Most of those who produce marketing for salons and create content for social media often take far too long over it. Some even find it so painful they often avoid it entirely, this is classic procrastination and is a vicious cycle which can lead to days or even weeks without a single post.
Not only is this completely avoidable, it’s also waste of your time and energy. Not to mention handing the advantage over to your competitors who are posting more regularly.
It’s costing not only time but also your brand’s presence on the internet, not to mention the untold stress and the impact it may have on your ability to carry out other tasks you should be doing also, there are no winners.
Fortunatley, there is another way which is easy for you to follow and implement.
We’re going to look at several techniques and hacks you can use to create content easily which is not only valuable to your audience but easy for you to generate too.
Following these suggestion will give you a blueprint for creating high converting social media posts which you can churn out whenever you need to and never have to procrastinate over it again. Woohoo!
let’s get started…
I know, it’s scary having to sit down and come up with ideas which aren’t pants for the whole world to see, I get it, you don’t want to embarrass yourself or your business.
I have done it all too often myself, you sit down at your desktop, ready to post something, and your mind goes blank, you can think of nothing. The more you think, the harder it gets, you start feeling evermore anxious, the curser blinking away until eventually, you say to yourself, I’ll have a think about it and do it later, which of course never arrives. That is of course until you sit down at your computer again, only for the whole episode to repeat over and over.
Having asked many salon owners about how long it takes on average to create social media content, people answered that they were taking up to three hours and more every single week just to do this one task!
That’s just a big commitment you can’t afford to waste especailly as there are ways you could be using the time better!
If this looks like you and you’re taking a significant amount of time to generate social media content and you’re getting stressed about it, perhaps it’s time to do some thing about it and try something new?
Give yourself a limited time slot
What! I thought you said you were making it easier?
Well, just hear me out for a sec, it might be hard to believe, but it’s been scientifically proven that if you shorten deadlines to complete a task, there’s a greater likelihood that you will complete it. It’s called Parkinson’s law, it means that we take up as much time as we need to complete a task, so if you give yourself 3 hours to do a job, then we’ll take that time.
And if you think you haven’t experienced it before, think again…Its the same phenomenon that allows you to complete all the tasks on your to do list immdiately before you go away on holiday.
So, instead of giving ourselves three hours, try limiting yourself to one hour to complete that exact same task. If you really stick to it, you’ll find that you will indeed get it done in an hour. I know It sounds simplistic and a bit woo woo, but it really is psychological, so try it out and shorten those deadlines and see the magic happen.
So the question then is, just how much time should I allocate to generating my social media content each week?
Well, that is up to you, because once you can control the time it takes and you know that you can fit it into a shorter time slot, you will be able to plan it that much better, It will feel liberating. But that is not all, because the most amazing things happen, you become more creative, you look at things differently and you then start thinking outside the box and all manner of ideas start flowing, it really does change your outlook, and before you know it, you’ll be a complete social media whizz.
Ok, so if the last tip didn’t challenge you, this one just might.
Create All Your Content At The Same Time
what! are you mad, i hear you cry, I know, I’m full of crazy advice today 🤣
Let me explain, if you have any type of content strategy for your digital marketing (which you should), you will probably have other forms of content you have to producing for your salon. This could be podcasts, blogs or video content or all three.
You may be doing all of that separately, and many people do, but if you are, you’re making more unnecessary work for yourself, aswell as being inefficient.
It’s down to having a system in place and thinking strategically about how you create content. If you think about it, doing all those other things separately, all in the name of content, just means that you’re a full-time content creator and not an entrepreneur. Instead, think about how you can incorporate that whole process into one streamlined system.
The idea here is to plan out the topics you’re going to produce content for, and then create one piece of content, which can then be repurposed to make other pieces of content in different formats. This one step alone can revolutionise your whole content creation workflow, not to mention your business, and possibly, even your revenue.
If you become more consistent in your content production this will inturn allow you to grow your brand that much faster and get more engagement with your audience, which inturn will generate more enquiries and revenue.
One of the best ways you can do this is if you create videos. You can create a video with a theme in mind, and then have that video transcribed into words through a service like Rev.com who will charge you $1 per minute of video transcribed.
Once you have the words down, you can then use that for a blog post on your site.
But we’re not finished, because you can also chop that video up into smaller sequences and use it for social media and even youtube.
Finally, if the video you shot is maybe longer, say 20-30 mins you can extract the audio track and post as a podcast too, wowsers!
So, all you need to do is create say one video per week, and you have the full weeks content for blog, social media and even including a podcast too, pretty cool eh?
I do realise though that a lot of salon owners may struggle with the technical elements of that which limits them from doing all of that fancy stuff, is there nothing a little more basic?
I hear ya, and I want to help, so here it is.
Give Your Audience What They Want
One of the biggest issues for content creators is the initial idea, what to write about. But what if i said there was an easy way to find out the most important topics to create content aout, and crucially the type that will get lots of engagement if done well.
What’s more is that its right under your nose and really easy to discover.
Think about it for one second, what is the one thing that people engage with more than any thing else, it has been shown that people react the most to solutions to their problems.
So, where do you do find those problems and the solutions so you can include in your content I hear you ask, well, from those who have the problems, and for that, all you need to do is ask your customers.
Yes, just by talking to your customers and your wider audience helps you understand what problems your customers have, and if you’re customers have problems, you can bet that other people will have those same issues and want to find out how to solve them.
But when I say problems, we’re not talking about anything other than what services you provide. Don’t think of what you provide as services, think of them instead as a problem solver or solutions to people problems.
Because that is what they are. You might be a great business owner and your customers love you to bits, but the majority of them use your company not because they want to have a beauty treatment, but because they want to solve a problem they have, and they feel that your company is the one they trust to do it best.
This tip alone is going to save you lots of time and anguish thinking about content topics and takes all the guesswork out of content creation.
All you need to do it ask your audience what they want and then create it, think of great questions to ask them and to find out those answers and then write about, its really that simple
The key thing about this is that if you just guess at what your audience is wanting to hear about, then you’re doing it wrong, as all you’re doing is making assumptions based on your own experience, and if you’re not creating the content that your audience craves, they are not going to be as engaged and so will be a complete waste of time.
Just remember, the most important thing when creating content is to do it consistentley, if you don’t have a system in place which results in you posting infrequently, then you’re going to be dissappionted.
On that same note, always try to aim for the best quality you can, but quality improves the more you do it, so I would rather you shoot for a medium quality social media post daily than a great insightful post once per week, your audience and your profits will reflect this too.
I hope you’ve found that useful, but if you have any other tips you would like to share, get in touch or pop over to our facebook page.
