Can we talk about the elephant in the room?
You know the one. It’s that nagging feeling every time you open Instagram or check your ads manager. The constant, relentless need to produce fresh creative content – photography, videos, graphics, captions – when none of that is actually your core skill set.
You got into this business because you love your product. Maybe you’re passionate about sustainability, or you spotted a gap in the market, or you created something that solved a problem you personally experienced. Nowhere in that origin story did it say “and I’ll spend 40% of my time figuring out Canva and stressing about what to post.”
Yet here we are.
And look, I get it. The content treadmill is exhausting. It’s why so many brand owners end up throwing something together at the last minute just to have something there. A quick product shot. A hastily written caption. Another post that ticks a box but doesn’t actually move the needle.
The problem is, that approach leads to substandard results from everything – your ads, your emails, your organic social. You’re putting in effort, but the return just isn’t there.
So today I want to share a different way of thinking about this. A systematic approach to content creation that’s actually tied to your revenue goals, so every piece of content you create has a purpose and a place in your growth strategy.
Why This Matters More Now Than Ever
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we all need to be producing and sharing new creative content on a much more regular basis than we used to.
It’s not just about the algorithms (though yes, they’re hungry beasts that reward fresh content). It’s also about how your customers are behaving right now. The way people consume content, interact with brands, and make purchasing decisions has shifted dramatically.
Your audience is scrolling faster. Their attention is harder to capture. And if your content looks like something they’ve seen before – even if they haven’t actually seen it before – they’ll keep scrolling.
This means the old approach of creating one set of graphics and running them until they stop working just doesn’t cut it anymore. You need variety. You need freshness. And you need it consistently.
Which sounds overwhelming until you have a system.
Start With Your Revenue Targets (Yes, Really)
I know it seems like an odd place to begin when we’re talking about content creation. But this is the foundation that everything else builds on.
You need to know your revenue targets for each month. And then you need to work out how much of that should come from new customers versus returning customers.
The answer will be different for every business. If you’re relatively new or you sell a product people typically only buy once, most of your growth will need to come from acquisition. If you have a consumable product – skincare, supplements, coffee, food – or something like fashion where people naturally come back for new collections, you can lean more heavily on retention.
This matters for content because the content that attracts new customers is fundamentally different from the content that brings existing customers back.
Understanding Where Your Customers Actually Are
Next question: what platforms are your customers spending time on, and at what point in their buying journey are they likely to interact with your content there?
This isn’t one-size-fits-all. A gift hamper brand with a strong corporate customer base might find their audience on LinkedIn – not exactly TikTok territory. A fashion brand targeting Gen Z needs to be where Gen Z actually hangs out.
But here’s the nuance that a lot of brands miss: different platforms serve different purposes in the customer journey.
TikTok, for example, is fantastic for building warm audiences and getting people to your website for the first time. But they’re not necessarily going to purchase at that point. It’s an awareness and consideration platform.
Pinterest, interestingly, is working really well for conversions for several of our clients right now. People go to Pinterest with purchase intent in a way they don’t on other social platforms.
Google captures people who already know what they want – they’re actively searching for your product or something like it. But if you’re only advertising on Google with nothing else, there’s a ceiling to how much you can spend because you’re not doing any audience-building upstream.
The point is: you need to understand what each platform is actually good for, so you can create the right content for each stage of the journey.
The Content You Need at Each Stage
This is where it gets practical.
At the awareness stage, your content needs to stop the scroll and capture attention. It should educate and entertain – I like to call it “edutainment,” which yes, sounds a bit like the Wiggles approach to content, but that’s kind of the point. If your educational content is boring, nobody’s going to stop scrolling to watch it.
At this stage, you’re not trying to sell. You’re trying to make people aware that you exist and that you have something relevant to their lives.
A lot of small businesses skip this entirely because it doesn’t lead to direct, immediate sales. There’s fear around spending money on content that doesn’t have a clear conversion attached. But if you’re only ever running sales-focused ads to cold audiences, your conversion rates will be dismal compared to what you could achieve if you warmed them up first.
Even just 5% of your ad budget going toward awareness can make a significant difference. And around 30% or more of your organic social content should be aimed at this stage too.
At the consideration stage, you’re helping people evaluate their options. Why you? Why your product specifically? What makes you different from the alternatives?
At the conversion stage, you’re giving people a reason to buy now. This is where your promotions, offers, and direct response content live.
The mistake I see constantly is brands creating content that assumes the customer already knows they exist and already wants their product. But only about 1-2% of your audience is actually ready to buy at any given moment. Everyone else needs nurturing through those earlier stages first.
Establishing Your Brand Personality
Before you create any content, you need to be really clear on your brand personality. What are the key characteristics or character traits of your brand? If your brand was a movie character, how would they talk? What would they be like?
This could be anything on the spectrum – funny and tongue-in-cheek, formal and authoritative, down-to-earth and approachable, luxurious and aspirational. There’s no right answer, but there does need to be an answer.
And it needs to be distinctive. If your brand personality is identical to your biggest competitor, you’re not going to stand out. You need to carve out your own space.
It also needs to resonate with your ideal customers. There’s no point deciding you want to be casual and irreverent if your customers need to trust you with something serious. An airline that sounds too casual probably isn’t going to inspire confidence in passengers.
