August 26, 2016
Marketing on social media increases your lead to close rate by a 100%. If you don’t already have a well thought–out plan for social media marketing in place, you are losing both time and money.
However, attracting an audience on social media is no mean task, given the overwhelming number of social media users and content posted by them. Being noticed through the noise requires a smart content plan and amplification tactics.
1. Add value to peoples’ lives
Simple promotional content doesn’t work in today’s scenario, because value is available for free to anyone who can use a computer. If you don’t provide it to your audience, they’ll find it elsewhere.
When designing your content marketing strategy for social media ask yourself these questions:
What can my brand offer that no–one else is?
It could be a novel feature, product, service or experience.
How can I be mean more to my audience than my competitors?
This is where you get creative. What’s the one factor where you out–rank your competitors? It could even be that your waiting lines are shorter than other services (everyone wants to save time).
Once you’ve identified a bunch of unique things to offer, plot your content strategy around those things. Highlight them every once a while in your content. To balance your promotional content, you could curate useful write–ups from non–competitive sources. You could employ a content curation app like DrumUp to curate the latest content in your niche. For news stories you could use a news aggregation app like FlipBoard.
2. Maximize visual impact by optimizing visual spaces
The human brain is visually inclined. 90% of communication within the brain is through visual impulses, and visuals are processes about 60,000 times faster than text is by people (very popular facts on visual content). Have you considered that text was invented by man? It is actually not natural for the brain to pick up words, but civilized programming.
If you haven’t prioritized visual content in marketing, you are functioning at low capacity.
All social media platforms have dedicated fields for visual uploads – your display pictures, cover photos and the image field on each social media post.
Are you using them all the best way possible?
Ideally, while planning your blog post or social media post, you should do it with the visual in mind.
Creating visuals isn’t even as complicated as it used to be. Image editors like Canva are even have black canvases sized to fit Twitter and Facebook posts and cover photos. Infographic tools like PiktoChart simplify the infographic making process as well.
3. Leverage visual consistency to create brand recall
To be remembered, you have to be memorable. You have to be recognized, and that requires an impressionable identity.
On social media your brand identity includes the voice you use, the colors, fonts and content that go up on your brand accounts. Look at brand identity as a stand alone personality that your social media audience can recognize in a heart–beat no matter where they see it, and on a positive note.
Like the stark gray that Apple uses in its adds, or McDonald’s bright red and yellow.
If your social media presence is consistent, your brand is much more likely to be recognized and remembered.
For visual editing, you could use Canva or PiktoChart. The use of colors, fonts and backdrops are simplified on editors like these.
4. Encourage employee participation in content distribution
The reason why many businesses adopt multiple media in their content plans is to reach out to a larger audience. But that isn’t necessary if you simply increase your reach on the social platforms that you have already invested in.
Suppose you have created a campaign for the launch of your latest product, and you want to go wide and capture as large an audience as possible. Sharing the campaign’s content on your brand’s social media account would afford you a reach of 10,000? 20,000? A reach equal to the number of your brand’s followers, in essence.
Instead, if your employees shared the campaign content on their personal social media accounts, your reach could increase by anywhere between 100X and 500X, depending on the size of your company.
Employee participation is also known to improve your credibility, influence and overall likeability on social media.
‘Employee advocacy’, as the concept is known, isn’t very hard to implement, given the right platforms and content strategy.
A few great employee advocacy platforms are LinkedIn’s Elevate, DrumUp’s Employee Advocacy Platform, Circulate.It and Everyone Social.
The tactics discussed on this post are infallible and can bring you exceptional results when executed right. The only two things to remember are consistency after initiation – begin them and patiently wait it out, no brand was built in a day.
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