How Our Content Strategy Came Out of Six Years of Assisting Therapists
In 6+ years of the virtual assistant world, we’ve gotten to do some amazing work and contract with some incredible businesses. We’ve gotten the chance to develop new creative and business minded skills and figure out our passions with in the online business space in our work. Which makes it hard to say goodbye.
But we also know it’s time: as of 2024, we’re not opening any spots on our calendar for any more virtual assistant contracts.
On the outside, the last two years have been business as usual. We’ve been continuing our day to day work, prioritizing work that built our client’s businesses over our own, appearing on our own digital platforms infrequently if at all.
Behind the scenes, we were making the terrifying decision of ending a client relationship that had been in place since the very beginning of our business. It was a professional relationship that gave us a lot: creative freedom, flexibility in our roles so we got to jump into new projects when we felt suited to them, and more referrals than we ever planned on–we even had to start a wait list to accommodate them.
As we were building our business, these were gifts we didn’t dare take for granted. We showed our appreciation in a number of ways we know now do more to erode rather than cement reciprocal respectful relationships (prioritizing projects no matter when they were given, working beyond reasonable hours, doing extra work unpaid in order to keep peace, procrastinating rate changes out of fear, etc.)
Soon though, the balance had tipped so far we were being run ragged under an outdated contract that we couldn’t afford to terminate and that our client wouldn’t agree to update. After months of feeling exploited and trying to arrange meetings with no movement from the other side, there came a time there wasn’t a choice anymore: we had to say goodbye. We ended our contract, and told ourselves we’d find the next phase of our business soon.
And we did–when we finally terminated that contract, our calendar opened up for us to take real steps forward in the work that had been on the back burner for years.
While we’ve done years of blogging and social media work for our therapy practice clients, we were never able to dive into it as deeply as we wanted to.
At first, we were simply posting assistants for many of our clients; they’d send us what they wanted posted to their various accounts and we’d brand and format the content for each platform and schedule it just to take it off their plate. Soon, many of our clients wanted to expand our role to a more creative one, allowing us to do more content planning and design as well as keeping up a regular posting schedule for them on our own. With our virtual assistant clients we took responsibility for:
Repurposing existing content
Maintaining a consistent posting schedule
Posting new blogs, staff updates, events as needed
But it was all within an hourly service package, so what we could get done was also determined by volume of additional tasks within the virtual assisting package.
However, as millennials in therapy, we had a unique perspective on the work we were doing.
Up until recently, we’ve been the primary users of social media and digital spaces (happy to welcome younger gens to the mix! they love all the platforms we loathe!) so as users who valued accurate mental health information, we’ve been keeping our eye on content strategy within the mental health space from both the content creator AND content consumer perspective. And we wanted to do things differently–not just for the business we worked with, but businesses like them. Culture and community conscious businesses who might be facing a daunting task when it comes to social media because their work, by nature, goes against what platforms prioritize. We’re talking about business like:
queer centered businesses
sexuality and sexual health educators
HAES dieticians specializing in eating disorder recovery
With these types of businesses and online communities, the tricks that work for others could pose ethical or values based problems for them. How do you establish your voice in a space that prioritizes inflammatory content and overgeneralized information, especially when that poses a direct harm to your community if you were to engage in those practices? Instead of depending on trends and vanity metrics, we want to contribute to an intentional online space.
Focusing on going viral or reaching as many people as possible or other vanity metrics can get your content in front of a lot of people–but very rarely do those people become clients or part of your community.
Creating values based content means getting back to the purpose of your presence:
Who are you trying to connect to?
What are you trying to offer them?
How can your expertise, passion and perspective make a difference to your community?
We’ve said the phrase vanity metrics a few times now.
In content strategy, particularly on platforms like Instagram (which is our social media expertise) there are vanity metrics and there are values based metrics. Lets break down the difference:
Vanity metrics are metrics such as: followers, likes, and views. They’re called “vanity” metrics because they’re easy to fake (buying followers, etc.) and they often don’t:
correlate to increase in business
indicate a loyal, engaged community
Value metrics on the other hand refer to:
visibility: plays, profile visits, reach, impressions
conversation: comments, shares, saves, DMs
interaction: website taps, sticker taps, organic follows
Using these metrics gives you a clearer idea of what your community is actually finding valuable, and helps keep your content aligned with the purpose of your business. It also takes into account that the size of your visible community doesn’t equate to the success of your community.
Let’s take the example of a HAES (Health At Every Size) dietician whose clients are in recovery from an eating disorder. Posts shared about resources for family members, books to support the recovery process, weight bias and sitgma, etc. might not get a lot of comments, and unless likes aren’t visible to others, they might not get a lot of likes either! But that doesn’t mean they’re not supporting the account’s purpose. People might be saving them, sharing them with others, messaging you about the resource/information or clicking through the links you direct them to with the post–all things you can’t see from the outside, and all things that don’t necessarily correlate to account popularity or content virality.
This private action being the primary way users engage with vulnerable topics highlighted the need for another difference in our content strategy: logistics, values and ethics would simply prevent the potential for endless growth or the ability to appeal to as many people as possible, so the strategy had to focus on different goals. In learning more about values based metrics, we saw the three main goals of purpose driven digital content as being:
To attract new aligned community members
To nurture and engage your existing community
To convert community members to clients and customers
The third step often has a sleazy feel, but with a values based approach, we like to think of this stage as just another step in your client’s growth. If you’ve been providing them with valuable content since they first came to you, hopefully you’ve given them what they need to achieve the steps before working with you on their own. In other words: your free content should “prime” your community not just in the sense that you’re prepping them for a sale, but because what you’ve offered to them for free was able to help them until they grew more (or were prepared in some other way) and then needed more comprehensive services.
Our work with creating content for therapy practices also helped highlight that trends ≠ strategy.
Scrambling to slap together whatever TikTok trend is hot right now isn’t gonna do anything for your business. And that’s the case for every trend, whether it’s a meme, a reel, language used, trending audios, or whatever.
Now, if you actually like a current trend and are excited at the idea of creating your own version, do it and don’t let us stop you! Stuff like that is only fun on the consumer side when the person making it actually had a good time. But trends are so short lived, investing in them as strategy beyond just having a good time now and then, just doesn’t make sense–and it doesn’t really communicate anything to your community about how you’re hoping to show up for them. And poor, cringey, or simply unaligned attempts might even put potential community members off.
The bottom line for values based content strategy: you don’t have to be doing everything on every platform. You need to be staying in alignment with your purpose and showing up in your community.
