The content marketing's magic ratio

If there is one phrase that often comes up in my consultation sessions, it is the following: "Yes, but I don’t want to be annoying to my audience!" It’s normal, when I tell my clients that I post between 8 and 12 times a day on social media, they are shocked every time. (Know that my goal is 20 times before 2020!) So far, I have never received negative comments about my posting frequency and I have more and more engagements with my posts. On the contrary, I receive several dozen messages each week from people who tell me they appreciate my content and encourage me to keep creating it. This is largely because I respect the magical ratio of content marketing, the 4-1-1.

Combined with our automated marketing tools, our content marketing strategy brings us up to 40 qualified leads per month… why wait?

What is the 4-1-1 ratio?

In marketing, the 4-1-1 ratio is an extremely important notion and, at the same time, probably the simplest to put into practice. Four elements of informative or entertaining content, 1 soft sale, 1 hard sale, and then we start over!

By informative content, we mean blogs, articles, videos, graphics, PDFs, whitepapers, etc. The goal of informative content has only one aim: to educate your prospect and help them with their challenges, fears, and problems.

What do I mean by soft sale? These are posts that highlight your business and your clients. For example, testimonials, case studies (business cases), name dropping (a photo of you with one of your clients), etc.

Finally, a hard sale post consists of making a direct call to action. You could promote your services, highlight a promotion, offer a free consultation, etc.

If we consider that between 5 and 10% of your audience sees your content when you publish it, if you respect the magic ratio of content marketing, your audience will not find you "pushy", I assure you!

How to apply the magical ratio of content marketing?

To be able to post 12 times a day, it is evident that you need to have a lot of content. However, you are not required to post 12 times a day to use the magical ratio of content marketing!

To have a good impact, I suggest that you publish at least twice a day on each platform. To be super effective in creating your content, I wrote an article that provides great tips to create content quickly using the virtuous content method.

To start your content marketing strategy, I suggest having at least 60 posts prepared before getting everything running. Then, use a software such as Monday, Asana, or Google Sheets to create an editorial calendar. Here’s an example:

Finally, to schedule your posts, two options are available to you. You can either pre-schedule each of your posts in a software (SaaS) like Hootsuite or do it directly on Facebook. As for Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, you absolutely need to use an external digital tool to pre-schedule your posts.

Gro and the magical ratio of content marketing

In general, I have a month of pre-scheduled posts in advance. I focus on content creation one week out of six. By focusing 100% on content creation for several consecutive days, it allows me to be much more efficient and create a lot of content. As I write 4000 to 5000 words per day when I’m in a good rhythm, a week of creation work often gives me 25,000 words (the article you are reading is around 1050 words, for comparison).

Then, I ask our graphic designer to prepare visuals and gather information to create an ebook. So I have about 25 blog articles per week of work.

Here are several examples of posts that would be part of the "4" in the magical content marketing ratio.

These are mainly blog articles or graphics. Sometimes, I will also take some elements from a blog article to create "long posts" like this one:

I have recently started to be more disciplined with Facebook stories. I always try to be as entertaining as possible (I must say we are quite funny at the office!) and occasionally, I will publish a blog article or promote one of our services.

After publishing four content elements in the "4" of the magical ratio, I will then follow up with a "soft sale".

Here are some examples of soft sale posts I have published on social media:

In general, these content elements aim to increase the social proof of my business. (Social proof refers to your reputation on social media.) For example, testimonials and reviews are excellent for enhancing the social proof of your business.

I also like to create business cases about our projects. Business cases provide the opportunity to effectively showcase your expertise to your audience while also generating organic traffic for your website.

Another type of soft sale content that I like to use is ebooks. Ebooks make it easy to gather contact information from your audience, allowing you to build an email list and more targeted audiences.

Finally, regarding so-called "hard sale" posts: this type of post focuses on the call to action (CTA). Here we talk about making appointments, free or paid consultations, free evaluations, etc.

Here are some examples of hard sale posts:

Don't be afraid to publish your quality content!

If you believe your content is of quality (I sincerely hope so!), then do not hesitate to regularly post on social media. The more often, the better, period. By using the magical ratio of content marketing, your audience will not be "overwhelmed" by promotions or offers and you may even see your audience grow.

Trust yourself! Create good content and share it quickly with your audience!