, you might record an hour-long interview with a vegan beauty expert, but cut that up into several 5 minute-long videos that will give you enough content for six months. Long-form becomes short-form.
You should also look to have different formats to suit people’s preferences. I’ll use Lisa and I as an example. I like to listen to content, Lisa likes to watch it. If I see a video on social media I tend to skip by it, Lisa will watch it. If I can find a podcast to find out how to do something then I will listen to that whilst I’m doing something else at the same time. Instead, Lisa will head to YouTube so that she can see someone showing you how to do it. Lisa loves watching Instagram stories of the vegan brands she follows, whereas I prefer to read their blogs. You could say that Lisa loves people, I love information! Regardless, we have different ways that we connect with content, and your customers will too.
