As a business owner, online traffic is vital to the growth and success of your entire operation. As consumers shift evermore to digital channels, it’s important to choose a marketing strategy that will give your business the most traction among your target audience. Digital marketing itself can be complicated, time-consuming, and costly, but there is one channel that is still relatively easy and inexpensive to find success: social media. And the path to success on that channel runs through content.
Content is the driver behind many of today’s successful digital marketing strategies, providing a unique opportunity to assist your target audience through the buyer journey with useful, genuine information. Much like your physical storefront requires appealing goods to catch your consumers’ attention, your digital presence–including your website and social pages–requires similar love and care to increase traffic to your business.
As we continue to traverse through a digital-first environment, your business should have a content strategy and social presence operating in tandem to engage with your consumers and keep them up-to-date on the status of your operation. But before you invest money into the content creation process, it’s important to understand what “content” means and how and where to source it to expand your digital presence.
What Is Content, Anyway?
Content, in today’s sense of the word, generally means any piece of information that you’re putting out into the world. That could entail the copy and images in your email campaign, the descriptions and product photography on your website, or the video in your social post. Importantly, content doesn’t always need to be produced by you or your team in order for you to benefit from it, but it does need to be sensibly released to maximize its value.
As an example, let’s say a brand that you sell in your store posts a great photo of a new product they’ve just released. While you can always just hit the reshare button to share the post with your followers, a more beneficial method for you to repurpose that content would be for you to download the image and post it as a native post on your business’s website. In this scenario, knowing that reshared content gets less visibility than natively posted content, your more sensible option would be to download the video and post it yourself to your business’s social page. The few extra minutes this takes will result in 477% more shares on Facebook than simply re-sharing your brand’s existing YouTube link.
Better in Tune With Your Industry
Producing high-quality, informative social content can be a difference-maker for your business, but it’s not everything.
The content marketing process involves becoming an active member of your community, asking questions and providing moments of education for your consumers. And while many of your consumers are practicing stay-at-home and social distancing techniques, it’s important to be mindful of the content you produce and share to best inform your audience moving forward.
Invest time in better understanding your industry – its status during COVID-19, current trends, etc. – and following industry-centric resources to stay up-to-date with what’s pertinent for your business and your consumers. You’ll see a return on investment in the form of brand awareness, consumer engagement, and customer loyalty.
Curation is Critical
A strong social content strategy is more than just churning out new social content. If you curate your digital assets to address specific problems and provide useful information to your audience, you can position yourself as a thought leader for your consumers and your industry.
Even if you think anyone can benefit from your content, focus on tailoring it to reach consumers that will most likely engage with your content in a beneficial way. Your interest in providing genuine content on your social pages will reflect with a higher retention rate towards your social page and greater awareness for your business.
Your consumers will also build a better impression of your business as they engage with your content. If they find what they read to be helpful, informative, or enlightening, your business’s reputation and followers will increase.
Paid or Organic Social Content?
Lastly, your plan of attack is vital to your social content’s success with your target audience. It’s imperative to choose a method (or two) that best fits your company’s budget while being perceived as genuine towards that audience.
Paid social advertising or paid social media refers to social content that is influenced by advertising dollars – such as boosting, targeting, etc. This form of media enables businesses to display content beyond their followers in areas where it otherwise wouldn’t show up. In fact, marketers spent more than $89 billion last year on social media advertising efforts alone.
With thousands of posts vying for your potential customer’s attention on social media, paid media is necessary to break through the noise and gain traction toward your business. However, you should not overlook the impact that organic media can have on your business too. As a cost-effective marketing tactic, organic media can help develop authentic interactions with your consumers and promote your value propositions without using paid promotion–gaining you more engaged and loyal followers.
We recommend utilizing both paid and organic tactics in tandem to maximize your ability to reach a broader audience while crafting authentic, compassionate content that doesn’t bombard their feed. By finding a balance between paid and social, you can supplement your social feed with brand-safe messaging that is promotional but also sensitive to the present climate.
Be Mindful of the Moment
We understand that today’s environment presents challenges to promoting your business and generating sales. But If your business has yet to incorporate a content strategy that is promotional while being mindful of these uncertain times, you may miss out on an opportunity to genuinely connect with your consumers and provide useful knowledge – now and in the future.
If you’re still having some trouble cultivating the right strategy for your business, it always helps to get a few pointers from someone who’s helped with messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do not hesitate to reach out to us and inquire about how we can help navigate your business’s social content strategy during these trying times.
