Mikkel Svold: Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. I'm Miguel Svart and today I want to talk about something that I think is on many people's minds right now because of the New Year's. So many people for the New Year's it's a time where you consider what you're doing and you want to make changes for the upcoming year. So this would be 2026. Now what I want to talk about today is content categories and how to categorize content. And I think I hope I can teach you something that we've just worked on today and pass that on. Welcome to the Contentful Universe. Let's have a jingle. All right, so let's try and dive into it. So what I often see is people when they post on social media, they tend to post the idea of the day. And what I mean by this is obviously you've got private people posting the idea of the day, but you've also actually got quite a lot of corporations, large and small, who posts whatever they're doing that particular day. So that may be they have, you know, dinner with the crew or they may have be at a workshop or they just ⁓ take a random photo at the office or you have some, you visited some client and you want to take a photo together. And by all means do all of those posts. But when it comes to building thought leadership on, especially on LinkedIn, I find that these knock, these one-off idea of the day kind of posts. They are a little bit insufficient just by themselves. As a company, you would want to go a little bit deeper. You would want to have a harder strategy on what kinds of posts that you produce and you want to go and you want to produce posts that you can kind of take a red thread directly up through the marketing strategy up until ⁓ it hits the actual business strategy. What I want to propose to you, if you're one of those companies who do the post, you know, idea of the day, or for most, it will be the idea of the week, it'll be that one thing that you need to just do. My idea to you would be something as very simple. And I know this may be trivial to many of you, but a lot of you don't do it anyway. So what I would suggest is you put, you choose three, five, maybe even categories of posts that you want to produce for your company. And those categories obviously should stem or be a direct derivative from the business strategy. So if you have a strategy of being the cheapest and maybe low budget, you want to post a lot of content on being cheap, on being low budget, on how to save money. If you want to position yourself in the opposite end of the spectrum where most of my clients lie, you would want to position yourself as someone who knows a lot about this stuff, someone who's in the know in the industry, someone who you can rely on, not just as a supplier, but also as a sparing partner, as an advisor when you're building something really complex. If you're an engineering company, which most of my clients are, If you're an engineering company, you really want to make sure that your potential clients and current clients, they know that you can actually produce something that fits into the actual setup of whatever engineering machine that you are building or that your client is building. You want to make sure that they know that you know. And the only way of doing that is by posting out, positioning yourself via your communication. positioning yourself as an expert in the field. So what I suggest to you, if you're in that category, you want to create buckets of different types of content. So one being thought leadership content or knowledge sharing content or that sort of thing. That's one bucket for you. Then you have your social bucket, which is your employee stories. You have your cake at the office. You've got office day out. You've got workshops. got all of those with images of people in them. And those, don't be confused by this because those images and those posts, they will be the ones that outperform the others probably because it's a lot easier when you are a social being on a platform and you're not actually producing, but you're only consuming. It's a lot easier to just like something because your uncle is in the picture or something like that. So you'd have a lot more interaction with those kinds of posts. However, they don't position you as the expert. They just say that you're a, it's a nice place to work. So it's different stories and it has different audiences. But one thought leadership knowledge sharing category, one team category, you probably also want a category showcasing what you've done for other clients. So that can be cases, regular cases, you know them from the website, it's not a new thing. Cases with images, with examples of what you've done. But it could also be behind the scenes. So I could, for instance, take a picture of myself right now, you know, filming this. because that is a behind the scenes kind of thing. And it will showcase that right now we're actually working for this and that client and this is how we do it. So that is also a category that you can steal from us. Then I think one category that I would probably advise you to have as well is a category that showcases your services or your products. And the reason I'm saying this, because for some companies, This is like, this is the only thing they do. For many companies, especially in engineering companies, I would say this is the only thing they do. However, a lot of people and a lot of companies who work with thought leadership as their brand and who work intensively with branding, they tend to forget that you're actually also selling something. So they tend to only rely on the teams based, you know, the social posts and only the knowledge sharing posts. So those two categories solely, and they tend to forget that you also have something you want to sell. You also want to educate your followers on what it is that you can actually do. And I know this because we've done this ourselves. We've forgotten this ourselves because we've been so obsessed with things like this, things like explaining how it works, helping people to try and work out their way around, their way around producing content. We've tried, we've tried just doing that. And then after a few years, it kind of occurred to us that, we probably want to also tell our audience what it is exactly that we sell because I don't actually sell what I'm doing right now. I'm not selling doing this video. I'm not earning money doing this video. I earn money from selling marketing help. you know, helping marketing departments for producing content for them. That's how I make money. And if you are a, advisor company, if you're, or if you're an engineering company producing stuff, you still need to tell that story. You still need to make sure that they know. And I think a good place to start, if you are a little bit in doubt whether you do enough of that is try and ask your current clients if they know what you do, not if they know what they buy from you. But if they know what they could also have bought from you, do they know your whole package of what you can deliver? I bet you they don't. I bet you they only know that single thing because what you do only takes up like 1 % of their daily work and what you do takes up 100 % of what your daily work. So there's a big discrepancy in how you see things and how you feel about, well, your own company and what you do. So those would be the categories that I would definitely recommend to you guys. So go out, do the teams category or the social category where you get a lot of social proof, so to say, do the cases category where you have different cases and behind the scenes, and then do the knowledge sharing category, which is important for positioning yourself as an expert. Or if you want to position yourself as the opposite, as a cheap thing, you would exchange that for, you you go that direction. and then you want to have that service or product category. And with those, how many is that, four categories, you can then choose to post out four times a week, or you can duplicate one of the categories and then kind of do five to seven times a week. And when you have those categories, and this is the important part, you know that every single post you do under one of those categories, you can drag a line directly up to your strategy. because you want to position yourself, you want to use your knowledge sharing category as a positioning tool. So you know that you're now positioning and you know that you're now helping the company achieve the primary goal of that particular company. So, and also there's a benefit here, it's a little bonus trick. The benefit is obviously it's a lot easier to ideate when you have set categories that you have to ideate within, then if you just have like a greenfield ideation where you can do everything and anything and nothing basically happens. So, so that would be my absolute recommendation. Leave behind the, the day, you know, the, post of the, the, the post of the day, the idea of I can now do a post of the day, or I have a sudden idea or an idea fell from the sky and I want to do that. Instead, focus on filling up those categories with a lot of content, much of it, you can actually batch work. So you can do it in one go. And then you have like 20 posts that is just about your services. You can sit down one day or two day or maybe three days and then you're done with that and you can post it out over the next half year. So that's my recommendation for today. I hope it made sense. And yeah, if not, let me know. ⁓ Hit me up at podcast at big ideas. No, wait a minute. That's another one. Hit me up at podcast at montanus.co. All right. That's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for listening and see you on another planet in the content universe.