Hands up if any of this sounds all too familiar;
- You excitedly start a new Facebook page for your hobby business. Everyone must know about these cute bows you sell! Two weeks in, you have 25 likes, zero engagement (hello- is anyone out there??) and you have no idea if any of this effort is actually translating into sales
- You’ve been tasked with managing the work twitter account. You signed up, set up the profile pics and bio, followed a few people and now…what?
- You pushed the company to start a business blog, but now that you’re a few weeks in, you’ve run out of ideas. Worse, you’re not sure if it’s affecting traffic, let alone sales.
That’s because you probably don’t have a content strategy. And I’m also guessing you may not have a content distribution strategy (where will it go once we create it?), an audience strategy (who are we creating it for?) or perhaps even a digital strategy (how does it all fit in?).
Why do all these things matter? It’s sort of like going on a trip without a (Google) map. You may get there eventually, but you’ll probably arrive at a dead end, take the EXTREMELY scenic route or end up tied up in a rundown shack somewhere (OK extreme, but any Wolf Creek fans out there??!).
One of the biggest mistakes I see is business entrusting their most visible channel of communication with the customer to the office intern or receptionist. This is not to say they can’t do a good job, but they must be well equipped. This means a clear actionable strategy, which probably sounds scary but roughly looks a little like this;
- Our objective on Facebook is to achieve X
- We will achieve this by X
- We post X times a day
- Here is what we post about
- Here is when we post
- We moderate our community in this way
- Here is how we respond
- This is where to turn if something goes wrong
- This is how we measure success
If you don’t have even the roughest idea of the above for your social channels, is your time online being spent in the best way? What are you achieving?
Using social media in a strategic way allows your business to get in front of the customer when they’re most receptive to receiving messages. We touch our phones an average of 2,617 times a day. Who is the customer more likely to call when they require a product or service? The business they’ve steadily built a rapport with by seeing and engaging with their content, or the first company that happened to come up when they did a google search?
If you’d love to kick start your content strategy and create your own killer content plan like the one above, talk to us today!