How to Save Hours Creating Your Social Media Content
Every driver and team understands that they should have some sort of social media presence, but often other than posting on race day the social platforms are overlooked. The reasons vary and can include not having the time to post, not knowing what to post, forgetting to post, and even not wanting to take the time and effort to post on social media.
If you are not posting on social media regularly and strategically you are missing out on opportunities to connect with or to impress potential sponsors and convince them to partner with you instead of a different driver.
If you are running a race team and need sponsor funding to be able to compete, you are not just a race team, you are a marketing company. You are charging a fee to companies and in return, you are providing a marketing service.
Your content serves many purposes:
Confirms you are indeed running your team as a business, and not just looking for a handout.
Can be an indicator of how you will market the companies you are looking to work with.
Can be used for inbound marketing for your company (attracting sponsors to you through the content you provide).
Shows that you have some expertise when it comes to marketing or another skill you would like to highlight.
Shows a company that you can be trusted to market their business.
Consistent use of social media will reach more people, and any of those people may be a connection to a sponsor.
If you create your content strategically you can reach sponsors at different stages of their decision-making. You can let businesses know sponsorship is a possibility, the benefits of sponsoring a team, and the results you have had with your sponsors, all of which will help them make decisions about where to spend their marketing dollars.
Hopefully, I have convinced you to think about using your social media pages more often and with some strategy behind what you post.
Even if you are convinced that you should be posting more, you may still have concerns about what you should be posting and how long it is going to take you. As with everything, a little bit of planning and preparation can set you up for success.
I am going to share some things that I have learned and how I (try) to plan and put out content on a (somewhat) consistent basis. I often fall into the same posting traps such as forgetting to post one day, and then the next and then wondering if I should even bother, wondering if anyone even cares about or reads what I post, trying to figure out what I should be posting, and wondering why anyone would listen to me – who am I to think that I can teach anyone anything about running a race team?
Some tips I want to share with you are creating content pillars to help you always have something to post about, multiplying the amount of content you can create by starting with just one piece of content, batch-creating your content, and scheduling it to save you some time and being able to ‘forget about it’ and not stress about creating content for a period.
Content pillars are the different topics you can share with your audience. As a driver, you will have two different audiences you can talk to – your fans and your sponsors or potential sponsors. That just means that you have more ideas to choose from! Once you have your content pillars, you can break that down further into additional ideas to post about.
Each person will have different content pillars – things they like and want to talk about. The content that you talk about is what makes you uniquely you and how you stand out from the crowd. Quite frankly, posting consistently will put you miles ahead of most other drivers. I recommend that you take 20 – 30 minutes to think about the topics you would like to talk about. The time you spend on this will be well worth it!
I have put together some ideas for you to jumpstart your imagination.
FANS SPONSORS
Racing – Upcoming, Day of, After Mentions & Thank You’s
Personal – Get to Know You Results You Have Gotten for Your Sponsors (WIIFM)
Racing – Behind the Scenes Why Motorsports Marketing (benefits, achieving goals)
Promotion (selling your races or merchandise) Promotion (I am looking for partners & why me)
I have recently done this for myself and scheduled the topics throughout the year. The order of topics I have chosen I will believe is the best way to guide you through and build upon each topic to create a business for your race team. I will rotate through the topics and will be repeating myself often! This is going to be okay though as I can try to share different information on the same topics, to reinforce messages, and sometimes you need to hear things at a different season in your life for it to resonate with you.
My Topics
Creating a Business Plan for Your Race Team
Building Your Brand
Social Media
Content
Traditional Marketing
Finding Sponsors
More ways to think about what kind of content to share, and break it down for you even further, when you are creating content, you should aim for a mix of content that is entertaining, educational, inspirational, evokes emotion, controversial, motivational, or build relationships. Each of these types of content serves a specific purpose and will keep your readers coming back to read more and see what you are up to.
Drivers and teams will potentially have different things to post depending on the time of year which gives you an even wider range of topics. With my content, I will be focusing on a topic for a period and then moving to the next one. As a driver, I would approach my content pillars a bit differently but do what works for you and feels right. I would rotate my content through each of the content pillars, expanding on each of them something like below:
Content for your fans – easy & keeps you top of mind.
Racing Get to Know You
Upcoming races Your Family
Race Day (can create a long-form video, prep,
Meetings, qualifying, racing, etc.) Your Pet
Results Work
Merchandise for Sale Causes You Support
Highlight Your Team Hobbies
Behind the Scenes Promo
Prepping the Car Where We Race
Repairs Work with Me
End of Season Work
What are You Doing For Your Sponsors
Maintenance
Content for Your Sponsors – sell yourself and how and why they should work with you.
Mentions Results
Race Day Thank You’s Previous Sponsorship
Share Their Posts Case Studies
Mention Just Because Current Results
Why Motorsports Marketing Small Business Marketing Tips
Brings Sales to Sponsors
Bring Customers – In-Person and Virtual Resources
Team Building Sports & Business are a Good Match
Networking Shows You Understand Business
Recognition
Thank You’s Promotion
Change Perceptions Work with me! Share often!
Awareness
If you are wondering how to share information for small businesses, a quick easy way to make you look smart and like a hero by providing relevant and timely information is to set a Google Alert for a topic such as ‘Small Business Marketing’ and Google will send you an email with relevant articles that you can in turn share and add your own thoughts about.
Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself – everyone does not see what you post and will not see the repeating information, and even if they do with our short-term memory they may not remember. Repeating your information will reinforce your message.
Before you start creating your social media posts, think about what form or content you like to produce, where you like to post, and where you consume information. If you don’t like to create videos, a platform such as YouTube will not be the best place to plan your content around.
