GUIDE
The No-Sweat Guide to Social Content Marketing
How to target your content efforts for maximum impact on social.
Book a meetingThere’s barely any need to underline the importance of sharing high-quality content on your brand’s social channels these days.
Building a solid portfolio of valuable and targeted content has become a must for companies that want to stand out like a diamond among gravel. When you post great content assets, you’re better suited to reach your target audiences where they are and achieve top engagement and brand-building results.
But creating and sustaining a winning content strategy for your social platforms may not be an easy feat, especially when you have to combine it with a ton of other social management tasks. There’s so much to take care of, and it all needs to be done in an organized and logical way.
No need to worry, though — you’re definitely up to the challenge. You just need to combine your valuable social media know-how with the right content strategy.
The best part: this guide has them all. Just apply the tactics outlined below, and you’ll be on your way to success with your social content strategy.
Decide on the types of content
Should you be posting longer-form content like eBooks or infographics on Facebook or LinkedIn? Should you be sharing single or multiple visuals on Instagram? These decisions boil down to the specifics of your target audience and business goals.
Analyze the content needs of your personas
The purpose of creating and sharing content is to provide the right information to your target audience while at the same time furthering your business goals, such as lead generation and brand awareness.
Achieving this starts with understanding what type of content will work best for your target personas. By knowing who you’re talking to, where to reach them, and what they need, you can make content truly propel your brand on social media.
Let’s get into details here:
- If you want to reach executive-level professionals in larger companies with your B2B tech product — say, accounting software, you’d want to bet on sharing data-rich eBooks and guides on LinkedIn.
- The same approach won’t work if you have a B2C product targeting sports fans, such as a range of protein-rich foods and drinks. Then, you’ll be better off sharing short-form content, visuals, and infographics on platforms like Facebook and Instagram
- You’ll need yet another approach if you want to reach Gen Z youngsters or Millennials and get them to engage with your clothing brand. Then you’ll have to share bite-size videos on Snapchat and TikTok, cool images on Pinterest, or even launch a podcast for up-and-coming fashion trends.
Research what your competitors are posting
Figuring out what content you should be sharing entails thorough research of the competition to spot general trends and tactics as well as what works and what doesn’t. But don’t just copy what works for your competitor.
You’ll have to make sure your target audiences can find something unique and valuable on your social channels. A great technique you can use for content differentiation is the skyscraper method. It builds upon the best content out there — layer after layer, until your content goes as high as a skyscraper.
Here’s how it works:
- Find the top-performing relevant content for a topic you also want to talk about
- Analyze why it works
- Devise your approach to beat it — ie, include even more useful information and visuals, updated data, etc.
- Craft your ‘skyscraper’ content
- Identify new distribution models to boost its reach on social
Match content to your sales funnel goals
It’s always challenging to match content to the right stage of your buyer’s sales journey. But that’s something that guarantees the content you share makes the biggest impact.
Let’s consider the target persona of the executive-level decision-maker in a corporation to whom you want to pitch your accounting software. Here are some ideas of things you might offer to that target persona on your social channels at the different stages:
Awareness:
- Blog posts
- Guides
Consideration:
- eBooks
- White papers
- Case studies
- Retargeting
Decision:
- Live chat
Craft your content plan
Succeeding with content starts with a good plan based on coherent and logical steps, and this counts for content you create for social too.
Shooting in the dark may work at first, but the better you organize your content efforts, the quicker you’ll see their results.
Create a mix of original and curated content
Creating original content is not an easy task. It takes a lot of research, planning, and laser-focused targeting. That’s why it’s worth setting up a mix of original and curated content for your social channels.
Once you make a realistic estimation of the content you can craft in house, it’s time to set up your curation strategy. Research shows you’ll need to keep a good balance between creation and curation.
If you want to achieve both higher traffic and conversion, this sweet spot seems to be:
- 25-50% created content
- 50-75% curated content
You’ll also have to decide on the brands you’ll be curating content from. Most companies avoid resharing the content of direct competitors but rather opt in for brands with supplementary products or services.
Set up a content calendar
Once you’ve decided on your content mix, it’s time for actual planning to ensure your brand’s consistency and predictability on social media. Skillful scheduling in the form of a content calendar is essential for your content strategy’s success because it ensures a good rhythm of sharing at the right time.
For each scheduled post, it makes sense to include details like:
- The platform(s) where it will be shared
- The persona you’re targeting
- Optimal date and time of the post
- Geo-targeting
- Purpose or campaign it falls under
- Content theme
- Link to the content asset
- Well-thought-out messaging
Create content in line with your branding and style
Every text or visual that your brand publishes online should have the same feeling to build up a recognizable brand. This is how you can create a coherent and engaging brand story.
Use a distinct content style
Each bit of content you share needs to communicate who your brand is.
Naturally, this spans both written and visual content. You can think of it as a filter through which you pass everything that reaches your audiences — your brand’s signature.
How to achieve that? The devil is in the details. Some of the proven techniques you can use include:
- Stick to your brand colors consistently across each post on each platform
- Use the same visual elements, i.e. similar illustration style, types of imagery, sizes, and colors
- Be coherent in the style of the copy used (more on that coming up next)
- For videos, choose a distinct style for characters, settings, and even camera movement
Stick to your brand’s voice
Creating a coherent brand experience for your target audiences across social platforms also entails sticking to your unique brand’s voice. You’ll only win from speaking in one distinct way in all of your content forms. That’s how people can quickly recognize your brand — whether in blog posts or social media content.
