Social media is more than just about posting about your upcoming sale this Friday. When starting/building an online platform, you are building a fan base. The people who are choosing to follow your furniture store on Instagram (for example) are there because you provide valuable content that benefits them directly.
Simply posting content to your social channels is not enough, you need to be relevant, relatable, informative and in some cases downright funny.
Content is your brand’s visual identity – it encompasses of your photos, videos, blog posts, captions, email copy, web design etc. It’s extremely important to create a high quality visual identity for your brand. This communicates your level of professionalism to your ideal customer, grabs the attention of your audience and encourages them want to work with you.
Your visual identity is one of the most important part of your branding strategy, it helps build customer loyalty and attracts your ideal customer (think luxury brands and prices to match).
Content without engagement however a waste of everyone’s time and it is fatal for your business. Engagement refers to the number of people who like, share, comment, save, direct message, respond to emails (etc) with your company through whichever online channels available.
If you’re posting content everyday but not engaging with your ideal customer, then this is one of the reasons your business isn’t working in your favor. Customers no longer seek you out, ask a few questions and make purchases right away. The market is simply too saturated and today’s customer is a lot more discerning.
You are now one of millions on the market. Meaning there are a lot of other people grabbing the attention of your ideal client. You need to reach out and give your ideal customer a reason to choose you over all competitors.
But what is engaging content? Before you can even determine what that is, you need to think about your brand’s identity and voice as well as trends within the digital marketplace. And in a more personal sense, you need to look at your own metrics to determine what type of content your ideal customer engaged with the most. The content you create must be have impact in some way in order to be worthy of customer engagement.
You need to create your content with intention. You need to ask yourself, what are you trying to do with this piece of content? Is it meant to educate? Entertain? Does it fit in with your overall marketing strategy? Yes, you may want to get into posting right away and directly asking questions but you need to pay special attention to the preparation stage you have a higher chance of delivering content with more impact.
Your content must be valuable. It must be of some use to your ideal customer and even more than that, it must be delivered in a semi light tone if you will. Gone are the days of the corporate voice (unless you’re posting content for the Economist) then I digress. This will call on you to flex your creative muscles as you not only need your content to be useful, you need it to be more useful than that of your competitors.
It definitely does take a lot of effort but if done right, you will build trust and your ideal customer will begin to consider you the authority of your niche. This means that the valuable content you have been giving away, will directly increase your return on investment.
