If you “get it right,” your biggest challenge will be replicating your success over time.
The truth is, creating content that attracts, engages, and converts your audience requires increasingly effective planning and execution.
That’s why I decided to write this article: to introduce you to two professional approaches to content creation that, together, can yield outstanding results.
By combining planning and execution, these strategies can significantly boost your social media sales. Let’s dive in so you can start achieving real results today.
What is strategic content?
Before anything else, what exactly is strategic content?
Strategic content is a form of planned communication designed to achieve specific and measurable goals, such as educating, engaging, or converting a target audience.
It’s based on data about your audience and aligned with your business goals, ensuring relevance and tangible results for your company.
What are the main types of content strategies?
There are countless content strategies out there, as varied as the experts who develop them. Today, we’ll focus on two particular strategies.
Method 1: the Starter Method
Developed by Ellen Salomão, the Starter Method builds content around the pains, dreams, objections, and beliefs of your persona, focusing on their levels of awareness. It can be considered a subset of the next technique.
Method 2: the RETINA Framework
Created by Pedro Sobral, RETINA focuses on pillars like Relationship, Engagement, Transformation, Interaction, Levels of Awareness, and Authority to create a consistent and profitable digital presence.
How to create a content strategy
If your goal is to create a content strategy, you need to define the following:
- Set clear objectives (e.g., increase sales, generate engagement).
- Study your persona: Understand their needs, desires, and pain points.
- Choose the right channels (Instagram, blog, email, etc.).
- Plan your funnel and content types (educational, motivational).
- Create a content calendar to maintain consistency.
- Measure results and adjust as needed.
While this is just an overview, remember that defining your persona is critical to creating content tailored to their needs. If necessary, you can always rely on a content strategist.
What is a content strategist?
A content strategist is a professional who plans, organizes, and manages content to achieve specific objectives.
They align communication with brand goals, ensuring the content is relevant, creative, and effective. This involves research, trend analysis, and working with data-driven insights.
If you’re ready to turn your social media channels into engagement and conversion machines, learning from top digital marketing experts is essential.
Let’s dive deeper into how these strategies work and how to integrate them to create a digital presence that communicates authority and drives sales.
Starter Method: guiding the customer journey
The Starter Method begins with persona mapping. Here’s what makes this technique effective:
- Persona mapping: Identify your ideal audience, including their pain points, dreams, objections, and beliefs.
- Content themes: For each pain, dream, objection, and belief, create three content themes. For example:
- Pain: High prices on similar products.
- Theme: Comparisons, promotions, and tips on saving money.
- Awareness levels: Develop content aligned with the customer journey stages, from unawareness to decision-making.
The key to the Starter Method is guiding your customer through each stage of their journey, addressing diverse interests to build connection and value.
RETINA: the Acronym for social media success
While the Starter Method focuses on persona pain points, dreams, objections, and beliefs, the RETINA framework adds an interactive dimension. Each letter stands for a pillar of content marketing on social media:
- R (Relationship): Build connections by showing the human side of your brand. Share stories, behind-the-scenes moments, values, and purpose.
- E (Engagement): Create attention-grabbing content, such as memes, fun facts, and trends, to encourage shares and likes.
- T (Transformation): Help your audience solve problems or learn something new—content they’ll save for future reference.
- I (Interaction 1×1): Encourage direct engagement, such as questions or replies to comments and messages.
- N (Levels of Awareness): Address your persona’s pain points, dreams, objections, and beliefs, showing how your product provides the solution.
- A (Authority): Establish expertise with content that reinforces your position as a market leader.
RETINA excels by fostering a closer relationship with your audience and driving qualified organic growth.
How to maximize results with content
Here’s how to integrate these strategies effectively:
- Start with the Starter Method:
- Map your persona: Understand their thoughts, emotions, actions, and challenges.
- Identify their pain points, dreams, objections, and beliefs.
- Organize content themes around each topic.
- Apply RETINA’s engagement and connection elements to each theme:
- For instance, for the theme “saving money,” create posts showcasing cost savings (Transformation), share customer stories (Relationship), and use humorous memes or comparisons (Engagement).
- Monitor and adjust:
- Analyze the performance of each content piece.
- Prioritize what works best while maintaining a balanced mix of content.
Need help implementing this? We’re here to support you!
The power of combining strategies
The two methods discussed today are complementary. When applied together, they help build a results-driven digital presence, grounded in research and strategy.
Adopting these techniques will enhance your content quality and deepen your audience connection.
After all, content marketing isn’t just about selling—it’s about creating value and lasting relationships.
Did you find this helpful?
Let me know: Are you ready to apply these strategies? Start planning today, and you’ll see that posting great content isn’t hard when you have a solid plan.