Guide to Social Media Content Creation That Sells
Here’s a crazy number: Over 3.6 billion people used social media in 2020.
Nearly 90% of marketers say social media is essential to their strategy, but over 50% of marketers say they don’t have a formalized strategy specifically for social media marketing!
We aim to change that.
If just thinking about social media makes your head spin, take a deep breath and read on.
We’ve put together a complete guide to social media content creation that sells. This article will explore why content is so important and how to build and execute a successful social strategy.
Why are Social Media and Content Important?
We’re relational beings – we like being social! Social media grabs attention and engages users in a way that more traditional marketing often misses, and compelling content is the key.
Good content, promoted through social media, is proven to help you:
Generate Leads: 61% of consumers make purchases based on a blog or social content.
Build Brand Loyalty: 70% of consumers feel closer to a company based on social content.
Save Money: Content marketing costs 62% less and generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy
Before you start creating any new content, you need to understand your goals and customers.
Set Your Goals
Always start with your overall marketing goals. Defining your specific goals will help you prioritize what type of content you need. You also need to assess your budget, resources, and competition. What are other people doing in your field?
Know Your Audience: Create a Buyer Persona
Customers want to feel like you’re talking directly to them. So you need to know who they are!
Ask questions about your customer base:
Who are your customers?
Where are they online already?
What topics interest them?
What are their needs and pain points?
Based on this information, create your buyer persona. The buyer persona is a fictionalized “character” who represents the people who need your product. Get familiar with them. Give them a name and a photo, and think of them as you create your content.
Know Your Audience: Buyer Journey
The buyer journey includes three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.
To illustrate these stages, let’s say you’re selling a meditation app to help people sleep.
As a buyer, I might be in the awareness stage if I just started having trouble sleeping. I’ll click on general posts or videos like “Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Sleep.”
In the consideration stage, maybe I identified my problem as racing thoughts. I’ll start researching tools for mental calm and maybe land on using an app.
In the final stage, I’m deciding whether I prefer the sound of the ocean or Harry Styles’ sultry tones guiding me in meditation. (Harry Styles all the way!) At this point, a YouTube video on meditation might tip me over the edge to trying your app.
How to Build Your Content
Now we’re in the content creation stage. Use the following steps to build winning content.
Know Your SEO
Spend some time researching competitors in your space and learning what keywords, hashtags, and topics get the most hits. What format are your competitors using, and what keywords or topics do they always include?
Generate Ideas
Organize content ideas into topic clusters by identifying 5-10 overarching topics. In the sleep app example, topics might be the keywords “sleep,” “meditation,” “anxiety,” “REM,” etc.
From there, ideate shorter pieces of shareable content like an Instagram poll about sleep patterns, an infographic explaining REM cycles, or a meditative breathing video for YouTube.
Cater to Social Channels
With social media content, understanding the channel is half the battle. Each platform has optimal formats for image and video.
Here are a few tips for crafting content for each of the most popular channels:
Facebook is known for its micro-communities and groups. You can easily segment your audience and target groups for your content. Videos and questions work the best, so keep that content fresh on your page.
Instagram is a visuals-first medium, so use high-quality photos, short videos, or infographics. Instagram Stories are an excellent way to increase engagement by using polls, questions, and short videos to get your audience interacting.
YouTube
The most successful way to use YouTube is informational videos: how-to guides, product reviews (the increasingly popular “unboxing” videos), educational animations, etc.
Top brands on Twitter have nailed the conversational tone. Twitter is the perfect platform for linking your other content and videos or regularly replying to your customer base.
TikTok
TikTok is an enormous platform for any brand looking to draw a younger customer base. Just like YouTube, TikTok is an excellent place for how-to’s, unboxings, and product reviews.
How to Automate and Schedule Your Posts
Scheduling your posts ahead of time helps minimize gaps and build a consistent presence with your audience. It also saves you time.
Once you have your content ideas formatted for various platforms, you will want to plug it all into an editorial calendar for the year.
We recommend finding a scheduling tool that helps you optimize your posts. There are plenty of social media scheduling tools online, most of which make it easy to set it up once and let it run itself. At Kafen8, we like CloudCampaign - because it’s kind of a social media scheduling, digital asset management, project management platform all in one tool.
Data and Insights
The final and most crucial step is to analyze your posts’ performance. Without data, you have no idea what’s working and what isn’t.
Using social media analytics tools, you can learn from the following metrics:
Engagement: how much interaction a specific post is getting, including likes, retweets, views, shares, comments, and more.
Audience growth: how your follower and subscriber counts are growing.
Conversion rates: how many posts lead to direct clicks and direct sales.
Mentions: how often a particular keyword or topic is mentioned across platforms.
Sentiment: literally how people feel about you!
Virality: how quickly your posts get shared and viewed.
Visual mentions: how often your brand logo appears in images and content across platforms.
Share of voice: the proportion of the social discussion that includes your brand.
Hiring a Social Media Marketing Agency
Okay, that was quite a lot! For many companies, taking on a project of this size can feel overwhelming. In this case, you may want to consult with a social media agency.
Agencies like Kafen8 can do all of this for you, from a website audit, to social media competitor research, to a content marketing plan, to analytics.
We’ve created this guide to help you get started, but you can also learn what it’s like to work with us and have your editorial calendar optimized by the experts.