Creating an effective social media marketing strategy is important for the success of your small business. In a previous article, we discussed how to create a social media marketing strategy that will work best for your business. If you are interested in learning more, read the article here. Now, when it comes time to actually implement your social media marketing strategy, one of the key aspects is to create quality content that will satisfy the needs of your customers. This can often be easier said than done. Don’t worry though, in this article we will go over three easy tips that will allow you to create high-quality social media content.
In this article, the three tips we will discuss are to know your customer base, plan your content, and measure and analyze content after posting. Utilizing all three of these tips will ensure your social media marketing strategies' need for quality content is fulfilled. It will also create a positive and reliable image in the mind of your customers.
1. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is an extremely important part of the content creation process. To make quality content that will satisfy your social media audience's needs, it makes sense to first understand some basic information about them. In an article published by HootSuite, they state there are seven important things you need to know to identify your business's target market. These seven things include age, location, language, spending power and patterns, interest, challenges, and stage of life. Finding answers to these seven questions will allow your business to gain a much deeper understanding of the overall customer base. You can then use this information to create content that is tailor-made for your audience and geared towards their interest.
2. Plan & Create Content
Once you have a better understanding of your social media audience, you can begin to plan out what content you will be making. Planning out content is a great way to ensure you can post consistently and it also helps take away some of the stress caused by idea generation.
According to HubSpot, the content creation process consists of seven steps. These steps are SEO research, ideation, writing/creating, editing, uploading, and promoting. As per HubSpot, the first step is to identify what keywords you will need to use to maximize the reach of your content. Ensuring you are utilizing strong keywords can have a huge impact on the overall success of your content. Not only should it align with the interest of your buyer persona, but it should also be attractive to a larger audience of new and potential customers. Once the SEO research is done and the keywords have been chosen, you can move on to the ideation stage. In this stage, you will begin to brainstorm content ideas. HubSpot recommends using the topic cluster model. This model starts with the creation of a long-form main content page and then branches out into various connecting pages. These connecting pages all tie back into the main content page. This type of structure makes idea generation a much easier task and helps make your content more discoverable.
After the ideation stage is complete, you can dive into writing and/or creating the content. In this stage, it is important to make sure you are doing adequate research and providing accurate, helpful, and easily digestible content. Next, you will review the content you have created and make edits. This ensures that the final piece of content is a quality representation of the business. Once editing is complete, you can upload the content to your website and save draft posts on social media platforms. Remember, if you are posting the same content on multiple forms of social media, you will need to slightly tweak the formatting to ensure it looks correct on each specific platform. Next, you can go ahead and post the content. It’s important to do research ahead of time to make sure you are posting at the optimal times on each social media platform. The final step is to promote the content. This can be done in a wide variety of ways. However, the most simple way is to create a visual aid that promotes the content and post it where your audience will be. For example, if your business has a strong following on Instagram, you would post on that platform to promote your new content. Doing this is important because if you are posting in a place that your audience cannot see, you are especially waiting your time.
3. Measure and Analyze Content
The last step to creating content is to analyze the data associated with your content to measure how successful it was. Regularly analyzing content is extremely important to ensure you are putting out content that is satisfying your audience. There are a few different metrics that can be used to identify how successful a specific piece of content was. According to Semrush, these metrics include organic sessions, search rankings, earned links, social shares, and conversions. These five metrics can give you a large amount of insight into the performance of your content. Use the information from these metrics to make informed decisions about what types of content to create or avoid in the future.
In this blog post, we talked about three tips for creating quality content for your small business. The tips we discussed were to know your audience, how to plan and create content, and how to measure and analyze your content. Each of these tips focused on a different part of the content creation process. The first, focused on doing adequate research to identify who you were creating content for. The second, talked about how to effectively create and plan out your content. And the third tip showed what metrics may be best used to analyze the success of your content. I hope you were able to gain some useful knowledge from this blog post that will help as you continue to grow your small business.
Resources
Brockbank, James. “The Essential Guide to Content Creation: To Engage and Convert Your Audience.” Semrush Blog, 16 Sept. 2020, https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-creation/.
Newberry, Christina. “How to Find and Target Your Social Media Audience (Free Template).” Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard, 7 Oct. 2020, https://blog.hootsuite.com/target-market/.
Perricone, Christina. “The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation.” HubSpot Blog, 1 Feb. 2022, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-creation.
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