As a social media marketer, one is often left in a state of uncertainty. It is difficult to gauge whether your social media marketing campaign is going to be successful or not. This is because it is not fixed whether your target audience will enjoy the content put out by your business or brand. So, how does one create the right content? And how is this content managed?
In this blog, we’re going to discuss the importance of content creation for social media marketing much before it is time to run the campaign.
As a marketer, content development for social media marketing can be a scary task, but if organized well, everything can be in your control. However, there are times when a strategy that performed well a few months back is unable to get the same response when implemented again. If you follow a structured process, you can plan out your content with more ease.
Before we dive into a step-by-step process of creating a social media content plan, you must understand the benefits of content creation for social media marketing.
Creating content in a structured manner gives your audience a brief idea about the kind of content they can expect from you. This will help them decide whether or not they would like to follow your brand or business on social media. It also ensures that you are well aware of how things will pan out on your social media channels, much in advance. As a marketer, this also gives you an opportunity to plan how you want to engage with your audience.
Here is a step by step guideline on how to create:
Social media goals
Before you begin putting your content in place and run your marketing campaigns, it is important that you identify your social media goals.
What is it that you’re trying to achieve on your social media channels? Are you trying to gain more likes and followers on your pages? Are you trying to drive more visitors to you website? Whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, make sure you have a good idea about it. Why? Because every time you create content, you should be able to gauge whether or not it will help you achieve your end goal.
For example, if your goal is to increase the level of engagement on your social media channels, you should create your content keeping this in mind. If you keep your end goal in mind, you’re more likely to create engaging content.
Social media platform
You’ve figured out what you want to achieve by running your marketing campaigns, now it’s time to figure out where you want to run them.
Get a good understanding of which social media platform you want to target on, depending where your audience spends maximum of their time. A basic understanding of the social media platform is a must. For example, you are more likely to find the millennials on platforms like Twitter and Instagram as compared to LinkedIn.
To make your content discoverable to the right audience, you need to make sure you address them on the right social media platform.
Target audience
As a marketer, you should have a thorough understanding of who your target audience is. Not just that, but also their likes, dislikes, the kind of content they enjoy consuming, where they like to hang out online, etc.
Keep in mind to keep your target audience as specific as possible. The more defined and niche your target audience is, the more likely you are to grab their attention.
If you are a startup, consider targeting a small audience and not a large one. Because your business is new, your posts and content is likely to get lost in a swamp of popular posts by larger firms and businesses.
Create content
Now that you have all your basic information in place, it is time for you to create content for your social media channels. This content will be catered to your audience, so it must be highly relevant to them.
A few things to keep in mind while creating content for your brand is to create content that is unique, informative and interesting. Until and unless your content is delivering something useful to the end user, your audience is likely to move on to other content that is more interesting or relevant.
If you have run marketing campaigns in the past, it is a good idea to analyze the insights to see what kind of posts did well and what kind did not. Based on the kind of content that got more likes, engagement and traffic, you can get a good idea about what kind of content you audience likes to consume. This is a good way to ensure your performance graphs always go up.
Test and analyze
Once you start running your social media campaigns, you will start getting insights on the performance of these posts. Most applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram have inbuilt features of letting you know about the performance of your content.
It is important to test and analyze this data to see if your content is successful. If your content is not as engaging as you thought it would be, it is a good idea to make tweaks can changes to your content in the right direction.
Take some time out to analyze various social media platforms, and see what kind of content businesses similar to yours are posting. This will help you with the content strategy for your social media marketing campaign. It is also a great idea to do a competitor analysis of the kind of content posted by you as compared to your competitors. Identify what your competitors are doing which you are not, and try including this in your next or current campaign.
Content calendar
Your content is ready, your campaigns are running, and now you occasionally check their performance. What’s most important through this entire process is to maintain and manage this content, its scheduling and promotion in an organized manner.
You can use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to organize the content and the content calendar for all social media platforms such that managing and organizing this content can become easy for the social media or account manager, as well as make these documents accessible to other team members.
With all this being said, there are some things that can modified depending on the nature of the business (is it a startup or an SME), services/products you offer. You can try and test various strategies to see what works the best for your business.
We hope you try out the 6 step guideline on how to go about creating a better social media content plan! If we missed out something, let us know in the comments below!
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