They’ve said it several times, content is king. They’ve also added that, engangement is queen. But, it just doesn’t have to be anything. It has to be purposeful stuff, that will help your numbers in sales and branding. And, below are the ways to ensure that your content checks out all the important boxes to make you the fortune you’re worth as an industrial icon
Goals
Quantitative and Qualitative.
Determine what numbers you intend to achieve in various metrics. Numbers are great, they justify your efforts, your cause and they don’t lie, rare to manipulate. Just make sure they tally and align with your integrated marketing goals and overal organisational goals. These include post and page reaches or impressions, following/likes, engangement, reviews, link clicks, endorsements, sales, website visitors, mentions and more.
Set aside what non-quantifiable things you want to achieve by the end of the year or in 5 years. These may be, brand position, social media optimisation, quality of messages into your inbox, quality of comments and mentions/tags, among others.
Calender
This, is basically a way of figuring out what events are taking place in the world that matter to your audience. And, finding a way to create content that’ll offer value in relation to the buzz of that holiday – value for your audience, and for you. Most successful influencers and firms on social media laverage events and holidays for better metrics.
Having identified your goals for the year, you draft your social media calendar which lists against dates what events and holidays are coming up and where. That includes some that aren’t very common. For instance, I celebrate July being ‘Cellphone Coutesy Month’, October being dedicated to cancer awareness – ‘Pinktober’, #InternationalWomensDay, #InternationalIceCreamDay, among other holidays and events. This should be the skeleton of your content – social media or blog.
Audience Personas
Having studied your current and prospective audience, work to come up with bios of at least 5 of your audience. This should identify interests, hopes, fears, buying and other behavioural patterns, some trivia and background information of about 5 diverse people who should represent the audience you intend to grow.
This is very important as it helps you determine the general nature, tone and speed of prose of your content and more.
Map
Yes yes! I find this to be very very important. Both for social media, but most importantly websites and blogs. Content needs to flow into each other, linking one to another strategically.
So, this is best as a product of your digital marketing goals, and content strategy. You can see how each piece will link with another. As you create and piece the content together, you can always be able to drop links, in a subtle way. Entrepreneur.com does that well. It provides loads of value for your readers and viewers, as much as it helps you to keep your readers/viewers on your site. Making them more loyal.
Curate
Remember the 1 third rule? Here’s the link to more about it in case you haven’t come across it.
Curating is one great way of going about this. You research content that relates, agrees with your content, and answers some some of your audience’s questions. Collect that into collections, tally that against your alloted content per your calendar and serve your audience on a regular and frequent basis. Thanks to Hootsuite and Crowdfire for that. They always have that feed with which you can actually permit the app to post relevant content for you on your site/account.
Schedule
So, in January 2019 we had a brief moment of total internet blackout, that lasted for about 2 days in Zimbabwe #ShutDownZimbabwe. Imagine that for your audience across the border. And your ratings against algorithms.
Couple that with other busy days you get, things being unpredictably overwhelming that you can’t post at appointed times.
All this calls for one thing – use scheduling tools and apps for smart content and social media marketing. This will ensure guranteed activity, and smooth and consistent operations and more.
I personally use Buffer, Hootsuite and Crowdfire. Some have also talked of If This Then That (ITTT), and others.
At Influence, we have ways to see this through, for a firm of any size and any industry, because it matters that business make and carve their place in the industry and be heard, and there always is potential for every business operating.
Influence ZW 