Looking to create the perfect content to make your audience happy and grow your business? These golden rules for creating high quality, meaningful content will help you connect with your audience, gain organic traffic, and increase your business sales!
At Solomoto, our team implemented a few marketing strategies at the beginning of our startup journey trying to “increase revenue from social media traffic.”
Our first strategy failed epically. The second strategy that we just started has increased our membership to over 180,000 active monthly users. So, it’s safe to say that we have learned a LOT about marketing over the last three years.
The inspiration for this post came from the mistakes we made on our marketing journey as a small business and what we changed the second time around.
There are a lot of tough lessons and painful moments you can avoid by following these golden rules for creating high quality content!
1. Identify your target audience.
You should have a clear idea who your target audience is and how they behave. To do this, do not just create a mental image or a vague list of bullet points about your customers, draw your audience.
That’s right, find some paper and a pencil and draw your target audience. Draw what they look like, what identities they have, list their values, interests, hopes, dreams, commitments, etc.
By drawing your target audience, you will not just have a better understanding of who your target audience is, but you will be able to empathize with your audience, thinking of them not just as customers but as people.
Believe us, it feels weird when you first start drawing your audience, but it really does work! Click these links so we can show you how to effectively draw your target audience and to empathize with them.
Remember, your target audience is who you are marketing your business to AND the people you will communicate with when writing content.
Whether it comes to selecting images, developing your product, or creating social media content, your target audience should remain at the core of every marketing and business decision made.
By empathizing with your target audience and viewing them as people with lives rather than just customers, your business will be able to easily evolve and adapt to the ever changing market. You will be able to integrate your audience’s values, interests, and preferences to your products and business model which will help your business grow.
2. Make your content fun and engaging.
Chances are, your customers want to follow your business on social media because they are interested in your business’ ideals, they like your products or services, they want to receive special deals or prizes, or even to learn something new.
To attract more of your target audience to your social media page (and keep your existing customers interested), you need to show off your business’ personality.
Stay away from aggressive sales pitches or dry facts. The biggest thing we found out when writing any type of content for our audience is that facts tell and stories sell.
Every business has a unique story. The smaller the business, the more human-oriented the stories are. We found out about the power of these unique voices the hard way. We spent all our time researching facts and statistics that we thought would benefit our users. And guess what - it didn’t work. Our users thought it was boring. We lost a lot of member engagement and our sales plummeted as a result.
We weren’t utilizing what made our business so great in the first place, the people. Solomoto has a strong culture that is found worldwide. When creating our content, we forgot to include what made us as a small business unique, which made our content sound corporate, boring, and empty.
As a business owner, think about WHY your audience is following you, how your business personality can add to your appeal, and how to make the WHY and your personality fun!
3. Diversify the types of content found on each social media platform.
All the top social media hubs present content in a unique way. By understanding what types of content will do well on each social media platform, you will increase your audience engagement and business popularity.
Here is a short list of the types of content that we found does well on the major platforms. If you want to learn more about these types of content, feel free to click this link.
- Facebook: videos, links, longer posts, and curated content
- Instagram: high definition photos and quotes
- Twitter: news, blog posts, and GIFs
- Pinterest: infographics and step-by-step photo guides
- Google+: blog posts that you want to rank on Google
- LinkedIn: company news and professional content
4. Use the news, pop culture, and movements as momentum.
Using tangential interests, trends, or fads to spice up your business and social media content is known as situational marketing. Situational marketing uses the idea from the first golden rule that your target audience is not just customers; they are people.
People have lives outside of your business. To develop a meaningful relationship with your audience, your business needs to recognize what jokes, trends, or interests impact their lives.
By knowing what references appeals to your audience, you can use that organic momentum to generate social media traffic and support from your audience.
Movements can also be very influential if you associate your brand or business with a specific value, social movement, or charity that you are passionate about. This does not only spread awareness about the movement, but increase the reputation of your business with your target audience by having it associated with a social movement.
These types of organic traffic generators increase the popularity of your business and influence people’s perception towards your business.
Keep in mind that momentum is like a wave. It’s important to learn how to ride the wave of momentum.
Catching the wave at right time will make your business soar. If you are too early or too late, you will miss the free opportunity.
5. Discover which content formats are effective.
Depending on your business and target audience, some types of media may be more effective in engaging your audience than others. A few examples of different media formats are articles, images, videos, quizzes, infographics, and slideshows.
You want to find out what types of media formats your users enjoy the most and support your business.
Feel free to check out this post on how you can find out which content formats are effective for your business.
6. Post high quality, aesthetically pleasing images.
Images are the most important thing that catches your audience’s eye while they are busy scrolling through their social media feed. High quality, beautiful images will cause your audience to stop and take the photo in.
When this happens, they are more likely to read the headline or photo caption. If interested, your audience may react to your photo (like, comment, share), or click on it which will direct them to an external site so they can learn more about your business or online store.
A professional camera is great for producing high quality images. Click this link to learn our tips on how to produce beautiful, high quality images in a matter of seconds.
Or, if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the money or the time to spend hours and thousands of dollars on expensive equipment, props, and editing software. Instead, you should invest in a service that provides these images for free or at a low cost.
At Solomoto, we don’t just provide your business with visually stunning images of professional caliber, but also high quality content tailored to your business’ needs. Feel free to visit our post on how Solomoto can improve your business today or learn about all our cutting edge features by clicking these links.
7. Post consistently and at peak times.
It’s important to keep the days and times you post consistent from week to week. This will give your audience the impression that your business is dependable and trustworthy.
By posting on the same days and times, you will establish an indirect connection with your audience. They will start to expect seeing your posts for that day since they know you keep up your end of the bargain and post content on a regular basis.
To maximize this relationship with your audience, you need to post content at peak times. You want to post content whenever your target audience is most active on social media to best advertise your business.
Several studies have been conducted to find out when the best times to post on social media are. The short answer:
The best days and times to post content depends on your target audience and the social media platform.
Did you really expect there to be one day and time that works for every social media platform?
If you think about it, each social media platform has their own style, functionality, and approach to communication. It makes sense that the user engagement will be different since these factors differ between each platform.
That being said, if you are not familiar with each platform inside-out, it can be overwhelming to make sure you post on the correct day and at the right time. To solve this issue, most businesses use a scheduling system to manage the posts they want to publish to each of their social media accounts.
Scheduling systems allow for business owners to set up their posts in advance so they can spend their time focusing on other important matters. These systems are great because you can build a specific content plan, schedule posts to be published to different platforms, and increase your interactions with your target audience.
Solomoto provides the ideal scheduling system for small and medium sized businesses who want to have an easy way to manage the content they publish on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Our scheduling system has more than the typical features because ours is specifically tailored to work for your business, regardless of location or venture.
Now it’s time to take action! Use the techniques you learned from this post to grow your business and create some amazing content.
Best of luck,
The Solomoto Team
P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook, and we will do our best to help!
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