Without a doubt, when speaking with our clients, one of their biggest stumbling blocks (apart from Twitter!) is creating content for their social media channels. I have lost count of the times that I’ve heard phrases such as ‘I just don’t know what to write about’ or ‘I don’t think I’ll have anything interesting to say’ or ‘I sit at my computer on a Monday with really good intentions and then go blank’. And we are with you – it is really hard to come up with something to say right there on the spot when nothing interesting has happened over the last 48 hours. So that is where content marketing and planning comes in.
So what is content marketing?
Well, it means to create and deliver valuable, relevant and consistent content, to attract and acquire clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer actions.
Or in other words – to produce great content to the right people at the right time.
And what do we mean by content?
Content comes in all forms, shapes and sizes, and from a content marketers point of view – the more interesting the better! We are talking about forms such as;
- Images
- Infographics
- Video
- Blogs
- Explainers
- Web pages
- PDFs
But we can take it so much further with How to’s, Case Studies, Ebooks, Webinars, FAQ’s, Guides, Quotes, Vlogs, Surveys, Slideshares, Podcasts and more!
These are great ways of approaching something you want to share. Rather than write a few short sentences you can create a piece of content that will produce engagement, interaction and followers. It is easy creating content such as infographics in platforms like Easel.ly and Piktochart, so don't be afraid of creating your own!
Also, don’t be afraid of sharing content that you have shared in the past, as long as it is not time restrictive. Blogs that you have written months ago which are still relevant can be re-shared throughout your social media channels. You can re-use a video that hasn’t been shown for a while. Any archived content that you have can be shared as long as it is still relevant and interesting.
Keeping visuals within your content is important, as we have previously discussed, people only remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. 83% of all human learning is visual – so if you can give them that content within a visual fashion you have so much more opportunity for your audience to retain that information.
User Generated Content
There is a lot of discussion currently about UGC, which means that the content you are sharing has come from a users source. For example – feedback from a customer, or an image from a competition you launched. We have created many images with Canva.com for clients using their own images as backdrops with a review overlaid. This can be shared on all of their channels and is a quick, easy and free way of creating an effective piece of content using UGC. This is why looking at what content you already have is important. You may have a lot of images or quotes or testimonials on file that you haven’t known what to do with. Creating a visual is one of the best ways to approach this. (For further information on the power of visual please refer to our previous blog post.)
Next time we are going to look at your strategy a bit further and we will also be looking at how to find your content.