Content is the basis of everything. Good marketing strategy is really just good content.
Whether it’s video, text, or photos your content is king and you should put effort into creating quality content that strategically aligns with your business goals. Because it’s so important, we’ve gone through what can happen when your content isn’t on point and you’re not paying attention to what it says about your business.
You’re talking to strangers.
We’ve been stressing this all October, know your audience. If you’ve been posting regularly on social media, you have some of the best analytics in the business at your fingertips. At a glance, you can know some of the most important characteristics of the people following you. You can check out their age, location, gender, and buying habits all in a flash. After checking out the analytics, you can start to deduce who these people are based on the posts they engage with most.
With this information, you can determine what your followers need, what their problems are and how your business can fix them. If your content doesn’t help fulfill their needs, they won’t engage with your business online. Keeping an eye on all of these indicators and your engagement levels, you can change your strategy accordingly.
For example, a soccer team has been using social media to promote ticket sales. They’ve been posting links to their ticket sale site and plenty of people have been engaging with the posts. However, they’re not seeing an increase in sales and can’t figure out why. They might check their analytics and find out that they’ve cultivated an audience that is too young to make travel decisions, or maybe they’re way out of their market reach.
Knowing this, the team could decide to use their social media to sell merch to their audience organically. They have already cultivated these fans who are both engaged and supportive, so altering the posts so that they can still capture those leads is helpful to their organization. The team also knows now that they may need to put some additional advertising budget into sponsoring posts in their market area to attract the right audience in order to sell tickets, or an audience old enough to make purchasing decisions.
You don’t believe in your content.
Maybe you’ve been posting consistently online and your website is capturing leads nonstop. However, your content doesn’t match your company’s values or support what you do as a business. Similarly to the last problem, you have engaging content but you’re also giving up what makes your brand unique. Your social media goes from something that should represent who and what your business is, to something performative that doesn’t accurately reflect your goals.
Think about it this way, a restaurant adopts a plant-based alternative to their menu despite not having any other plant-based products available. They have built a business on providing food options to a specific group of people, but have now poured marketing efforts into something that doesn’t necessarily align with the brand identity they’ve created.
They are getting countless likes and this may even translate into one-off sales. However, because they don’t provide any other plant-based alternatives the customers they’ve attracted don’t last. This isn’t a sustainable content strategy because they’ve focused their marketing efforts on something that isn’t key to their values and have built an audience that doesn’t actually believe in their brand. If you find yourself in a position like this, refocus and make sure that your content is aligned with what you actually do.
Stuck in the past.
Sometimes there are businesses that have it all figured out. They know their audience and they’re confident their content matches their brand and values. Yet they still find their engagement starting to slide eventually.
If you take a critical look at their content, you’ll find that it’s all the same. It’s the same version of the same picture in the same format. They use the same advertisements over and over again, to a point where you actively avoid their content because you’ve seen it already. Rehashing all of your old posts is just beating a dead horse.
Eventually, this repeated content will lose its sheen. It will stop working. Instead of repeating the same thing over and over, consider finding a deeper understanding of your following so that you can create new content that’s still efficient.
Relying on gimmicks.
If all of the above aren’t a problem, you might not be in the clear just yet. Consider what you’re posting. Has it been mainly comprised of gimmicks and discounts? Are people engaging for the right reasons?
If your audience primarily visits your page for contests and discounts, consider whether or not that’s really helping to build your business. Think about whether or not you want people to interact with your brand just to get a discount. You probably don’t.
What now?
Remember one thing, you’re ahead of the game as long as you’re trying. You’ve put the effort into building your digital presence, but now you need to take a step back and think about if any of the above is true for you. If it is, that’s ok. You can always make changes.
Not sure where to start? You can always give us a call and we will provide you with a no-pressure consultation about your digital marketing strategy.
Check out our full Marketing Mistake series on IGTV by clicking here.