Even the strongest social media posters still need a little help from time to time. Are you doing everything you can? Read the following list to see if you’re missing any key digital media secrets.
Marketing your content in a way that is funny is important, but it also has to be engaging, and in the end, translate to profits. This is the entire purpose of content marketing in the first place. Whatever medium you are using, there is always ways to better engage your audience. If you feel like your social media presence could be better, you may be inadvertently doing one of the following things:
You’re selling more than Informing
This is a tough border line to guard. On the one hand, you do want to sell your products. But that cannot be the only thing you do on your site. This may help you do well in house, but it won’t get you much follower traction. Content marketing has less of a focus on being aggressive and frequent. It is about building a long-term relationship with your followers. It takes many months to build up a solid foundation with your followers. You are looking at a long-term trajectory when it comes to marketing.
It takes a lot of leg work and nuance in order to pull people into your page. You have to have the patience in order to create a narrative for customers. Create a visual to entice people in initially and peak interest. This helps get more people to your page and lead to a higher conversion rate.
Try focusing in on different problems your consumer base is having, rather than just posting informative text. It also helps to create articles focused around the topics you are selling products for. Rather than focus on the product itself, try to incorporate the product into fun and interesting articles. If you sell hair products, try writing about different styles (and how your product can help with it). Show some explanatory videos featuring your product, but not with it necessarily at the center. Make people want to buy the product because of what they are watching, not because you told them to. This is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field without coming off as too pushy.
2. You are not consistent with your posting
It is not enough to post very engaging content infrequently. Studies have shown that publishing more blog entries has a direct correlation with more hits on a site. It varies per industry but at least six a month is a good starting figure. You have to post frequently in order to end up in searches and get even more traffic going to your blog. It takes between three months to half a year to really get the consistency of a well-seasoned blog, but the trick is to keep at it. Popular posts are great but they are not enough to sustain a page long term. You need to keep at it.
Also take into account the forum you are posting on. Twitter is the type of forum that demands at least one post a day in order to stay relevant. Other forums offer you more flexibility. But make sure not to ignore your page for too long. Plan out a calendar of submissions in order to better organize yourself. Get your sources together in advance so you are not overwhelmed and stay ahead of your posting schedule. Look towards the long term when planning out your posting.
3. You are not being strategic
You need to set goals before you start posting. This is the best way to learn from your mistakes and try out different things. Have a brainstorm about how and when you want to post things. Decide on a core demographic. Then start researching about that group of people and see what it is they like, and respond to online. It is important to have some sort of highline strategy, taking into account where you want to publish and at what time, to test out different types of content. The more data you are able to get back, the more you can use it later on. Write down everything you are doing so that you can keep track of it over a long period of time, preferably in quarterly interims to best study seasonal post rates. This will help you get a much stronger long term perspective.
4. You don’t learn from your content experience
The most important part of content posting is the ability change strategy quickly when you have made an error. You need to be able to take feedback from your analytics and results and produce that into significant change. Keep an eye on your content. Plenty of websites offer data tracking and analytics. Google is one example. Look at click rates, click back rates, how long people are on your page, and downloads to see how engaging your posts are. Analyze subscriptions and comments in order to get a sense of how interesting your content is. Read through and see where people think you can do better.
It is important to keep an eye out on the feedback you are getting from consumers in order to better shift your overall marketing strategy. This is a huge step in utilizing and taking advantage of content marketing and real time reactions from the market.
5. You have a lot of tech problems
No one likes going to a site with a bunch of tech problems. It is very easy to build a reputation as a sit with awful tech glitches, and very hard to shake that sort of reputation. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with your site. One huge problem occurs with optimizing of images on your site. Many sites have repeating content or errors in Meta descriptions. Sometimes even title tags are incorrect. Each page you post needs to have just one H1 heading, but often pages can contain multiples. This can really mess up the optics of the site you are using and find it difficult to find.
