I Spent a Month Developing My Content Marketing Muscles  

October 24, 2023

Have you ever wondered what it takes to create awareness and a buzz around a brand or product in the digital realm? I did and over the past month, I immersed myself in the world of content marketing, and I’m excited to share my experiences and discoveries with you.

As of this post, I am going through an online personal and professional development course called Praxis. Part of the work that I am completing includes four skill projects, this being the first. I hope you enjoy reading about how I created a month-long content marketing skill project, and seeing the results from it! 

Purpose of this Project

This month my goal was to create marketable content for my online apparel shop, Flora Fauna Fantasy, and to learn more about content marketing. Simply put, content marketing is creating digital materials to bring awareness to a specific brand or product. These can be blogs and videos, or in my case, social media posts and emails. By the end, I had created twenty social media posts, five emails, and one landing page for this project. Here’s how I did it.

Week 1: Research

“No research without action, no action without research.”

–  Kurt Lewin

I research everything. Everything. Plants, psychology, politics, people, quantum phys positiveics, the list goes on and on. Ask me about any random topic, and I probably have a tidbit of obscure information about it. All this to say, I like to know what I’m getting into beforehand so I have some expectations of what’s going to happen. Marketing is no different. I’ll save you my obsessive details though, and give you some broad and beneficial information about content marketing.

As I previously said, content marketing is making content to create awareness of a brand or product. Around two-thirds of it can be educational, entertaining, or the combination, edutainment. The final third can directly promote the products or brand itself. The goal of this method is to create value for the consumer (edutainment) to keep them engaged, curious, and aware, before asking to create more value for them through the purchase of your product or services. 

The customer is always your focus in any kind of marketing. Who are you trying to reach, what do they need, how can you solve it, and how can you reach the people with the problem? These are the main questions that marketers ask. Now for a short flashback.

I knew going into this project that I wanted to create content for an apparel shop I created on Bonfire.com. The shop is called Flora Fauna Fantasy Designs. It sells t-shirts, hoodies, and crewneck sweaters with unique designs that incorporate the best parts of fantasy, dark academia, and cottagecore aesthetics into modern apparel. I had six designs that I created and a little bit of content marketing on social media for it.

To come up with answers to the questions as mentioned earlier, I did market research on who my ideal customer was, what they needed, and how I could solve it. For Flora Fauna Fantasy, an ideal customer is probably a young adult who enjoys reading fantasy or has a taste for dark academia and cottagecore aesthetics. Flora Fauna Fantasy creates value by providing a way to express that love for fantasy without putting on a full suit of armor or ballgown. After a week of research, I began building this hypothetical landing page.

Week 2: The Landing Page

 “Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

– John F. Kennedy

A landing page is a standalone page that can be used to complete a specific purpose. This purpose might be to offer a sale, request a quote for something, or subscribe to a newsletter. My landing page was designed for a hypothetical newsletter, the idea behind this being if I can create something of value to a hypothetical customer, for example offering a weekly newsletter talking about ideas on how to romanticize your life, I would be able to collect emails for future marketing. You can see the landing page that I designed using Convert Kit below.

Landing pages are meant to have a specific call to action. This call to action should be repeated multiple times throughout the design. If your call to action is something that requires more effort from someone, it is helpful to have reviews below it to give legitimacy. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reviews to use yet because I have not made any sales.

The first part of the page is designed to create interest and collect the email.

The second page is the conclusion of that subscription.

Using ConvertKit was quite easy after I figured it out. The formatting of the website made locating the type of page I wanted, and then customizing it, fast. I think my hypothetical email newsletter is well on its way to getting some new hypothetical subscribers!

Week 3: Content Creation

“Creativity is just connecting things.”

 – Steve Jobs.

Finally, the big week came and it was time to put all of what I learned into practice. This week started with me collecting photos to use for the content that I would be making. I used a free trial of HootSuite to create my post schedule and Canva, which is incorporated into their site, to create a majority of my posts. I made both Instagram and Facebook posts and I also used Twitter to create tweets, that I then re-purposed into Facebook and Instagram posts. I researched the best times to post these and using HootSuite features I created a posting schedule.

I made both entertaining posts and posts that were directly marketing my products. I found aesthic photos and different quotes for my entertaining posts and tweets. Here’s an example of an entertaining post:

Then I used different designs from my shop to directly promote the shop. Here’s an example of one of those:

See the rest of my Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts.

Overall I created 20 individual posts, 15 of which were identical Instagram and Facebook posts, and five tweets. After I finished making those, I created five welcome marketing emails. These emails are made with the purpose of calling a new subscriber to action and making a stronger connection to them. Because conversion usually happens at the beginning, after there’s a bit of excitement around the product, you want to make a connection with the possible customer ASAP when they subscribe. The call to action in this case was to purchase from Flora Fauna Fantasy.

View the emails here.

Week 4: Showcasing the Project

“I think it’s important to have some documentation of the past.” 

– Henry Rollins

This week my focus has been creating another landing page to host this post, and a video documenting my process to showcase the project that I created. Documentation is an important part of the process as I have learned. I use it when I create art and now for this project. For others it allows them to see the skills that I bring to the table. Even just for myself, I can look back at how far I’ve come in my own growth process, which is part of the reason I keep multiple journals for different things. Anyway, here’s the video documentation of my skill project.

What I Wish I’d Done Differently

As with anything in life, there’s always something that you can improve on and this is no different. While I am happy with what I created this month, I think it could have shined even more with just a bit more time and effort put into it. With all the other things that I’m working on I couldn’t spend quite as much time as I would have liked to on this project. For example, if I had created only Instagram and Facebook reels, I think my engagement would have been much higher. The one reel I posted gained over 240 views, but my highest-viewed post only had only 10. However, it took me four times as long to make that reel than a regular post, and I simply did not have the time to make 20 different reels.

Final Thoughts

For rapidly learning this new skill, I’d say I did pretty good. I learned a lot about what goes into any sort of content marketing and how to do it. I enjoyed creating the content as well as learning about what works and what doesn’t. In the future I think I will continue marketing for my shop, just not as intensely as I did this month. Marketing is a valuable skill to have, and the more time I spend on it, the better I’ll get at it. Thank you for taking the time to read about what I created!

Resources that I Used to Complete this Project

If you are interested in the tools that I employed, or want to try something like this out for yourself, check out the links below.

• Praxis– which taught me how to structure this project and gave me ideas for resources to use on it.

• Pexels– my love for this free images site knows no end. I’ve used it for art references, PowerPoint presentations, and now this project as well.

• Hootsuit– using the sixty-day free trial on this site made it so easy to schedule posts and even create them using the embedded Canva feature.

• Canva– it works excellently for designing appealing graphics, and I used it to design a majority of my posts.

• ConvertKit– this site has a ton of different landing page options to choose from. I was able to easily customize my landing page from here.
• CapCut– I used this for the video editing! There are a ton of different editing tools that you can use for free.