Once you’ve established this, document it. Create tone of voice guidelines. Create a visual style guide. This becomes especially important if you ever have anyone else creating content on your behalf – it all needs to feel like it’s coming from the same brand.
Your Brand Promise and Benefits
This sounds obvious, but you need to keep your brand promise and customer benefits front and centre in your content.
Here’s what I often see: brand owners think they’re saying the same things over and over, so they stop communicating the fundamentals. Surely people are sick of hearing about why our product is great by now, right?
But here’s the thing – the people who haven’t bought from you yet aren’t sick of it. They haven’t heard it. They’re still at that early stage where they need to understand what problem you solve and why you’re the best solution.
One of our clients, Seedling Baby, does this brilliantly. Eva’s been running that business for about 14 years, but she still consistently educates her audience about the problems new parents face and the benefits of her products. That content keeps performing because there’s always a new cohort of potential customers who need that information.
Building Your Content Templates
Here’s where we get into the efficiency piece.
I recommend having a standard selection of content templates – dimensions, types (video, animated gif, still images), formats for different placements and platforms. Set these up once in Canva and half the work is already done every time you need to create something new.
You should have templates for:
- Square posts
- Vertical stories/reels format
- Carousel posts
- Email headers
- Ad formats for different placements
- Pinterest pins (different dimensions again)
When you sit down to create content for a new campaign or promotion, you’re not starting from scratch and wondering “do I need a reel? Do I need a carousel?” You just work through your templates and create versions for each format.
If you’re not at the point where you can hire a professional graphic designer, here’s my tip: pay someone to create your Canva templates once. It won’t cost much, but it means you’re starting from professionally designed, on-brand templates rather than generic Canva templates that don’t match your brand at all. This one investment lifts everything you create from that point forward.
Your Promotional Calendar
You need to give your customers reasons to buy throughout the year. This is where your promotional calendar comes in.
I recommend every brand has at least four major promotions per year – whether that’s product launches, seasonal sales like Black Friday, or other significant campaigns. Then you can have smaller offers in and around those.
But it doesn’t always have to be a discount. If you’re running a big discount every single week, you train your customers to wait for the next one.
One of our clients, a beautiful personalised jewellery brand, recently ran a “word of the year” campaign. Not a discount – just a timely, relevant content idea encouraging people to get a piece of jewellery personalised with their word of the year. It resonated because it was perfect for January and aligned with how people are already thinking at that time of year.
Another client is currently running a back-to-school promotion because that’s relevant to her product and her audience right now. You wouldn’t run that campaign in June.
The point is: map out your promotional calendar in advance. Know what you’ll be promoting when. This makes content creation so much easier because you’re not deciding in the moment – you’re executing on a plan.
Creative Variants: Why Sameness Kills Performance
This is a crucial concept that a lot of brands miss.
When you’re creating content for a campaign, you need creative variants – different versions that are essentially communicating the same thing but look and feel different.
Don’t just make every graphic look the same in different sizes. You’ll have customers who respond to different things. Some people respond to UGC-style video content. Others respond to polished graphic design. Some prefer animated content, others prefer stills.
For a recent Boxing Day campaign we helped a client with, we created a variety of different headlines, different graphic design treatments, UGC video content, animated graphics using still images – all within their brand guidelines, but with different looks and feels.
The reason this matters: when all your content looks the same, your audience thinks they’ve seen it before, so they keep scrolling. Even if they haven’t actually seen that specific piece, visual sameness triggers that “seen it” response.
This is especially important for people in your audience who haven’t purchased yet, or who haven’t purchased in a while. You can’t afford to blend into the newsfeed. You need to stand out, and to do that, you need variety.
Schedule It or It Won’t Happen
Finally, put content creation time in your calendar. Treat it like a non-negotiable appointment.
There are two separate activities here: content creation (the photography, video shoots, reaching out to content creators) and content production (getting into Canva and actually building the assets).
If you leave this to the last minute, the year will get harder and harder, and your content will underperform because it’s rushed and reactive rather than strategic and planned.
The more frequently you can produce fresh, high-quality content, the better your results will be. That’s just the reality of how platforms and consumers behave now – both from a purchasing behaviour and content consumption perspective, and from an algorithm perspective.
Bringing It All Together
So here’s your content creation system in summary:
Start with your revenue targets. Work out the split between new and returning customers. Identify which platforms your customers use and what stage of the buyer journey each platform serves. Calculate your ad budget and target acquisition cost. Build your campaign structure around the buyer journey stages. Establish and document your brand personality, promise, and benefits. Create content templates so you’re not reinventing the wheel. Plan your promotional calendar with major and minor campaigns throughout the year. Create multiple creative variants for each campaign. And schedule dedicated time for content creation and production.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not the exciting part of running a business. But it’s the system that turns content from a stressful, last-minute chore into a strategic asset that actually drives your growth.
And that’s when content stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like a lever.
Ready to Build Your Content System?
If you’re looking to get more sophisticated with your content strategy and really tie your creative efforts to your growth goals, we can help.
Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session where we can look at your specific situation – your targets, your platforms, your current content approach – and map out what a proper system would look like for your business. Plus learn more about how we help ecommerce brands turn their marketing into a genuine growth engine.
Because you didn’t start this business to spend your life stressed about what to post. Let’s fix that.
— Catherine
