Enhanced Social Ads: Content Strategies

A lot of word has been spread about the importance of having a solid social media content strategy ready for your business. A strategy that identifies your primary business goals and lays down the fundamentals of how to craft and distribute the best content type for your social channels.

Truth be told, there’s no one-size-fits-’em-all social media content strategy that will ensure success. Different brands from different industries catering to different audiences will probably have different goals and expectations. Still, there are some specific guidelines that every brand can be able to follow to somewhat extent.

In this article, we will talk about the ins and outs of social media content strategies and how they can propel your business toward success on these seemingly cut-throat platforms. 

Enhanced Social Ads and Set Up Your Business Goals

You’ve probably heard about this a thousand times, but truth be told, there’s no long-term success regarding your content strategy if you don’t have your goals set. 

What do you want to achieve with your content? Would you like to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Improve your sales
• Lead generation
• Increase engagement with your online community
• Grow your audience
• Increase traffic to your website?

Knowing what you want from your content strategy will also involve exploring your brand’s values and studying your audience. 

And after you’ve set up your specific goals, make sure to come up with content ideas that will help you serve said goals. Let’s say that you want to drive more sales from your social media ads. To do this, you should consider promoting your services and products in your posts while also engaging with your audience in a way that moves them toward your landing pages or direct sales through your social page.

Know Your Audience – Enhanced Social Ads

Ask any digital marketing agency veteran, and they will tell you that you can’t really write good content unless you know who it’s for. Creating a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your typical customer can help you in crafting a more precise content strategy. 

To create the ultimate persona, harness all the data you have: take a look at the average age of your audience and their location. Gather info about their relationship with your brand and which products and services they use (yours or your competitor’s). Every piece of info can come a long way in creating a more precise picture of what they care about, what their problems are, and what they like/dislike about your brand.

There are several ways you can go about this. For instance, you can take the lead and reach out to your customers in a social post, asking them what they want to see in your service/product lineup. On the other hand, you can always request a team of expert marketers to help you get actual hard data about who your audience is and how you should cater to their needs through your content.

Take a Hard Look At Your Current Posts 

Once you understand what your audiences want for you, it’s a good idea to see what you’ve been posting so far. 

Audit your existing content thoroughly. By looking at your current and past posts, you can gather more info about what performs well and what fails to resonate with your followers. 

Now, each platform will probably have different post types that perform better than the others. Apart from assessing these differences, see whether the engagement and conversions you’ve gotten from those posts align with your business goals. 

Take a Hard Look at The Competition

Sometimes, your data isn’t enough to see whether your content is performing as it should. Make sure to conduct a competitive analysis as well. It will help you gather new content ideas and will help you to create more precise benchmarks for your new strategy. 

There are tools out there that can help you gain insight from competitors, like average engagement rates, growth rates, and best-performing content.

Apart from looking just at the numbers, take your time and actually read their content. What are they doing to perform better? Is the tone of voice different? Is the language more subtle or flamboyant? This might help you see whether you have strayed away from your brand’s own voice or not. Or are your competitors using new content formats that are simply more engaging? 

At the moment, 66% of consumers say that short-form video is the type of content they engage with the most. Images are the second most popular format, followed by live videos, gifs, and memes. 

Now, we won’t say that you should stick to these formats and wait for social media superstardom. Every post type and format serves a specific marketing goal, and you will need to create the perfect brand to cater to every possible scenario and need.

Think about it this way: you might have a short video that talks about your product, but if you are looking for other content that may take potential buyers to a landing page or lack posts that give your brand or product social proof, chances are, you won’t be able to maximize the potential of the video, nor the product. 

Choose Your Formats and Start Creating Content Calendars

After assessing the most engaging content types, it’s also a smart idea to look at your own data – what’s the most popular format among your audience? If they enjoy short videos, then, by all means, incorporate them into your strategy.

On that note, stay away from being a one-trick pony. Change things up, both format and content-wise. Show some personality, highlight your services and products, but stay away from becoming overly promotional or repetitive. 

On that note, you can always use educational videos to highlight your products or partner up with other creators, or even use user-generated content. 

You can also:

• Go behind the scenes
• Run promotions
• Host contests
• Use online games and quizzes
• Use ephemeral content

Once you’ve got the numbers, it’s time to create your first content calendar, which will enable you to visualize and organize your ideas. Calendars are basically hubs for your posts, and they aim to help you oversee everything.

When creating content, you can repurpose some of it for several channels to leverage every benefit of it. Still, there will be cases where you would need to choose and pick which post should land on, let’s say, Instagram or LinkedIn.

Content Distribution and Promotion

A good content strategy for social media isn’t just about what you are posting on your channels. A good strategy also addresses consistency and ways to maximize brand awareness. 

Sounds a bit confusing? The following will clear things up: 

Schedule Ahead

There are several ways you can automate the entire posting process, ensuring you never miss the right time to share something. There are several great tools out there that can help you schedule your posts more or less in bulk, which also helps you save time. 

Encourage People to Share

If you want social proof, encourage other people to share your posts as well. Generally, encourage your audience to engage with your posts. Ask questions, ask them to elaborate, to comment, to share their views. 

Collaborate

To reach a wider audience, you can always work together with content creators inside your niche. This can lead to fruitful collaborations and new ideas for your future content calendars. 

Sometimes, It’s Good to Be Platform-Specific

Each platform has its own unique features and “posting culture” that will help you get the most out of your posts. For instance, Instagram and Twitter use hashtags to improve reach. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you can use industry-related groups to engage with your audiences, potential, and existing customers and followers. 

Enhanced Social Ads – Measuring The Results 

In the end, you will want to see just how effective your content strategy is. Tracking the performance of each calendar and each post is crucial in creating a strategy that will work in the long run. Running detailed analysis and understanding the relevant metrics can help you optimize your strategy over time or tweak it on the fly. 

A good measuring approach would be analysing your content on a monthly basis to see what’s working and what’s not. Take a look at the things that performed best and which posts were the weakest. Assess which posts managed to support your business goals and go from there.

Creating Social Content Made Easy

Don’t let the subheading above fool you: creating truly engaging and converting content isn’t necessarily easy. It requires a deep understanding of your audience, their preferences, your competition, your social channels, and your own brand. 

Honestly, creating a solid content strategy takes time and will eventually require tweaking and even an overhaul from time to time. Social trends change, and user behavior with them. Still, if you are true to your brand and your audiences and keep offering top-notch products and services (along with content), you will always find a way to reach the next new follower, fan, or even brand loyalist.