Here is an example of a posting matrix I am going to strive for with this post. It is a lot of work to do, but the work I put in over 2-3 days can be enough content created to be posted over the course of a month. It is an aggressive posting schedule, and I will have it all done and posted within the week just to show you how you could take one piece of content and create a lot of different pieces from the one. I am comfortable with all of these types of posts so it will not take me as long to get it done as someone trying to do this for the first time. If you have questions about how I have done anything you can always send a message through any of the social media channels, send a text to 616.287.3960, or an email to TLC@TLCMotorsportsMarketing.com
Your content should take different forms – long form and short form to keep your audience interested and engaged and to provide information in the manner that your audience wants. Some people like to read, some will watch long videos, some only short videos, bullet points may be easier to read for those in a hurry, and some may just want a photo.
I will start with this blog post, which is long (and long-form content), but I will still count it as one piece of content. From here I will create a bunch of different posts. I’ll give you my goal for the number of posts and then the actual number at the end of the week.
This post is long and broken apart into different categories to make it easier to create content that can stand on its own and still make sense.
To make it easier for me I have written this first and then will create a long video to post to YouTube. (2 pieces)
I previously said that I am not confident in my editing skills, so I prefer to create individual short videos instead of editing long videos into short videos.
I should have three different topics from this article which can be broken down into:
3 LinkedIn Newsletters
3 emails (8 pieces)
3 Carousel posts that will be posted on Linked In and Instagram (14)
3 Social media posts – words with an image that will be posted on Facebook and Twitter (20)
3 Stories will be posted on Facebook and Instagram (26)
3 Graphics for Instagram (29)
3 Pinterest with two different covers (35)
3 short videos edited on each platform and posted to Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts (44 pieces of content, and I can probably do more)
Now that you know what you COULD do, decide what you can realistically do and maintain.
Your goal is to be consistent, not to be overwhelmed. If you think you can only do 3 posts per week on one platform, do that and commit to doing that consistently. If you can do 3 posts per week on 2 platforms, schedule time to do that. Don’t feel like you need to be everywhere all the time.
If you forget to post one day, and then forget to post the next day, don’t give up because you missed a couple of days! Avoid this by planning and then scheduling all the content you can.
There are many social media schedulers available, some are free, and some you need to pay for. A free and easy way to schedule your Facebook Page and Instagram content together and in one place using Meta Business Suite. You will need to link your Instagram and Facebook Pages together, but it is an easy process if you have not done it yet.
Now that you have some ideas about what you can do and you have made the decision to make a big impact with your social media, you want to be able to create it as efficiently and quickly as possible.
Tips:
Schedule time in your day to create your content.
Get rid of distractions – TV, your phone, your family.
Know what you want to create before sitting down to do it.
Don’t worry about perfection – just get it done.
As you become more familiar with your tools and processes you will get quicker. As I said earlier, it is quicker for me to record new videos instead of editing them and creating short videos from long ones. I have also (kind of) gotten past worrying about a perfect video. I will say uuuummmm, pause to think about what I want to say, and make mistakes. We are all human and we all make mistakes! I try not to worry about my mistakes, and if someone chooses to comment on my mistakes I (silently) challenge them to do better and try to ignore their comments. There are always going to be others who will try to tear you down. Be the bigger person, understand where their comments are coming from, and move on. If someone is commenting to start a respectful discussion with a differing opinion, go with it!
Batching your content means creating all of one type of content at one time, not jumping around and trying to utilize different tools at the same time. Write everything at one time. Record all your videos at one time. Create any graphics at the same. And finally, schedule all your content at the same time. This will eliminate jumping around to different tools and keep your mind working in the same way, saving you time and effort.
My tips for batching content:
For a long-form video, I will write the post first, or at least an outline, and then read that if it is long and has a lot of details.
If you prefer to talk it out without writing, save time by playing the video and using a program that will transcribe your video. Google Docs, MS Word, or Otter.ai can do this for you and then you can go back and make any adjustments or clean up the text.
For the short-form videos, I can take the topics from each paragraph or section and create one-minute or shorter videos from this content. While the different platforms do not like you to use another platform’s video on theirs – meaning Instagram does not like you to use a TikTok video on Instagram. The second platform will likely not show your video to very many people or will not show it at all. There is also video creation software that when you download the video their logo is on the video. The platforms do not like this either. Instead, I will use the same video that had been recorded on my phone and upload that to each of the different platforms and use the features of the individual platforms. I have been able to download a TikTok video using the app Snaptik which will remove the logo and then add that to YouTube. If I do this, I will not use the features from TikTok other than adding text to the video.
Short-form social media posts that are word-based can be copied from my blog and pasted into a post to be scheduled through Meta Business Suite. I currently do not have a social media scheduler for Twitter, but there are some available including CoSchedule, HootSuite, Buffer, and many others.
If you want to create graphics or pictures with words my favorite tool is Canva. There is a free version that will work well for you, or a paid version for $13, which gives you additional features. One of my favorite features of the paid version of Canva is that I can resize an image to a size that is optimal for the different platforms. Adobe Express is another program you may use for free and with which you can create beautiful images. I have been using Canva for years and I am more comfortable with that.
My final tips are:
Do not try to do everything in one sitting, or even one day. Schedule time across multiple days to get it done.
Remember to schedule that time a few days before you want to have the content show up on social media.
Once you schedule your content, double-check that it does in fact post. There are many times when the scheduler will not publish correctly.
Even if you have published all of your content, you are not done. This is ‘social’ media. Take a few minutes each day to respond to comments on your posts and to comment on other people’s posts.