You will be able to mine customer questions, reviews and sales conversations for pillar topics and post ideas.
Scroll back through your WhatsApp chats with customers from the last three months. Somewhere in there is a parent asking whether the cake will survive a car ride to Jurong, or a client asking whether your package includes revisions, or a shopper asking if the blouse comes in a longer length. You probably answered each one once, privately, and forgot about it.
Every one of those questions is a post idea. Better still, it is a post idea written in your buyer's own words, and the next person with the same question is scrolling right now.
If you took Content and copywriting, you built a voice-of-customer file in lesson 1.4, Build your voice-of-customer file. That file is now the richest source of social content you have. The questions people ask before they buy are exactly what other buyers want answered, and when a post opens with a question in the same words a customer used, the right viewer recognises it as theirs.
Mei Ling went through her chats and found that "how many days in advance do I need to order" came up again and again, in slightly different wording. That became one video. "Will it melt if the party is outdoors" became another. "Can you do a cake that looks like a specific cartoon character" became a short explainer about what she can and cannot copy, and why.
The first job is to collect the questions word for word. Do not tidy them into marketing language, because the rough version is what a buyer would search for and recognise.
Your own messages are one source. There are three more that most businesses skip.
Your reviews, on Google Maps, Shopee, Carousell or wherever you sell, show what people praise and what disappoints them. Praise tells you what to show more of. A three-star review often tells you what people worry about before they buy.
Comments on competitors' posts are a free look at what your shared buyers are asking. If people keep asking another bakery whether it delivers to the west, that question is in your buyers' heads too.
Group chats and community pages, such as a Facebook group for your estate or a parents' group, show the problems people talk about before they have decided to buy anything. Read them, and keep any personal details out of your notes.
Owners tend to think the finished product is the most interesting thing they have. Viewers often disagree. A finished cake is nice to look at. A cake being stacked, levelled and piped, with one small disaster along the way, is something people watch to the end.
The process, the mistakes, the tools, the ordinary details of how you work are all things you take for granted and viewers have never seen. Priya's centre could show how she marks a worksheet and what the red pen notes mean, which no parent has seen from the inside. Farah, who sells modest workwear from her studio in Geylang, could show why she lengthens the sleeves on a pattern and what happens when a fabric shrinks in the first wash.
Mistakes deserve a special mention. The cake that collapsed in the oven, from lesson 1.1, worked because it showed a real problem and a real fix. Viewers trust a business that shows its process honestly more than one that only shows the perfect result.
The last source is you. Every field has common advice that you partly disagree with. A baker might think the trend for very tall cakes makes them hard to cut and serve at a party. A tuition teacher might think drilling past papers too early does more harm than good. A financial adviser might think people check their investments far too often.
When you state an opinion like that and explain your reasoning, you give viewers something your competitors are not saying, and you show how you think. Keep opinions to things you can back up from your own experience, and stay polite about people who disagree. The goal is to be useful and recognisable, and picking fights works against that.
Once you have collected twenty or so questions and comments, spread them out and look for repeats. Questions about timing and booking belong together. Questions about what is possible, such as eggless, gluten-free or a particular design, belong together. Stories about parties and children belong together. Each group that keeps growing is a pillar candidate.
You will find that some groups are full and some have only one item. That is normal at this stage. Lesson 2.4, Write your pillars and twenty post ideas, is where you decide which groups become pillars.
For now, the job is collecting. In the activity you will gather twenty real questions or comments from your messages, reviews or competitors' posts, and sort them into the themes they fall into.
Collect twenty real customer questions or comments from your messages, reviews or competitor posts and group them into themes.
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