Producing effective social media content consistently

Maintaining a consistent marketing message is the tough part for most businesses who try to handle social media marketing themselves. Content development and publication that stays relevant, interesting and on-message takes a lot of time and its quality will suffer unless you have committed resources. The optimal way to go is to outsource social media marketing to a high-touch, well-focused agency.

The power of storytelling through social media

Successful companies have a story to tell and they have people who are good storytellers. Do you have both?

A company’s story can consist of answers to these kinds of questions:

• What is your product or service? Bonus tips specifically for social media content
• How does your product or service help people?
• How do you deliver the product or make the service available to those who want it?
• In what ways is your company different than its competitors – what sets it apart?

And these days, getting into the socially conscious mindset of your target audience means having good, authentic answers for questions like:

• What do you stand for?
• In what ways does your company give back to its local community and/or to its professional community?
• What message do you support?

Then, how do you create content that aligns with your mission, vision and business goals?

Posing these questions provides an opportunity to help frame your company’s story.

Content creation: Established framework and process

A defined process is essential for keeping content creation efforts running like a well-oiled machine. An effective process uses a framework made up of best in class tools; Trello, Hootsuite, G Suite and Dropbox are examples of the tools we use for our content development framework.

Trello is our project management base. Its boards, lists, and cards enable us to organize and prioritize social media campaigns in a consistent, accountable way. Resources, directories, creative assets, to-do lists, assignments, automation, due dates and more. Punctuating its position as a best-in-class tool, Trello was recently acquired by Atlassian and still maintains its service & brand.

Hootsuite is our scheduling, content curation, publication, engagement and analytics base. The efficiency of posting on multiple social media channels is just one of the Hootsuite features that allow us to provide top notch service and results.

G Suite is ubiquitous and easy to use, making it a great tool for securely sharing documents, spreadsheets and editorial calendars. The collaborative editing features in Google Docs make for fast edits and approvals of content.

Dropbox is our “on deck” document sharing tool when clients are using Dropbox instead of G Suite.

Plan long-term content strategy alongside short-term

Long-term planning identifies and organizes all the initiatives and campaigns over the course of a year where content will need to be created. The established framework and process for content creation allows for short-term and long-term content to be ideated, created and published, then tracked together.

This is important because planning social media content that compliments holidays, sports events, cultural happenings, national “this” day and national “that” days should always happen well in advance. For example, if your business has offerings that are relevant to the “this and that” days, there should be intentional content created to make the connection with your business; leverage the buzz of “this and that” by planning ahead.

Likewise, leveraging current events and news needs to be done in a timely manner so that it makes a relevant and memorable connection with the consumer.

Generate content ideas

One of the differences between mediocre and great social media marketing is that the latter relies on a process to consistently produce high-quality content ideas. Outsourcing your social media marketing means you’ll offload the need to learn how to research, uncover and document those ideas and expand on them. Ideas aren’t always easily apparent and this is where having the work done for you pays off.

The time savings are enormous.

Experience, expertise and skill offered by the professional outweigh determination exerted by the novice.

Have you spent fruitless time trying to think of what to post, which day of the week and what time of day? How about reading article after article trying to figure out which social media channel is best suited for reaching your audience — is it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn? What about YouTube? Oh, yes, you must certainly think about YouTube (the internet’s second largest search engine) and of course that summons the need to have video content.

Promote content effectively

Content promotion on social media channels is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Building a promotional plan, promoting your content organically and through paid ads, and keeping up with trends to continually improve content promotion strategies are amongst the big time savers you will realize when you outsource your social media marketing.

Ad campaigns

Paid ads on a platform like Facebook, which is still substantially less expensive than advertising with Google Ads, are not an option – they are a must. Whether the campaign’s goal is brand awareness, lead generation or e-commerce sales, Facebook Ads are the only realistic way your company will see direct results on that platform. The organic content, by itself, no longer has much weight in Facebook’s algorithm for business pages.

Measure and analyze content performance

Your content strategy’s return on investment must be measured by setting goals and analyzing content performance. Identifying the goals for your content, which metrics to track for your organic and paid efforts and how to attribute conversions are essential elements of a social media marketing plan.

A conversion can be an ad click, a lead generation form, a product sale, a consulting appointment scheduled or any number of desired outcomes.

How your content’s performance is communicated to others is also important. For example, do you need to report dollars generated versus dollars spent on an ad campaign? Or number of lead generation forms submitted versus number of product sales? The type of report that is generated each month (or for each individual campaign), is defined by the metrics you or your stakeholders want to track.

A word about pricing for social media marketing in Las Vegas

Sticker shock is how I describe the reaction we sometimes see from business owners and executives at corporate clients, and I still marvel at that reaction even after more than a decade of working to help companies with their social media marketing. Why “marvel?” Well, it tells me that the owner or executive has not weighed the simplest of cost comparisons. For example, spending $700 or $1,700 or $2,700 or more per month on having an agency do it right versus spending the priceless time of the executive and often the valuable time of ancillary staff, too, who lack the experience, expertise and skill to be efficient.

And what about the cost of that investment versus the return? Sticker shock people balk at spending $2,700 per month even if getting one new client nets them $10,000, or similarly if spending $2,700 per month helps realize $20,000 in sales.

My advice: No matter what the measurable ROI is, dollar-wise, don’t omit the value of time and quality that you get with a professional social media service provider.