Social Media Content Creation and Strategy for Regional Businesses
- Jan 30, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 10
Most regional businesses approach social media content the same way. Something happens in the business, they grab their phone, take a photo and post it. Sometimes it connects. Often it does not. And over time the whole thing starts to feel random and exhausting.
The problem is not the content. It is the absence of a strategy behind it.
In Week 1 of the KGMG Creative social media workshop series, Matt Griffiths, KGMG co-director and head of social media, covers the foundational layer that makes everything else work: how to build a content strategy that suits your specific business, your specific audience and your specific goals.
What strategy actually means for a regional business
Strategy sounds like a corporate word. In practice, for a regional business managing their own social media, it means three things.
Knowing what you are trying to achieve. Not more followers or better engagement. Those are outputs, not goals. The real goal might be keeping your existing customer base warm and buying. It might be attracting visitors from outside the region. It might be building the kind of consistent visibility that turns silent followers into enquiries over time. The strategy looks different depending on which of those you are working towards.
Knowing who you are talking to. The content that resonates with a 45-year-old local business owner is different to the content that resonates with a 28-year-old tourist planning a weekend in the Macedon Ranges. Most businesses are posting at everyone and reaching no one in particular.
Knowing what to post and when. A content calendar is not about being rigid. It is about being intentional. When you know what is coming, you stop scrambling for something to post at the last minute and start creating content that is actually thought through.
Finding your brand voice
One of the most practical parts of Week 1 is the work around brand voice. What your business sounds like when it communicates, and how to keep that consistent across every post, every caption and every response to a comment.
Brand voice is not about being polished or corporate. For most regional businesses, the opposite is true. Authenticity, warmth and a genuine sense of place are the things that make regional businesses compelling on social media. A winery that sounds like a winery. A tradie who sounds like a tradie. A cafe that sounds like the specific cafe it actually is, not a generic hospitality brand.
Matt works through this with workshop participants using their own business as the example. By the end of the session, everyone has a clearer sense of what their business sounds like and how to keep it consistent.
Building a marketing calendar
The final piece of Week 1 is the practical structure that makes content strategy executable: the marketing calendar.
A marketing calendar maps out your content across the month, accounting for what is happening in your business, what is happening in the community, what is seasonal and what is evergreen. It is the difference between showing up consistently and showing up whenever you happen to have time.
For regional businesses, the calendar also accounts for local events, school holidays, seasonal patterns and community moments that a city-based social media manager would simply never think to include. That local relevance is one of the most powerful things a regional business can bring to their social media, and it starts here.
Watch the video
In the video above, Matt walks through the Week 1 content live from the workshop session. Watch it to get a feel for how the session runs and what is covered in the room.
Want to attend in person?
These workshops run regularly in partnership with MRFEC in Gisborne and consistently sell out. If you would like to join the next term, head to our workshops page for upcoming dates and bookings.
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