“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.
This Week: Creating Content Consumers Actually Want, The Power of Musical.ly is Real, Video Types Drive Different Results, Shifting from Desktop to a Mobile-First Search Strategy and Check the Default Settings.
Read MoreContent... everyone’s talking about it, but it’s pretty elusive for a lot of brands. They often think they don’t have anything, but it’s more likely they don’t know what they’re looking for or they think what they have isn’t good enough.
Brands can take a lot of different approaches to content from aggregating content that’s valuable to customers created by others, which makes the brand a resource for valuable content. Brands can also create original content, which requires a publisher mindset. The right approach depends on the business’ objectives and strategy, which should tie directly to the audience.
Original content allows brands to offer something that no one else can. A brand has exclusive access to itself, and it can open that access up to its most passionate advocates to keep them excited about the brand and what it does. It’s not about straight-up selling. It’s telling a bigger story about what the brand is and how it fits into consumers lives.
A great example is how Red Bull uses extreme sports content to entertain their audience while communicating to them Red Bull’s value proposition with subtlety.
Use the Tools at Your Fingertips
A brand has one key asset that they often don’t consider or are too scared to leverage—employees. Employees can be invaluable content producers. They’re often ‘in the trenches’ with consumers and know what they care about because they deal with them each and every day.
Tools also come in the form of literal tools. Instagram just released an update that allows both employees and the tool to be leveraged at the same time.
iOS users can now post photos directly to brand Pages seamlessly from the Instagram app (here’s how). Instagram is a fantastic content creation tool that allows users to make the mundane interesting.
Use it to post behind-the-scenes footage, brand events, product previews and so on. It allows the brand to pull back the curtain and do more than just tell consumers what they’re up to but also show them in an interesting way.
Brands could potentially identify a handful of employees who have to apply and get trained to have admin access to the Facebook Page and can share Instagram content. Rules will have to be put in place, but social media should ultimately live across the organization, and once trained, these employees become content creators making the brand’s efforts more scalable.
That’s just one example, but brands need to get creative when it comes to content generation and not over think it to the point of being stagnant. It starts with identifying objectives and strategies beforehand. Once there, do some digging. Talk to people across the organization who either have content or have the potential to help create it. Then identify the tools used to create it and determine a plan to bring the pieces together.
Social media monitoring is becoming less of a question and more of a necessity for businesses. Whether it’s using a combination of free DIY solutions like Google Alerts and Twitter Search or more enterprise-level solutions like Sysomos or Radian6, brands accept that they need the right tools to listen effectively. But the most common reasons for investing include threat tracking and opportunity spotting, but the benefits go deeper than that.
The ability to tap consumer conversations at any given moment gives brands an opportunity to inform what they’re doing and make it better. This plays out most of all through the use of content.
Social media monitoring allows brands to do a couple things:
Identify Conversation Whitespace
Marketers can use a combination of tools to track where relevant conversations are taking place related to their brands, competitors or categories. Consumers turn to social media for information.
What questions are people asking? Is this existing information accurate? Can we do better? Content allows brands to deliver ongoing value to social customers. Fulfilling a need that has been identified makes a brand presence that much stronger.
Looking at what isn’t being said is just as important as evaluating what is. It can inform a brand’s approach to content generation and direct what needs to be created next.
Evaluate “Virality”
Marketers should absolutely be identifying how original content spreads (virality) and who is spreading it, but these findings can also inform how the brand moves forward.
Let’s be clear “virality” doesn’t mean the same thing as a “viral” video. Virality has to do with how content spreads.
Virality findings can include:
Monitoring delivers far too many insights to be limited to listening. It can make what a brand is already doing better by helping to develop the right content in the right form for the right audience.
Image Source: stock.xchngThe holiday season can be a double-edged sword for marketers as we start to see purchase-ready consumers eager to buy their gifts for loved ones. Understandably, marketers are all too eager to try to get consumers to spend their money with their brands.
After all, that’s what marketers do. We connect with consumers and work to persuade them to purchase products from us. However, the social media space requires marketers to rethink their instincts and tread carefully.
Respect the Relationship.
Social media, unlike any other platform, is where we can easily communicate one-on-one with our customers. We spend time and effort connecting with people, responding to queries and creating compelling content that consumers not only want to consume but also share with others.
Like any relationship, the time and effort put in social media throughout the year is an investment. It’s a give and take.
The challenge for marketers is respecting those relationships all the time, particularly during the holidays when driving the sale can take priority over nurturing the relationships with customers.
Marketers can’t be selfish. “Buy, buy, buy!” and “Sale, sale, sale!” have a time and place in brands’ social media efforts, but they should be communicated with a balance of valuable content.
Social media is the consumer’s turf. We need to be respectful of that and make sure that what we’re doing is making our relationships with them stronger.
Deliver Value. Always.
It’s rare to find a brand that isn’t communicating in one way or another using social media, which means it’s more important than ever to be more than a distraction. We can’t get lazy. Value must always be delivered, whether it’s providing online customer service, creating great content that consumers enjoy or curating and sharing relevant content that’s already out there.
Consumers will see efforts that appear too promotional, bombard them with irrelevant information and feel too pushy and punish marketers for them. Maybe they’ll unsubscribe/unfollow/unlike, or maybe they’ll do something more damaging such as spread negative word of mouth.
Social media’s just different. Consumers look for entertainment and interactivity when engaging with social platforms. Sales should be communicated through these channels but with balance. The question that should always be in the back of a marketers mind all the time, especially during the holidays, is “Are we delivering value or just trying to get the sale?”
It’s easy to be presumptuous with social media. With so many tools and platforms at our disposal, it’s tempting for marketers to think, “Hey, we have stuff to say. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to hear about this?” But, without a doubt, no one cares about your brand more than you do.
No matter the advocate, his or her world will never be as consumed with your brand as yours is. Why would it? They have jobs, families and countless other priorities that come before your brand, which likely ranks pretty high in terms of your priorities.
That is exactly why brands need to be more than just present. They need their presence to be valuable.
Mediocrity Rules the Web
The magic of social media is that anyone can have a voice. However, that means there’s a surplus of content and information out there. One can find the same thing in hundreds, maybe thousands of different places. This surplus of information means much of it is the same, making most of it mediocre at best.
Brands are in constant competition with mediocrity because there’s a constant struggle to break the mediocrity straps that tend to hold them back. Being mediocre may be fine for many, but brands are online to connect with their consumers. Consumer attention is fragmented. There’s too much great content on the Web to bother with some of the mediocrity brands produce.
The Value Test
The nagging question that always needs to be the crux of every brand’s content marketing strategy is: Are we providing value?
What’s the utility of the content you’re providing? What void are you filling? Maybe it’s education. Perhaps, your content is really funny and provides entertainment. There’s even value in taking customer feedback and turning it into real change and innovation based on their thoughts and concerns.
Sometimes brands don’t even need to be the creators of content. Instead, they’re the aggregators, bringing together content from around the Web that’s relevant to the brand and its consumers, making the brand a resource for value.
How would your customers react if your social media presence were to disappear tomorrow? Would they notice? Would they just go elsewhere? Or would they miss the value you brought to their online lives by providing relevant, interesting content and establishing a community of individuals like themselves whom they’re able to connect with day after day?