Use sharing features on your website to make it easier to disseminate across multiple forums. One way to make it easier for users is to make sure they have an embed code in the graphics you want shared. This coding makes it so that everything that is shared will be uniform, no matter what site it is shared on. Without it, there is a high risk of getting some very wonky looking posts coming from your site. This also allows you to put in backlinks and logos in your codes. There are plenty of free sites on the web that will allow you to do this.
6. You need to balance how much you use SEO
You need to focus on your consumer base, not Google, when you write your website. It is tempting to design your website in order to appear first in Google searches. And indeed this doesn’t hurt you in getting some good feedback. All you need are a couple of SEO basics:
Place the most relevant keywords and terms in the text you want to highlight such as your page title or headings. You can also put it at the beginning of any texts you want to add. This includes any paragraphs or phrases. Try also including it in headings and title tags. Remember to only use one H1 headline, although you can feel free to use subtitles where you please.
Make sure not to “keyword stuff.” This basically means that you don’t want to saturate your site with keywords in order to be most relevant in searches. The better written your content is, the less likely this is to occur. This is good because Google penalizes websites who oversaturate in this manner.
7. Your content is way off the mark
This may be obvious to some, but it is very difficult to put in practice. Do you truly understand you consumer base as well as you think you do? You need to ensure you are tapping in to what it is they want. This can help you establish yourself as an expert and source of authority in your field. The best way to start doing that is to make sure your content is unique from everyone else.
Start by putting everyone into groups (ideal versions of the types of people coming to your site). Create content that is specific to that group. What is it that these people want? Who are they? What do they do in their spare time? Really tap into what it is to be this type of person. Look through what sort of content is doing well among this group. Sites like BuzzSumo can really give you an idea of what is going viral and with whom. Don’t forget that you have much of this information on hand already. Go to your marketing or costumers sales team and see if they have data analytics on different groups. Check out competitors in the field and see what their strategy is. The best way to go about it is to try and understand the people you are publishing to by building an entire narrative around them, rather than guessing.
8. You’re not using sites for their best purpose
Nobody likes to go looking for content. Your content needs to find your target audience. Pick the sites you think people will frequent the most and publish content that is specific to the demographics on that site. You need to be able to get data on where people are going online and what it is they want to see.
Try looking into buying ad time on different sites. Paying for media outreach is a great way to increase your follower count and get more people to your page. This is also a great way to ensure experts are tracking when and where people are most active, rather than blindly guessing yourself.
Send people a newsletter so they can get to know what the company is up to. Target it to groups that are looking for certain products but also include information about things they may not have known. Put this on different sites, but also make it link back to your website, to increase traffic and click throughs.
Of course with other content, make sure it does not have the extra step of going back to your website. Articles and graphics should open up directly in whatever site you are using. This makes it easier for users in the long run. Seek out influencers on different sites to help promote your content as well. This will build a reputation as a prominent and cool page in whatever sphere you are operating in.
9. The quality of your posts leaves something to be desired
It is important to post frequently, but not if you are going to put up things that make you look bad. Do not use extra text and weird images. There is already a lot of that wasting away in the corners of the Internet. People do not need more spam on their dashboards and feeds. Put effort into creating high quality articles and images (or indeed, obtaining them). This will make a huge difference in how you are perceived online. Be accurate, do your research, and be concise. Make sure you are as original as possible. Have a general outline in everything you are posting that is easy to follow. Proofread your stuff and make sure you say what you mean the first time. There is nothing worse than having to go back and repost content. It is unprofessional and looks bad for your company. Additionally, take the time to hire experts that can tell you what is attractive graphically and what is not as appealing.
10. You don’t put a face to the name
You cannot successfully brand if your content cannot be traced back to you. Make sure your company name and logo is front and center in all initiatives you put out. There is no point in going viral if you cannot take any of the credit. Indeed, this makes it very difficult to go viral a second time because you have none of the reputational effects associated with your first post. Make yourself recognizable to consumers so you can keep putting out quality content online.
Conclusion:
It is easy to make mistakes when branding online. A successful product can go south if the right steps are not taken. Follow this guide and your product launch is sure to be a success.
