You’ve created a social presence across multiple platforms for your brand, and you feel like things are going well.
But, could they be going better?
Just existing on social media isn’t going to increase your brand awareness at the speed you want it to.
You need a strong and focused marketing content strategy to get your content in front of the eyes of the audience you want the most.
Why is it important to have a strong social media content marketing strategy?
Having an effective social media content marketing strategy for your brand will help you to increase awareness and drive traffic to your different channels.
Using the right content marketing strategy, you’ll see your brand;
- connect with your target audience.
- build brand loyalty.
- increase word of mouth.
- generate more leads.
- boost conversions.
- drive more traffic to your website which will improve your SEO ranking.
Even with this simple plan, it is possible to make some common mistakes. We’ve listed them below so you can plan ahead and avoid any pitfalls.
Not having a plan.
It doesn’t matter what industry your brand is in, you need a social content plan. It serves as a roadmap for all your marketing activities and will outline the expectations and outcomes you hope to achieve.
You’ll be able to clearly see what resources you need, and how you’ll measure your success as you move forward with the plan.
Without a proper plan you’ll just be creating and sharing content for the sake of it.
Not knowing your audience.
One of the biggest mistakes brands can make is not understanding their audience across their social platforms. If you don’t know who you are marketing to, and you don’t create content that resonates with them then you’ll just be wasting resources.
To better understand your audience you’ll want to collect some data before you plan ahead. Just guessing what your audience will like is more luck based than anything else.
A simple survey on your socials will give you a better understanding of your audience, throw out a question on your Instagram stories, something fun and engaging that will give you some insight into who your target audience are.
Complex language and tone.
Overly complex language isn’t always the way to go when connecting with your audience. The language you use is more important than you might think.
Make sure to use language that resonates with your audience. You want to show the human side to your brand to allows your audience to better connection between the two.
Your tone is can be a range of different things. You can be uplifting, confident, empathetic, compassionate, but also empowering and playful. You can consider a more professional tone, or choose something a little more friendly that focuses on being informative.
Test out different tones across a few pieces of content and see which ones work best for your brand.
Treating all social platforms equally.
Each social media platform is unique and allows you different opportunities when interacting with your audience.
You’ll want to implement a strategy for each platform rather than a blanket strategy that covers all of them. This means that you’ll be speaking the language of the users on each app, allowing for better interactions.
Spend some time researching which platforms your target customers are spending the majority of their time on and plan your strategy around that.
Quantity over quality.
Too much posting is never a good thing. You might think that pushing out as much content as you can is going to increase brand awareness and drive engagement from your followers, but you’d be mistaken.
Brands that post too often will generally begin to lose followers from the overwhelming amount of content taking over the news feed of audiences.
Put your efforts towards sharing high-quality, engaging content rather than clogging up the newsfeed.
Lack of engaging content.
Audiences are fickle, and don’t want to waste time on something that isn’t serving them. They want to be following brands who create and share engaging content that is addressing their pain points and helps them to learn something new about the brand.
If you know what your audience needs, you’ll have an easier time putting together content that suits them. If you hit a winner with a piece of content you may find that users will share your content to their network and all of a sudden the pieces will fall into place.
No attention-grabbing visuals.
Visual content is one of the best ways to evoke emotion and compel your audience to engage with your brand. You can use visuals to tell a story, explain more complex concepts, and show off statistics in a more palatable format.
You should still have text-based posts, but try to pair them with visual content to give your audience a wide range of things to see and interact with.
Make use of Stories and try going ‘live’ every once in a while, your audience will be curious to see what you’re doing and drop by.
