How to Plan Effective Content Creation

The social media landscape is constantly evolving and as marketing professionals we need to be willing and able to shift how we develop our content to accommodate these changes. Not even three months ago did brands gain the ability to add Shoppable stickers to Instagram stories, and that alone can completely shift how to strategize your social presence and increase sales.  

But despite adjustments in algorithms and the expansion of exciting features, there are some general best practices that shouldn’t be shifted.

Below we’ll dive into some tips and tricks to create social media that will have an effective and meaningful impact on your desired audience.

Develop a Strategy

What is it that your brand is trying to achieve? Identifying this is imperative to you laying out a roadmap to get you there and ultimately will determine the kind of copy you’ll be writing when crafting your posts.

Speak to Your Audience

In order to speak to your desired audience, you need to know them. Who’s your target consumer? What do they like? What resonates with them? Go beyond something as simple as demographics and really dig deep into what makes them tick. You can do this by conducting buyer interviews, focus groups, buying third-party research, or even just conducting a very thorough organic audit of your own feed to see what the general feel of your audience is. This will help you craft posts that circle back to your strategy—whether that be offering solutions to potential problems or even just connecting with them on an emotional level.

Establish a Voice

Obviously you want to effectively communicate with your ideal consumer, but you also need to establish a voice that represents your brand. More often than not social media is a place people come to connect with not just people, but companies. Figuring out how you want your brand to be perceived will help you decide how to manage day-to-day communication with consumers across your platforms.

One brand that has established a very strong brand voice is Wendy’s. They’ve established “trolling” as a way to not only interact with fans, but to really stand out. While their strategy is a bit unconventional and not necessarily what most brands would do, it certainly has garnered a lot of attention and put them in the forefront of social media. Their methodology has also allowed them to directly interact with their competitors as a way to leverage their own brand and to try to prove why they’re better on a national stage.

Stay Consistent

You wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who was different each time you talked to them, and your brand is no different. People come to rely on brands for their dependability and this is especially true on social. Create a space where consumers know what to expect when they interact with you and stick with it. It’ll create trust and a sense of reliability.

Encourage Engagement

One-sided conversations aren’t fun! Of course you have objectives to meet within your social strategy, but you also want to provide a place for your consumers to enjoy themselves, too. A simple way to do this is by posing questions within your social copy. People like talking about themselves, and doing this is an easy way to get them to interact with your posts.

Another great way to do this is by creating contests. You can leverage posts this way to receive user generated content (UGC) that you can use at a later time to positively promote your brand while conveying a genuine care and connection with your audience.

One campaign I worked on before used this method to create #FanFriday for the film Five Feet Apart. We saw that fans were using Instagram to show off their personal artwork inspired by the movie, and encouraged as much engagement as possible by teasing that they could possibly be featured on our feed. We saw a huge uptick in interactions with our page thanks to this, and really thrilled the fans whose artwork was shown off on a major motion production’s social channel.

Keep Things Short and Sweet

Let’s face it: people are busy and don’t have the time or attention span to read social posts that appear to be long-winded or time consuming.  You can absolutely craft social copy that packs a punch while also being to the point. 

If you’d like to chat more about content strategy, please contact me: jordan@kpitarget.com.