Content marketing is becoming increasingly important as a way of engaging with your audience. What do I mean by content marketing?
In my opinion, updates that you share on your social media channels should be approximately 40% original content, 40% shared content and 20% engagement. These are rough figures that will vary by business type, but it is a good place to start.
Original content is content that the business creates to share with its audience. By original content, I don’t mean content that tries to sell or even content that talks about how wonderful the business is, but content that gives added value to your audience. This added value might be because it solves a problem, makes them laugh, think or say Wow! Try to think creativity about your content – look at how Oreo does it.
Content could be:
- Textual – blog posts, LinkedIn posts or status updates, newsletters, e-books or articles
- Visual – images, videos, SlideShare presentations, Infographics, cartoons, memes
- Interactive – polls, quizzes, short E-Learning modules
- Any combination of the above
A survey of 1,000 UK social media users by Axonn found that “77% of users follow at least one brand on social media, but more than half have unfollowed a brand for posting boring or overly salesy content.”
Any content that you create needs to be high quality – written well, targeted to the audience with high quality, relevant images.
According to the survey, “interesting content is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. Spelling and grammar matters to 48% of those surveyed. 67% prefer to buy from a brand they follow on social media.”
The idea of producing added value content is to develop an audience who follow your content and share it with others. You first build an audience and once you have the audience, you can take them to the next stage. Yes, you are going to want to sell eventually otherwise you will go out of business, but you should sell on the back of the great content you are creating not as the first thing you do on social media.
Great content will also help with your search engine rankings. If you have great relevant content on your website that others are sharing, search engines will be able to understand what your website is about and realise that it should be highly ranked because it is getting traffic and being shared.
So how to produce the content? Some thoughts:
- Allocate marketing time / budget to content creation
- Make sure you understand the tone and voice of the business
- Encourage all members of the business to be involved
- Use an editor to optimise content and check it to make sure it represents the right tone and voice of the business
- Think about your ideal client and what is their pain / interest? Imagine you are producing the content directly for that client
- Create a content plan so your content can be regular and consistent.
- Distribute content across your social media channels and ask your audience to engage – then keep the conversation going.
What do you think? What content has worked for you? Let me know if you would like more information about our content management service or Training courses.