By Kristin Laffrey, business coach for women leading impact in fertility, birth, postpartum, motherhood, parenting and matrescence.
It goes without saying that marketing is an integral part of building your doula business. Whether you are looking to get your first client or creating a consistent flow of clients into your doula packages, you need to be able to attract clients.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach where you can build your doula business through creating and distributing valuable, informative and relatable content to attract your ideal pregnancy, birth and/or postpartum clients. The power of content marketing is that it can be created and distributed in many different forms such as social media posts, blog posts, videos, podcasts etc.
When you build out your content marketing strategy and have a clear process for executing your content creation, you can maximise your marketing to reach more of your potential clients.
Here are the key reasons you want to be utilising content creation for your doula business:
It builds trust and credibility with your audience: as a doula, the way you work with your clients is extremely close and therefore attracting clients requires you to build trust and credibility with your audience to create safety in them reaching out for support. An effective content marketing strategy can support you to do that.
It allows you to attract the right clients: producing valuable content can draw potential clients to your brand and your business. Most importantly though, it can attract the RIGHT people. As a doula, you aren’t here to work with anyone but rather the people you desire to support and the content you create can ensure you are attracting the right clients for you. That is why the type of content you are creating and the message you are delivering is so important in your marketing.
It drives traffic: content marketing drives traffic to your platforms to then be able to nurture them to build that trust and credibility for them to work with you.
It is cost effective: compared to traditional marketing, content marketing is extremely cost effective making it easy to create and distribute content to attract clients and also leverage your strategy to add layers to your content marketing strategy as you decide to further increase visibility and grow your business.
Now that you know why it’s important and extremely valuable to produce content within your business to attract doula clients, how do you maximise your content creation to streamline your process and make distribution more simplified?
Having worked with doulas, both starting and expanding their businesses, since early 2020, here is one of the greatest challenges I see when it comes to creating content.
Their ability to continuously create content.
There are two things that are important to make this happen:
A clear marketing strategy that you can execute
A simplified process for executing your marketing strategy to create content
In creating content, one of the most effective and streamlined processes for creating consistency is to batch-produce content. This article is going to walk you through the 6 step process to creating content so that you can identify the tasks that need to be complete to execute your content marketing strategy and batch the tasks to create a simplified process to complete.
The 6 step process to producing content
Here is a 6 step process for creating and distributing content to support you in creating consistent content within your business to reach your potential doula clients and book more clients into your packages.
Step 1: Clarify
Determine the intention and purpose of the content you are creating. When producing content it is important to understand the intention behind the content. Knowing why you are creating this piece of content and the purpose for what the content is going to deliver is going to drive the way it is received by your audience and also the action they take from the content.
Clarifying the intention and purpose of your content is a big part of your content marketing strategy. This is a big part of how I support clients within the Mothermind because having a clear marketing strategy is going to support you in knowing how to attract and convert doula clients to create a consistent flow of clients.
Step 2: Outline
Create an outline of the core content message you are looking to deliver. The core message you are delivering within your content to meet the intention and purpose clarified in step 1 is going to ensure you are delivering a clear and concise message for your ideal clients. It is important throughout the whole process to come back to “does this content I have created deliver the core message I am delivering to my ideal client?”
Step 3: Draft
Write draft copy drawing on the core message to be delivered.
Step 4: Create
Create any corresponding graphics/visuals to support your content. A great free tool for creating graphics/visuals for your content is Canva. Create templates for your different styles of posts to support you in being able to quickly create graphics to support your content.
Step 5: Review
Edit, refine and create final amendments to your content prior to completing the final copy.
Step 6: Schedule
Upload content and schedule for posting to the appropriate site. Although you don’t need to schedule your content, you can post whilst you are online however to be able to batch produce content, scheduling is an effective way to prepare and complete multiple pieces of content ahead of time so that you aren’t required to be online all the time in your business producing and distributing content.
If you are struggling to create consistent content in your doula business, having a clear marketing strategy and simplified process for executing your strategy is an effective way to maintain content creation and distribution within your business.
Take time to map out your upcoming posts and the intention behind each post, get clear on the core message you want to deliver within each post, draft your copy for those posts, create any corresponding graphics, review your content and then schedule.
Ensuring that you have an effective process for creating content is going to not only increase efficiency within your business but also support you in creating consistent content so that you can attract more doula clients and grow your business to serve more women throughout pregnancy, birth, postpartum and beyond.