It’s no question that content is an integral part of any marketing strategy and has consistently proven to be effective for lead generation.
While creating content is relatively easy, the challenge most marketers face is whizzing up relevant content that truly appeals to their target audience.
Your content means very little if you can’t fuel your viewers with enough information that excites and invites them to patronise your business. So ensuring you write interesting pieces and develop engaging visuals that are consistent with your marketing objectives is a top priority.
Here are three tips to help achieve smart content for your audience:
Think of your topic and stick to it
Before penning your content, carefully map out all your ideas. Then figure out exactly what story you want to share and how you wish to narrate it.
Determining your subject will help you create better content and you’ll be able to deliver more meaningful information. Your readers will also find it easier to follow your story when you haven’t been specific and provided a clear trail of thought.
Aim to inform, not to promote
Very few people, if anyone, wants to read something that’s basically screaming ‘Buy me now!’ It’s purpose should instead be to is to share information about your brand, and educate your reader. Excessive promotion can make you appear weak and desperate. Instead aim to build trust and show the value of your brand through engaging content.
Keep it short and don’t ramble
We all have have short-attention spans. Use simple words when expressing your thoughts and eliminate qualifying words to effectively get your message across.
Think less is more and your audience will appreciate it. Avoid rambling and always stick to your main subject.
Creating content should be fun and is a great way to get your creative juices flowing.
If you need help putting some life into your content, get in touch with us at [email protected].
It’s extremely easy for brands to build up a library of original content. The real challenge at hand is adapting that content to suit social media. In the age of short attention spans, brands need to keep up and tailor their content to suit each platform’s features or face being seen as irrelevant.
For brands, having a social media presence does not simply mean dumping the same content and format on every single social media channel possible. Doing it for the sake of it is ineffective and a waste of time and resources.
As intimidating as social media seems, brands need to craft content that fits. Results will follow when the outcome reflects consistent brand messaging and meaningful engagement with the brand’s audience.
When in doubt, repurpose
When posting articles on social media, always consider the fact that sometimes, less may be more. Because people are getting increasingly visual with their social media habits, brands can meet them halfway and start repurposing content instead.
Even if you’ve got a concise listicle, think about how that can be translated visually. Take a look and see what other brands have done:
HipVan remodels their blog posts into lean 5-6 images that provide a snapshot of the article’s best points. The 500×500 pixel image size gives people a full look at those images without needing them to take any extra action. On the overall, the simplicity and easy access of this format will no doubt increase the shareability on Facebook and other platforms.
Instead of posting a product link, Etch & Bolts made a visually appealing gif that summed up their new collection.
Size matters
Use people’s short attention spans to your advantage. Because people tend to swipe past brands very easily, it is your job to make sure you grab their attention even BEFORE they have a chance to look at the next post – this means you have about two seconds!
Get familiar with universal image sizes that work well on any platform and device. If you’re posting a photo on Twitter, make sure the size is optimised for all devices. What looks nice on desktops might look totally butchered on mobile phones.
Take a lesson from Instagram’s success – Square images/videos tend to do better on mobile displays because it takes up more space on the screen versus a landscape-oriented visual.
But…keep it short and sweet
If people are faced with a 300-word long caption on Facebook, chances are their thumbs have already swiped onto the next post. Keep your messages short and straight to the point. If anyone wanted to read that caption, they’d read a book.
Check out @sg_now’s example. The square image is universally friendly on all devices and the caption is snappy but let’s you in on sufficient detail.
TIP: Don’t see Twitter’s character count as a limitation, but as inspiration instead.
Sometimes, less may not be more
Though I’ve been preaching the ‘short and sweet’ message, there are exceptions. Take a look at Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist’s Facebook post:
You’ll see that the engagement on his post is insane – 13,637 likes and 1,816 shares! Notice his caption wasn’t exactly the most concise yet he still managed to rake in the numbers.
Bottomline? This example shows that there still is a place for in-depth content on Facebook but you need to be knee-deep in your analytics to see if that’s the best way of content delivery.
Producing viral content isn’t always the solution. Brands need to realise that not everything will go viral. Furthermore, creating content for the sake of achieving the almighty viral status ties up resources and isn’t sustainable in the long run.
Instead of spending time trying to make content go viral, focus on sustainable ways to grow and engage your audience. Brands cannot be built on viral videos but on strategies that focus on long term and sustainable growth.
Don’t see social media as another platform for you to dump all your branded content on. Take the time and see how your content can fit on a particular platform – each one’s different and will help you fulfill different objectives.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] to see how we can help you create compelling content for your social media platforms.
Understanding your consumer, their journey and purchase process is and should be the backbone of any content marketing strategy. The material we produce needs to help a buyer with their purchase decisions and address certain pain points.
It should educate and inspire as well as provide helpful tools to steer the buyer’s decision toward a specific product or service that you are offering. If it doesn’t, then the content serves absolutely no purpose and becomes a huge waste of your time and resources.
As well as to educate, your content needs to generate a sense of trust and show the reader that you understand what they need and know how to solve their problems. It should never be a sales pitch.
To understand your consumer means to follow their journey from the awareness stage right through to purchase (and beyond), and a content marketing strategy helps to attract those prospects and convert them to customers. It’s about producing targeted content, always keeping the buyer’s interests in mind, and with so much consumer and industry information available to us online, there is simply no excuse for poor content.
The move to digital has made content marketing one of the most effective marketing tools out there. The most important and fail-proof factor is to thoroughly understand your target audience and address something they cannot solve or are struggling with. This is the key to success.
If you have appeal, gain their trust, satisfy a need and delight them in the process, you could be on your way to converting a prospect to a customer and producing targeted content doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s a simple guide to get you thinking:
1 – Start with market research
Thoroughly research your industry, your audience and their behaviour patterns. What do people need and what are they struggling with? How do they buy?
Consider the buyer journey and start thinking about the sort of information they would require. This is the first step to developing great content that is targeted with purpose.
2 – Develop a buyer persona
Once you’ve done the research, you should by now be able to identify who your prospects are. Now it’s time to develop a few buyer personas.
According to Hubspot a buyer persona represents a semi-fictional version of your ideal customer. Consider their demographic information (i.e job title, role, responsibilities company, industry and budget) and their behavioural traits, such as their concerns, goals and motivating factors. Write it all down with as much detail as possible.
Developing these personas will immensely help with creating engaging content ideas and will help you structure a great content campaign.
3 – Your prospects matter…all the time
The buyer journey should not stop at the market research stage. Combine the buyer journey with the buyer personas that you have created. Always think about the prospect when producing any sort of content. You should ideally create a content series that covers topics relevant to their purchase journey – it’s not supposed to be a direct sales pitch.
For example, if you have started a fitness business focusing on body transformations, your content needs to work through all the elements that prospects should consider on their health and wellness journey. Talk about diet changes, foods that promote weight loss, what to eat/not to eat before and after a workout, simple lifestyle changes and include some success case studies. In a non-intrusive way you want to educate your customer and show how your services can help them achieve their fitness goals.
Now it’s your turn. Start creating some awesome content!
If you need help creating a winning content marketing strategy, please get in-touch with us at [email protected].
