Many businesses understate the impact of their organic posts in their social media marketing. Their only focus is constantly on ‘where do I advertise’ and ‘how do I advertise.’ They’re looking at their end-goal – more customers and more sales. Not bad, but the organic channel (besides being free) is an overlooked channel to continuously advertise (for free) to your audience and engage with them (did I mention it’s kinda for free?).
Don’t neglect your social posts – here are some tips to use and maximize the effect of this marketing channel to build brand awareness, engage your audience, and remarket to existing customers and social followers.
Here are all the topics we will cover in this guide
Understanding Your Audience
Like with ad campaigns, you’ll want to know who you’re posting for.
It’s definitely more stress-free when posting organically than when launching an ad campaign, but it’s important to understand who your audience is so you’re able to publish posts that they enjoy.
Plus, you can also use your organic posts to test creatives for your ad campaigns too!
Here are some things you should look at to understand your target audience:
- Demographics: This info helps you decide on the final output and language of your social posts to keep them engaging for your audience.
- Interests and Preferences: You’ll be able to include these in your creatives, or create similar-feeling content, to resonate better with your audience.
- Behavioral Data: This is where you’ll be spending time if you’re focused on growing organically and identifying what exactly is connecting with your audience and what isn’t.
Creating Content That Resonates
- Value-Driven Content: What that value is is determined by what your audience is looking for. It could be educational, entertaining or just pure inspiration. Set the expectation for them and have them come back for more.
- Personal Touch: Do more than high-production posts and videos. Share behind-the-scenes clips and day-to-day action. Humanize your brand for people to be able to connect better.
- User-Generated Content: Encourage followers and customers to share their experiences and photos about your brand. You’re able to create social proof this way, but also create better connections with your followers and hav them invested in sharing you.
Content Strategy
A content strategy could be as simple as a posting schedule and as complex as a yearly and quarterly theme schedule with posts planned out, captions drafted, and briefs made.
Use what works best for you and, if you need to, evolve from there. Don’t overwhelm yourself – that would be pointless and the exact opposite of what the strategy is for.
Your content strategy exists to help ease the stress of creation and deciding what you’re going to be publishing. Don’t overcomplicate it and do what’s necessary over optimal to get yourself comfortable without overwhelming yourself with dates and ideas and deadlines.
Here are some tips to help you develop a robust content strategy for your social media marketing:
Types of Content That Work Well
- Text Posts: You don’t always need a massive visual. Text posts are a great way for sharing updates, news, quick tips, or even milestones with your community. Keep them short (no walls of texts) and engaging. Plus, it can give some designers room to be creative with the brand’s font and style. You can also build templates for when you need to push or update something quickly to save creatively overloading a designer over time.
- Images: Use high-quality images and statics and remember to optimize for mobile – that’s where people are doing the most scrolling, so get used to holding your phone vertically.
- Videos: Videos are great for condensing complex topics and explaining them simply and in an engaging way. You’ll want to get better at recording with your phone vertically or learn how to keyframe in editing so you can optimize your videos for mobile (not everyone rotates their phone for your horizontal video and that’s potentially a lost lead).
- Infographics: Infographics are a great way to visualize data within your social media marketing. They also make what is essentially boring statistical analysis (sorry statisticians?) into a fun way to present the information to your audience. Pie charts, bar charts, that chart with a squiggly line AND bars. The colors. Make it pop (definitely sorry to designers) and eyeballs on important insights you believe should be shared and people should know. And it;’s not all just data, you can provide tips and how-to guides like this too. It’s all about taking what some people view as boring text or a boring number and transforming it into something that is #NOTBOOORING. That’s really all an infographic is.
Creating a Content Calendar
- Planning Ahead: Plan your posting ahead in a way that’s manageable and makes sense to you. This will depend on how often you post and your niche. If you post 3 times a day everyday, all day, getting a month’s worth in advance will be great to have ahead. But you could also do it week-to-week. If you’re posting two times a week, push yourself to have 3 months planned. That’s 8 posts a month and 24 posts in three months. Your main goal for the planning is to prevent last-minute scrambles, and get yourself time to build the post out from your creative mind to the limits of whatever tool you’re using to bring it into reality for your social media marketing.
- Scheduling Posts: If you’re only really active on one platform, like Instagram or TikTok, you can mainly use their business manager. It’s a best practice and you get more familiar with what works on your platform. Suppose you’re more cross-platform, and want to be everywhere. In that case, you may want to look into getting some help (Fatcow Digital? 👀) with posting or using a tool like Hootsuite so you can get familiar with one platform, track everything on one platform, and not spend more time jumping between all of the platforms for one post. More importantly, scheduling gives you more buffer time between when you publish and when your next post needs to be ready. I like to be between one and two ahead, but everyone has their own preference for a buffer time, so find one that’s comfortable with your schedule – that’s what’s most important.
- Flexibility: Be ready to adjust what you post depending on trending topics, events, changes in your business, and yourself – you might come up with a better idea and suddenly have to change EVERYTHING. Your social media marketing strategy isn’t set in stone, it’s just ready to help you with a post you thought of, so if you have something better than what you planned, you have the freedom to adjust.
Visual and Verbal Cohesion
Consistency in branding is crucial for creating effective social media posts.
Here’s how you can achieve visual and verbal cohesion in your social media marketing:
Use Consistent Branding
- Visual Identity: Be consistent with how you present your content. You run a jewelry brand social media account, then make sure your posts look elegant and the products are photographed in a consistently clear high-quality way. You run a meme page that grabs tweets from X (Twitter), then keep the screenshots and crops consistent. Keep colors, fonts, and logos in your posts and relevant. Be consistent with your social media marketing to build and maintain your brand identity.
