Content marketing is the creation of online content that stimulates interest in your brand without explicitly promoting a product. It can take the form of blogs, entertaining posts, or aggregate content from various resources or your own followers. Examples of content marketing used frequently include industry related blogging, memes, other funny images, community submitted content, or links to websites of interest to your audience.

One page that I regard as being particuarily good at content marketing is Car Throttle. Their Facebook page is peppered with automotive memes and links to articles on their website. However, the content they are best known for is community submitted videos. Their audience submits noteworthy videos related to cars, and Car Throttle selects the best, edits them, and adds a caption. The submitter of course receives credit, and each video gets hundreds-of-thousands of views. Since the content is user-submitted and non-promotional, other community members are more likely to share it. https://www.facebook.com/carthrottle/

Another page I have mentioned previously is VapeWild. They too have a good variety of vape related memes and user submitted content in addition to their product images and promotions. While their content may be cheesy, they have a good mix of posts related to their products and general content related to vaping as an industry/hobby. https://www.facebook.com/VapeWild

Here is my content calendar for Insincerely. Essentially, the same weekly pattern will be repeated with minor variations for “holidays” I can relate to my existing products (heart sticker for mother’s day) or target audience (420). While the pattern may look simple, a good deal of research has been done to devise this. First, I began by examining my Instagram analytics to see when most of my followers are online. The days of the week have been ranked by color to symbolize popularity. What I deem as more important content will be posted on the more popular days.

I attempted to do the same thing for my Facebook audience but usage is almost identical across the days of the week. Additionally, 8 p.m. seems to be the peak hour no matter the day. Thus, I will post duplicate content from Instagram at 8 p.m. every night.

Next, I dove deeper into the particulars of when users were online, noting peak hours for each day. This is why the exact time is noted for each post on the calendar. Finally, I manually tallied through my entire list of past sales to see which days of the week sales occur on. I found the overwhelming majority happen either on Wednesday or Friday, with Wednesday being slightly more popular. I also analyzed a smaller sample of more recent sales to make sure the trend is current and found identical results.

With this information in mind, I devised a weekly content strategy. Since Wednesday and Friday are my revenue days, I will run a very small promotion each week on those days. Hopefully, this will push somewhere who is on the edge of ordering to that final conversion. Posting about the promotion on two separate days also serves as a reminder. Not everyone is ready to purchase right away.

Thursday is my other extremely popular day. This is when I will post both a product image in the morning to inform new customers as well as a “savage video” at night to entertain existing customers and build brand image. What are these “savage videos?” Ridiculous content that embodies the tagline of Insincerely: Reckless and Rebellious. My most recent video from a few weeks ago is of me lighting a cigarette using a personal-defense taser. People love these videos and they always get fantastic engagement.

My less popular days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Wednesday is already spoken for with the promotion, but Tuesdays and Saturdays will be used for more product imagery (both macro-shots and in-use shots). Sundays and Mondays are my worst performing days. Thus, I will use Sunday as my community submitted content day. Customers are always sending me pictures of their new stickers in use or selfies of them wearing my face masks. I love that they want to share these with me and they enjoy when I follow through and share with my own audience. However, these photos are often very low quality for obvious reasons. These customers don’t have time to perfectly frame the photo, edit in Photoshop, and export for the perfect Instagram image. I do want to share these images, but I don’t want them to speak for the quality of my brand. This is why I have chosen to share on a day with fewer impressions. Finally, I will post more savage” content on Mondays to keep the small audience I have then entertained.