Building a recognizable brand voice entails:
- Carefully selecting the vocabulary and having all writers stick to it
- Thinking about length and format of writing for each content asset
- Defining the range of tone of voice your brand uses in different scenarios, i.e. when addressing your audience in a Facebook post and when issuing a product launch or press release
To ensure consistency, you can summarize the essence of your brand voice in adjectives and create a brand voice chart for easy reference.
| Voice characteristics | Description | Do ✅ | Don’t ❌ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passionate 😍 | We’re passionate about changing the way the world works. | • Use strong verbs • Be champions for [insert industry] • Be cheerleaders | • Be lukewarm • Be wishy-washy • Use passive voice |
| Quirky 😜 | We’re not afraid to change the status quo and be ourselves. | • Use unexpected examples • Take the contrarian viewpoint • Express yourself | • Use too much slang or too many obscure references • Use jargon or overplayed examples • Lose sight of the audience and the core message |
| Irreverent 😁 | We take our product seriously; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. | • Be playful • Use colorful illustrations or examples | • Be too casual • Use too many pop culture examples |
| Authentic 🙃 | We’re going to give you the tools and insight you need to make your job easier. That may not always be through our product. | • Be honest and direct • Own any issues or mistakes and show how you would address them • Stick to your word | • Use marketing jargon or superlatives • Overpromise • Oversell the product’s capabilities |
Take care of SEO optimization
You know the drill: when you’re aiming for high organic search volumes for your content, you can’t go without SEO. This holds even for content that you create exclusively for your social media channels.
Start with keyword research
Optimizing content for search engines starts with pinpointing keywords that you want to target and for which you want to rank.
To achieve this, you’ll need to integrate keyword research in your content creation process for social.
Rather than figuring out how the content you shared may fare in terms of SEO once it’s out, you’ll need to embed the target keywords for each piece of content as it’s being written.
Optimize all of your content
Getting the most out of your SEO efforts entails that you maximize the searchability of your content by optimal use of keywords in the text. This may be more important for some social channels, such as Quora and LinkedIn.
You can optimize pretty much everything you share that consists of copy or that has copy attached to it:
- Blog posts
- Guides, eBooks, and whitepapers
- How-to pages
- Infographics
- Visuals
- Videos
- And all the rest
Brainstorm content ideas on the go
How do you keep up a constant stream of fresh ideas for content you can share across your social platforms?
You’ll need to get your creative juices flowing, but there are plenty of things that can help.
Listen to your audience
Social listening can inform your content planning in a powerful way. It’s an essential element of audience research that tells you how and when people talk about your brand. You can then use these insights to tweak your social strategy — and the best of all, to get ideas for your fresh content to share across channels.
Stay up-to-date with industry trends
Another important source of inspiration for your content creation are your competitors and the trends you spot in your industry. This means you have to monitor your field continuously, so you can quickly react with relevant messaging and data.
Make sure to regularly review your competitors’ social channels and follow relevant hashtags and keywords across the platforms. With the data you gather from social listening and industry research, you can then experiment with different content brainstorming methods. Your topic generation can start from a specific topic, difficulty level of the content, content structure, or format.
Make the most of your content
When you have a great piece of content, how do you maximize its impact?
Repurpose and republish to fully leverage content
Repurposing is one of the most important strategies for making the most of the content you’ve already created. Once you have an in-depth guide, for example, you can break it into blog posts, social media posts, infographics, and many other content assets.
To maximize the use of your content assets, you can also republish with updates to keep content fresh. You can choose your top-performing pieces in terms of keywords, links, traffic, and social shares. Then you just need to add new info and remove outdated stuff, perform SEO optimization, and republish.
Come up with innovative content promotion
Reaping the greatest benefits from the content you create entails getting creative with your social media distribution practices.
One of the tactics worth trying is influencer marketing. By identifying relevant influencers in your field and developing connections with them, you can explore how your content can be promoted through their networks. The stamp of approval of up-and-coming influencers can give quite the boost to your brand’s performance on social.
Measure and improve your content’s performance on social
Is it all about the clicks and likes? Make sure you know what to measure and how to improve the impact of your content on social media.
Track the metrics that matter
Making the most of your content entails measuring the right metrics so you know what works best. Besides tracking content consumption and interactions on social channels, it’s also a good idea to check your stats for optimal post timing.
Once you’ve explored your social data, you can compare it with other metrics, such as the traffic to your website and actual conversions. This is how you can determine the relationship between your performance on social and its real-life impact on your business. Don’t miss our How to Measure Your Social Media ROI guide for in-depth tips.
Tweak your social content strategy on the go
The idea of measuring your content’s performance is to adjust your approach on the go. That’s why it’s important to stay open to revising your strategy based on real-time data.
For example, if you notice that the best time for posting an infographic appears to be in the late afternoon rather than in the morning, as you previously thought, your best bet is to go with what the data shows.
Sticking to a plan for the plan’s sake makes no sense — so be ready to tweak your social strategy flexibly.
You’re now prepared to craft your content on the basis of proven tactics and effective planning. Good luck!