If you own or operate a business in 2021, regardless of size, you need to be on social media. This is hardly news to anyone, as it’s been true for at least a decade now, but there are still business owners that underestimate the impact that quality digital content can have on their organization, sales figures, recruiting, and more.
But crafting quality content can be difficult, and in the absence of a dedicated social media manager—or marketing communications specialist, or content specialist, or whatever you might call it—it can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’ve got other items on your list.
So today, let’s take a look at a few ways that you can create easy, effective digital content that both you and your stakeholders will love.
Know Your Audience
- Demographic Info—Who are you speaking to? Like any marketer makes an “ideal customer,” creating quality digital content requires that you know whom you’re speaking to. Their age will influence any language, slang, emojis, or colloquialisms. Their location might influence what you choose to make reference to or local events you look to recognize, and gender can influence how you craft your message. Knowing the approximate demographics of your followers on any given social channel or on your website itself can influence all these decisions.
- What are they searching for?—What do they hope to find on your page? What would you be hoping to find if you were on your page? In what ways can you clarify the things that differentiate your product or service?
- Common Questions for Your Staff—This can be an easy source of information. Are there questions your team gets all the time? Then clearly something in your content marketing isn’t getting this across. Here’s your chance to fix that!
- Answer questions your users didn’t know they had yet—Some users may find your page when they aren’t as far along in the funnel. Your content marketing can catch people who are just learning about your business as well as people who are close to making purchases.
Use Images
- Researchers indicate that pictures help people remember information far better than words.
- Social professionals state that Facebook posts with photos see a significant increase in engagement.
- “Everybody’s Doing It”—One survey indicates 80% of marketers use visual assets in social media marketing.
Make Sure You’ve Got ‘The Write Stuff’
- No one is going to want to read content full of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and poor formatting.
- Don’t get too wordy. People can tune out if you take too long to get to the point.
- Use ‘Power Words’ to evoke emotion from your audience and call them to action.
Deliver Clear Calls To Action
- Keep Them Simple: Tell people specifically what you want them to do to interact further with your brand.
- Use small concise sentences to give direction.
Be Flexible
- Sometimes what you think will work won’t. Sometimes a post that you scheduled as a throw-away will take off.
- Be willing to reschedule posts or reformat your plans if certain types of posts keep doing well for you.
- Your analytics will tell you what’s doing well, and if you mix up your times of day, you can get a feel for what kind of content does well and at what times.
Once you’ve got a nice portfolio of quality content, the next important step is to create a content marketing plan to really make sure that you’re using that content effectively. The best written content in the world won’t make much of a difference if the right people aren’t seeing it.
But that’s a post for another day.
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