Social media marketing is a great tactic to create brand awareness, build a strong brand image, drive traffic to your site, motivate conversion, and maintain relationships with your community. Still, it’s also time-consuming, expensive, and requires many skills to achieve your goals. Creating amazing social media content also requires planning if you hope to maintain the consistency necessary to achieve these goals. Matching that content to hit potential buyers and customers with the right information at the right stage in the buying cycle optimizes the return from your marketing efforts. As you can see below, you must layer your content so you provide plenty of information to drive your community toward conversion.
Skills needed to generate amazing social media content
When you generate amazing social media content, you give your community accessible and meaningful information, bring new consumers to your website, and maintain current customers through excellent interaction. But, you need folks with a host of skills to create amazing social media content, including:
- Copywriting. You need a lot of smart, pithy content created on a daily basis. This content is more personal and less formal than content written for traditional marketing efforts. It also strives to deepen the relationship between the brand and its target market.
- Marketing strategy and planning. You need a well-researched marketing plan to guide your social media strategy based on a thorough review of the firm’s external and internal environments. A content marketing calendar makes the process of developing content on a consistent basis easier. Check out our great content marketing calendar template for some help in developing one of your own.
- Image creation and editing. For example, do you know you can remove the background from an image faster than ever before and share it with your audience on your social media platforms? With some exciting photographs, you impress your audience. With traditional media, you had a host of graphic designers to create stunning images for magazines and other print applications, which takes weeks. The speed of social media now means you must create these images almost at the drop of a hat, so you can’t afford the time necessary for a graphic designer to create the right image. We want good images fast with social media rather than great images slow.
- Understanding how social media platforms use algorithms to ensure your content shows up for the largest number of users in your target marketing.
- How to use marketing automation tools, such as Hubspot and Buffer, to ease the burden of sharing content at the right time on the right platform.
- The ability to understand analytics and translate data to build insights that help you improve your performance over time.
This article provides some practical strategies to create amazing social media content.
Creating amazing social media content
1. Do your research
The greatest content producers are also meticulous researchers. When you master research skills, you can generate genuinely authoritative material that enhances your reputation and adds value to your community.
Before you do that, however, you must develop a deep understanding of your target market, building personas like the one below to help you optimize performance with the right message on the right platform.
Create content that solves problems your target market faces or provides something interesting or entertaining. Be unique rather than repeat the same content types and messages as everyone else on the platform. With these topics in mind, produce unique content based on thorough research on the topic and avoid restricting yourself to the most popular blogs on your topic, which likely contains information that’s already covered extensively. Instead, analyze the whole market. If you can’t locate anything relevant, you may generate your data by hosting surveys and conducting interviews.
2. Create content in real-time
Learn about the interests of your target market and generate content appropriately. Get to know about the activities and television shows they attend and watch, such as motorcycle racing, soccer games, and movie award ceremonies. Link your content to events happening in the social spheres to ensure relevance to your market. Also, keep an eye out for unplanned events to avoid appearing insensitive by posting something upbeat, for example, at a time when events call for public mourning. This is the downside of marketing automation; it’s never a set-it-and-forget-it situation.
Also, discover what events your readers are interested in during a given period. Since it is challenging to keep track of all these important days/events, add them to your calendar template to ensure you create relevant content associated with the event.
3. Create unique and creative content
Instead of copying and pasting information from other websites, add value to posts by using original content. This strategy helps you stand out from the crowd and attract users to follow you. However, don’t be afraid to revisit topics you covered in the past. A social platform, even a blog, isn’t something visitors read like a book, from cover to cover. They pick and choose content to read, so you can cover an old topic with a new spin or write an update to an old post. After editing the content to fit the platform, you can even selectively reuse content, especially across different platforms. For instance, you can share your blog posts across your other platforms.
You can write and publish blog posts about your business and products on social media to increase traffic to your website. Lists, weekly round-ups, news, how-to articles, curated material, and case studies are popular blog content topics often shared on social media. Provide community forums and awards to entice users to visit your social media platforms.
Encouraging UGC (user-generated content) makes your job much easier as you use your community to create amazing social media content to support your goals. UGC also has more cache with your community and appears more trustworthy.
4. Motivate action
If you want to create exciting content, you must first inspire action. While you can use various methods to educate and engage the audience with helpful information, request their opinion, and conduct research, start by motivating action if you want to provide knowledge that converts readers into consumers.
Providing customers with helpful information or insight is an effective way to do this, as a strategy involving too much overt promotion doesn’t play well on social media. Restrict your promotions to less than 20% of your content if you want to keep building a vibrant community.
5. Pay close attention to feedback
Respect your fans’ and followers’ thoughts and suggestions and make them feel that you respect their contribution. To collect feedback on your services and products, you can utilize polls, surveys, and simple queries, as well as institute an effective listening program that seeks out user feedback wherever it occurs.
Also, consider your readers’ problems, issues, and queries, and ask your followers for predictions to engage them.
But, a monitoring program goes beyond simply listening and requesting feedback. You must monitor metrics associated with your social media marketing. By using a media monitoring tool, you can track and analyze the growth of your campaign. Each social platform provides some metrics you should monitor and analyze for insights. Plus, you must assess performance on Google Analytics to determine how effectively your social media marketing drives traffic to your site and what happens to visitors once they land on your site. Do they make a purchase? Which platforms and posts do the best job of translating to sales? Who is driven to your site from social media?
6. Apply humor in your content
Try using humor to keep your audience interested instead of always maintaining a serious tone while discussing your company.
Some examples of amusing content ideas include sharing a meme or cartoon, commemorating strange festivals, publishing “fact or myth” inquiries, and trying to be innovative.
Final thought
Since people are on social media to have some fun, your content must be captivating to gain the attention you need. Follow the above easy steps to create innovative social media marketing strategies.
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