by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
Something you maybe didn’t realize when you started as a college coach is just how much time, effort, and planning goes into effective content creation that will connect to your ideal recruit and take them from identification to commitment.
You hear about your competitors texting every day, calling and emailing every week, posting nearly every day on the ‘gram like it’s easy, peasy, lemon squeezy—so you may not have even thought twice about it when you took the jump into becoming a head coach.
But you quickly found out it’s definitely easier said than done. Way easier.
Week to week, you find yourself racking your brain for content ideas for your texts, emails, Instagram feed, AND Instagram stories. Do your recruits really care about every detail of your or your athletes lifes!?
The short answer? Yes. Your recruits want you—are counting on you—to show up. They TRULY want the insight only you can bring to them!
But when it feels so difficult to continuously come up with content to share, and it takes SO much of your time… it’s hard to find the motivation to keep up with the Joneses on content creation.
I want to give you an inside look as to the process I go through. Since I am not posting to attract recruits these days, I changed this process below up a little to make this relevant to you as a recruiter.
A lot of coaches come to me overwhelmed by the thought of having to create content for recruits via emails, texts, social, letters to attract and sell the recruits they are after.
I was overwhelmed too until I learned how to repurpose content.
That strategy is to create 1 piece of content a week, then repurpose it across all of the mediums where you are connecting with recruits.
You don’t have to do it every week, but that’s how you’ll get the most momentum.
For content ideas, I always go back to paying attention to the question’s recruits are asking you.
For example, let’s say you shoot one video answering a recruits question about all of the things your team does for fun on campus.
Once you’ve shot the week’s video, you’ll repurpose it all over the place. Here’s the steps:
1. Shoot a 2-5 minute video. Name the video using terms you think your recruits searches or will be interested in. Yes, your video can be shorter or longer—it’s totally up to you.
2. Upload the video into a Dropbox folder that you and your team can access. Always include your programs name, episode number, topic, and your name in the title (e.g. “BusyCoach-37-HowToGetOrganized-MandyGreen.mp4”).
3. Capture 3 thumbnails/stills from the video that you can use for posting later. Save different sizes of each thumbnail including 400px wide (for email use), 600px wide (for Facebook use), 720px or full size (for YouTube), and square (for Instagram). Put text over the thumbnail with the topic of the video (e.g. “How to Get Organized”) or a quote from the video (“Get it out of your head and down onto paper”).
4. Send the video Dropbox link to a transcriptionist (I use Rev.com). Put the transcript into your Dropbox folder for that episode and use the same naming convention (e.g. “BusyCoach-37-HowToGetOrganized-MandyGreen.mp4”).
5. Now upload your video to YouTube. Follow these instructions:
- Publish it as Public.
- Add tag names relevant to video, your brand, and your target market.
- Include your social media links in the top of the description so recruits or their parents can follow you.
- Include a summary with keywords in the video description. Add annotations and a call-to-action overlay to the video. Link people to your social media pages.
6. Use the transcription to create emails that you can send out to your recruits.
7. On your Facebook page(s), post the blog link with the embedded video and 500 word summary right after you make the YouTube video public.
8. Create 7 quote images from (or inspired by) the video. Post one image per day, along with its text, on your social media sites (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat etc) and include a link to the YouTube video page.
9. At the end of the week, take note of:
- Which quote images from the video were liked/shared the most. Put them in a special Dropbox folder called “Most Popular” so that you can repost the popular images again. (I recommend putting all popular quotes in recurring rotation).
- Which Social Media posts/links were liked/shared the most?
Use this information to make improvements to next months posts.
10. Repeat every week. If it seems like a lot of work, remember all these efforts are ultimately driving people to trust, like, and engage more with your program.
The best way to build a loyal audience who trusts you, is engaged with what you are talking about, and is curious enough to come and visit in person to see if for themselves? Consistency in your brand—aka, how you show up in the world.
When you talk about the same topics in the same voice on your phone calls, social media, and in your recruits’ inboxes, you start to build unshakeable trust with your ideal recruit. They know what kind of content to expect from you, how it’ll sound, and how often they’ll hear from you.
Creating 1 piece of content and then repurposing it gives you the ability to easily connect the dots between all of your communication channels to consistently attract your ideal client all. the. time.
If the content goes over well, you can reuse the content at a later time when you start recruiting your next class so you are not reinventing the wheel with each new class.
Want more strategies to save you time and improve your recruiting results? Email Mandy to set up a strategy call, mandy@busy.coach.