This article describes four ways to create relevant social content for paid, earned, owned and shared channels. These critical focus areas ensure you give your customers the best possible experience.
Social media marketing is a landscape where customers' expectations of a consistent and seamless journey often clash with disjointed social planning approaches. It's made worse by social platforms' lack of data transparency and the continuously changing social media platform algorithms. It's also why you, as marketers, must establish cross-functional teams to secure your social presence is unified across paid, owned, earned and shared media.
The guidelines and processes for a consistent brand presence
- Your customers demand brand consistency, which requires planning and orchestration, even when your organisation's ownership of social media communications is disjointed.
- Your key to a successful content pipeline is that you plan intelligently. But, first, you must ensure that the right content appears on the right channel in a suitable format and at the right time.
- You shall break down the silos across your online and social teams. Host bi-daily or weekly stand-ups to confirm that what you want to say is still relevant. Use shared editorial calendars so your cross-functional teams have a holistic view of planning and publishing.
Engage and empower your community
- You must strive to provide entertainment, utility, conversation or some combination of the three to remain relevant to your target audience.
- You shall listen to your target audience and be part of the conversations that matter to them. If your audience wants to talk about material handling, for example, create content plans around material handling.
- Make sure you give your customers a voice in your brand and leverage user-generated content to build trust. People want to hear about your brand's greatness from their peers, not you.
- Explore which influencers are suitable for your brand and why. Can they help you reach diverse audiences? Do they create eye-catching content? Is their voice naturally aligned with yours?
Sync with the customer journey
- Aligning your social media throughout the buyer journey helps reinforce your brand as authentic and dependable, which is essential in this time of uncertainty.
- It would be best to consider how far your potential and existing customers can get in their decisions using social media. They may not be able to buy or order on-platform, but you can provide posts and use CTAs that will help them get closer to you before driving them to your website.
Meet your audience where they are
- Brand-engaged customers say they like seeing content from and following brands.
- Give these social media users helpful content that speaks to their needs and pain points. The most significant opportunity in social media lies in being extremely specific in responding to your customer's needs.
- To ensure the content doesn't get stale, test and optimise it to determine whether it still resonates.
If you want to learn more about using social media as a B2B company, take a look at our extensive guide to social media for business – you can also download the guide as a PDF below if you prefer.
