How To Use Themes To Guide Your Small Business Marketing
If you’re creating your own marketing content, you know how hard it is to come up with new ideas every single month. One of my favorite ways to help solve this is to use themes to guide your small business marketing.
Let’s talk about how to theme your content:
Why themes?
If you set a monthly theme, you’re never starting from zero. Every month, when you sit down to write and create visuals, you’ll at least have an idea about where you’re headed.
The best part about having a theme to guide your marketing is that it’s helpful all the way around: It makes content creation much easier for you and makes your content more put together for your audience.
Setting monthly themes
Begin by brainstorming theme possibilities for the next six months. You can base your monthly content themes around holidays you celebrate, the season of the year, events, important business milestones, educational topics, giveaways, promotions—whatever speaks to you and works with the rhythm of your business. Remember, your theme is mainly a good excuse to engage with your audience.
Once you have a list, note each theme in your monthly content planner and figure out how you’ll slant more playful themes to fit your business.
For instance, the theme “Spring Cleaning” for my social media marketing business is a good one for engaging with followers because it’s familiar and catchy and evokes hopefulness. But for my business, I don’t use it literally, of course. Instead of talking about traditional cleaning, I’ll give readers tips about things like digital cleanup and how to implement new organizational systems for their content.
Once you’re ready to create monthly content, brainstorm ideas that orbit around your monthly theme. Here are some ideas:
Tip-based blog posts
Your blogs anchor your content. Choose a tip or how-to topic based on your monthly theme and write a blog post teaching people about it. Your post should use clear, actionable language and present valuable information to your followers.
In my fictional example, I might walk people through my tips for organizing their content files, scheduling apps, and image files—including what can get dragged to the trash. If your blog post addresses your theme, it helps you create consistent content (since you’ll publish the post on your blog, share about it on social media, and probably link it in your e-blast). This consistency helps engage your audience.
Email marketing
Send out weekly e-blasts, ensuring that each one touches on your monthly theme. For instance, you could introduce the theme to your subscribers in a longer introduction at the beginning of the month, link your blog post in an email the following week, refer to your theme briefly in the third email and wrap up the month with a recap of the many ways you’ve engaged with people around your theme at the end of the month.
Again, the idea is to create consistency, so don’t be afraid to call attention to the thing you’re focusing on for the month!
Social media
Weave your theme into your social media posts. Remember, you don’t have to reference your theme in every single one, but make sure to mention it a number of times throughout the month.
To do so, you can quote from your blog post (a couple of times, if you like), write up a funny story about your theme and why you chose it, describe your theme in all emojis (if that approach fits with your brand), or take a “deep dive” into the theme in a longer, bulleted social media post (be sure to check your platform for character count limits).
Supporting video content: IGTV, Reels, Stories
Continue the thematic fun through video and other engaging content. Create an IGTV about your blog post, do a Live Q+A video about something related to your theme, or take your theme to Reels!
You can emphasize your theme every day, if you like, on Instagram Stories or other similar platforms. Take polls related to your theme (“Who cleans out their digital desktop every spring?!”), adopt a theme-related sticker to use once a day, or share your daily thematic musings through brief Story videos. So many fun possibilities!
