The No-Sweat Guide to Social Content Marketing | Brandwatch
Content Marketing
The importance of sharing high-quality content on your brand’s social channels cannot be overstated in today’s digital landscape.
Creating a robust portfolio of valuable and targeted content is no longer optional but essential for companies aiming to distinguish themselves. Great content helps you effectively reach your target audiences, achieve high engagement, and build your brand.
However, developing and sustaining a winning content strategy for your social platforms can be daunting, especially when you have multiple social management tasks to juggle. Each aspect needs to be managed in an organized and strategic manner.
Don’t worry—you can rise to this challenge by combining your social media expertise with the right content strategy.
This guide provides comprehensive tactics to help you succeed with your social content strategy. Here’s a detailed approach:
Decide on the Types of Content
Determine the appropriate types of content for each platform. For example, long-form content like eBooks or infographics may be suitable for Facebook or LinkedIn, while Instagram might be better for single or multiple visuals. These decisions should align with your target audience’s preferences and your business goals.
Analyze the Content Needs of Your Personas
Understand what types of content resonate most with your target personas. By knowing who your audience is, where to reach them, and what information they seek, you can tailor your content to meet their needs and advance your business goals, such as lead generation and brand awareness.
For instance, if you’re targeting executive-level professionals in larger companies with a B2B tech product like accounting software, share data-rich eBooks and guides on LinkedIn.
Conversely, if you have a B2C product targeting sports fans, such as protein-rich foods and drinks, focus on short-form content, visuals, and infographics on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
To engage Gen Z or Millennials with a clothing brand, share bite-sized videos on Snapchat and TikTok, cool images on Pinterest, or even launch a podcast about fashion trends.
Research What Your Competitors Are Posting
Conduct thorough research on your competitors to identify general trends and effective tactics. However, don’t just replicate their strategies. Ensure your content offers something unique and valuable to your audience. A great technique for this is the skyscraper method, where you build upon top-performing content by adding more useful information, visuals, and updated data.
Steps for the skyscraper method:
- Find the top-performing relevant content for your topic.
- Analyze why it works.
- Develop your approach to surpass it by including more valuable information and visuals.
- Craft your ‘skyscraper’ content.
- Identify new distribution models to boost its reach.
Match Content to Your Sales Funnel Goals
Tailor your content to the different stages of your buyer’s journey to maximize its impact. For example, when targeting executive-level decision-makers with your accounting software, you might offer:
- Awareness Stage: Blog posts, Guides
- Consideration Stage: eBooks, White papers, Case studies, Retargeting
- Decision Stage: Live chat
Craft Your Content Plan
Organize your content creation efforts based on coherent and logical steps. A well-thought-out plan will help you achieve quicker and more effective results. Include a mix of original and curated content to maintain a steady flow of engaging material.
Set Up a Content Calendar
Plan and schedule your content to ensure consistent and predictable posting. For each scheduled post, include details such as:
- The platform(s) where it will be shared
- The persona you’re targeting
- Optimal date and time for posting
- Geo-targeting
- Purpose or campaign it falls under
- Content theme
- Link to the content asset
- Well-thought-out messaging
Create Content in Line with Your Branding and Style
Maintain a consistent brand voice and style across all content to build a recognizable brand. Ensure that every piece of content, whether text or visual, reflects your brand’s identity.
Techniques to achieve this:
- Consistently use brand colors across all posts.
- Use similar illustration styles, types of imagery, sizes, and colors.
- Maintain coherence in the copy’s style.
- For videos, choose a distinct style for characters, settings, and camera movements.
Maintain Your Brand’s Voice
Creating a consistent brand experience for your audience across social platforms requires adhering to your brand’s unique voice. Consistency in your communication style helps people quickly recognize your brand, whether in blog posts or social media content.
Developing a recognizable brand voice involves:
- Selecting Consistent Vocabulary: Choose specific words and phrases that align with your brand’s identity and ensure all writers use them.
- Considering Length and Format: Tailor the length and format of writing for each type of content to maintain coherence.
- Defining Tone of Voice for Different Scenarios: Establish the tone your brand uses in various contexts, such as casual and engaging for social media posts and formal for product launches or press releases.
To ensure uniformity, summarize your brand’s voice using descriptive adjectives and create a brand voice chart for easy reference by all content creators.
Take Care of SEO Optimization
Integrate keyword research into your content creation process. Optimize all content for search engines to maximize its visibility. This includes blog posts, guides, eBooks, infographics, visuals, videos, and more.
Brainstorm Content Ideas on the Go
Keep your content fresh by continuously generating new ideas. Use social listening to understand how and when people talk about your brand and stay updated with industry trends to inform your content planning.
Regularly review your competitors’ social channels and follow relevant hashtags and keywords. Use the data gathered to experiment with different content brainstorming methods, considering topics, difficulty levels, content structures, and formats.
Make the Most of Your Content
Repurpose and republish content to maximize its impact. Break down comprehensive guides into blog posts, social media posts, and infographics. Republish top-performing content with updates to keep it relevant and engaging.
Measure and Improve Your Content’s Performance
Track the right metrics to understand what works best. Besides tracking content consumption and interactions on social channels, compare these metrics with website traffic and conversions to assess the real-life impact on your business.
Adjust your strategy based on real-time data. For example, if data shows that infographics perform better in the late afternoon, schedule your posts accordingly.
By following these detailed tactics and maintaining an effective planning process, you can craft and optimize your social media content strategy for success. Good luck!
The Table of Contents of “The No-Sweat Guide to Social Content Marketing“:
- Introduction
- Decide on the types of content
- Craft your content plan
- Create a mix of original and curated content
- Set up a content calendar
- Take care of SEO optimization
- Experience the social suite of the future
Pricing:
- Free