- Tone and Voice: Don’t change how you interact with your audience. Your profile represents your personality, and you push that out with your visuals, but more importantly with the tone and voice of your text.
- Messaging: Make sure your messaging for each post is clear. More importantly, be clear about the message you’re trying to push yourself. It’s not just ‘I need a post to get more clients’ okay, that’s your goal. But your post needs to be pushing a message that says to potential clients “HEY! DO YOU SEE THIS? THIS IS THE BEST!” and if that isn’t clear, why would they come to you? Be clear with the message of the post, and remember to include calls-to-action so you’re viewers/followers/audience know what step they should take next after seeing the post you’ve published and shared.
Tips for Creating Visually Appealing Posts
- High-Quality Images: Use high-quality images. Noone likes looking at something blurred or unclear. Even the odd crops aren’t always taken well. If you’re photographing something, consider how clear and well-lit it is.
- Make it Vertical: This is where you optimize for mobile. People are scrolling on their phones, and recording and taking pictures in landscape can really dampen your reach and impact. It’ll even cause you more work with editing if you need to keyframe a video as opposed to doing it because you want to to make the video more engaging.
- Branding Elements: Remember to consider your brand elements and include them in your posts. Think about your main and supporting brand colors and what works better for your brand’s social, and what colors go well with them. Add your logo and remember to use your brand’s font.
- Captions and Text Overlays: But Rami, you said posts should be clear, how is a video going to be clear with text all over it? Don’t cover what you’re trying to show in your videos with the text you add, but definitely add text or captions to your videos. It makes them more accessible (think people watching with videos and reels muted) and makes sure if someone is speaking, no word is missed because the subtitles are easily available. It’s also a great way to highlight specific features by adjusting text colors or only adding text for the main points you want to make. (You could try doing this if you’re new to captioning and just starting out).
Engagement and Interaction
Engagement is a two-way street on social media. Here are some options and strategies you have to interact and engage with your audience effectively on social media:
Strategies for Increasing Engagement
- Ask Questions: Ask followers questions in your posts and stories. It could be as simple as asking for opinions or feedback. Start the conversation and watch them continue it.
- Host Giveaways & Contests: This is a big hack the ecom world leverages time and again to drive engagement on their social profiles and acquire followers on new brand launches. They’re fun ways to encourage users to share your content and tag their friends.
- Polls and Surveys: A great way to interact with your audience when you’re looking to get feedback and find valuable insight, and no insight is more invaluable then one pulled straight from your audience. (they’re not always going to just say it though, so be prepared to do some critical thinking and reading between the lines).
Best Practices for Responding to Comments and Messages
- Timely Responses: This shows your followers they’re important to you and you’re available when they need you. If you’re a new account and looking to grow a personal brand, I’d suggest psyching yourself up to be ready to respond to every comment and DM you get to keep people engaged and provide positive feedback and reinforcement to them interacting with you. Find a comfortable window of time to respond, and do it. Do it. Do it.
- Personalized Responses: It can be as simple as using their name or as complex as creating an inside joke for you and your followers. Take a look at it when thinking about your social media marketing strategy.
- Positive Tone: Keep it happy and light, even when addressing a complaint or rebuke. Stay courteous, polite, and professional. You’re the brand and have an image to maintain. There’s always Crisis Management when you need it, but why need it in the first place if you don’t have to – I like that option better.
Using Keywords and Hashtags
Using keywords and hashtags in your visuals and captions have their own role in making your posted content discoverable.
Here’s how you can look to benefit from using them:
Incorporating Relevant Keywords
Keyword Research: Check out popular and trending keywords relevant to your niche on Google Keyword planner, SEMrush, and AHrefs. More importantly though, do some searches on the platforms themselves. You’ll be able to find popular and trending keywords and hashtags to use in your posts and grow natively from the platforms themselves.
Natural Integration: AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING. AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING. AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING. And don’t make it so obvious. Include the keyword you’re trying to target like “social media keyword integration’ naturally in your writing. (That was a keyword I’m targeting 😈).
Localized Keywords: Remember to include localized keywords like “near me” or “your city name.” It will help attract local customers to your business. Check this out for more
Using Localized Hashtags and Keywords
Geographic Hashtags: Using geographic hashtags to target specific locations, like #NYC or #Beirut will help target users in those areas.
Industry-Specific Hashtags: Find trending and popular hashtags in your niche to include in your posts. This will help you connect with people interested in your niche and attract them to your follower base.
Branded Hashtags: Look to create a branded hashtag (if relevant) that’s unique to your business. You’re able to monopolize a hashtag, and it’ll help you keep track of any UGC content your audience creates about your brand.
Key Takeaways
Let’s go through everything one more time, real quick:
- Understand Your Audience: Find their interests, characteristics, and behaviors to build content they’ll like.
- Content Strategy: Build out your schedule and strategy with themes and different kinds of content for your audience. Remember to be flexible.
- Visual and Verbal Cohesion: Be consistent with your brand wherever you are.
- Engagement and Interaction: Host giveaways, asks questions, use polls, and respond, respond, respond.
- Keywords and Hashtags: Naturally use keywords and hashtags in your content to help better target your audience and show up as too spammy.
If you’ve ever got a question, you get to book a completely free 30-min strategy session with us. If you’re unsure about something, let’s talk and see how we can clear it up for you! (We’ll also pitch our services, at the end, so you’ll already have an idea about how you can get help for your business).
