Content Marketing Fundamentals – Flashcards

"Content" is a far reaching term in the case of social media. This can include: Gifs and images. White papers Blog Articles As well as the accompanying copy on a social post. etc. Content plays a crucial role in achieving business and social media objectives. Such as: Brand recognition Thought leadership Audience engagement And lead generation. It allows you to cement your position as a go-to destination for your customers. Whether it be for entertainment, education or inspiration. Effective content will help you build long term relationships with your audience. Leading to increase revenue for your organization. Ensure to keep your content is well received by keeping it relevant to your audience's goals, interests and pin-points. Not only is great content a good way to build trusting relationships with your audience, it can also help support the needs of your business. The best way of ensuring this is to create content that reflects the unique perspective of your brand. Whilst also taking into account the needs of your organization. A key tool to achieving your social content marketing goals is a strong content strategy which acts as a game plan for coordinating, creating and distributing your organization's content. Creating content without a strategy could lead to an unbalanced tone, subject matter or purpose. Without a plan in place most organizations would find it difficult to maintain an effective cadence and regularity to their posting schedule. Foregoing a content strategy will also make it difficult to understand the ROI of your social efforts a challenge. As there would be no consistent objectives or measurement strategies in place. Use your content strategy as a way to tell a consistent, cohesive story about your brand. A well thought out strategy helps you ensure you've set attainable goals, identified your audience and are distributing your content effectively.

Your social media content strategy should flow naturally from your social media strategy and objectives. Ask yourself how you can use content tactically to achieve broader social media objectives. For e.g. if a social media objective is to increase brand recognition with millennials by 30% your social strategy could specific a posting rate for Snapchat and include plans for influencer takeovers of Instagram live. Giving you more opportunities to connect with your target market. In addition to supporting the social media strategy your social media content strategy should also support and align with your organization's general content strategy, provided on exists. There are four key components of a social content strategy: Research and analysis of current content reception. Your target audience, identified by platform. A list of content specific goals and objectives. Plans for the distribution of your content. Research is important to identifying what content will resonate with your audience. Begin by looking at your social media audit and then use network specific tools such as Facebook insights and Twitter analytics to identify your audience demographics by network. Remember to treat each network's following as a unique audience as your Instagram audience may be very different to your Twitter followers. Next, analyze the reception of your previously posted content. Find specific examples of the best performing post and create a list for each network. This will help you identify the types of content and supporting copy that are succeeding on each channel. Maybe your top performing content on Twitter is educational, such as "how to" posts, but your Instagram followers engage more with inspirational posts. Tailor your content strategy to what is successful on each network and don't assume that one size fits all. To dig even deeper at content performance, reach out to your audience directly. Consider posting polls to ask what types of content your audience will like to see in the future. For e.g. if you run a weekly Twitter chat you could post a poll asking what your audience would like to chat about next. The results will not only provide you with great ideas for content, but also with insight to your audience's needs. Working closely with content creators with your organization, such as copywriters and marketing team is important for achieving social media objectives. Be sure to share insights on content performance early in the content creation process, so it influences the content being created. This will in turn provide the social media team with shareable material more likely to resonate among target audiences. Next up is competitive analysis, looking at what your competitors are posting can be a great source of inspiration. Just be sure not to copy. Look closely at the types of topics your competitors are covering and which ones they aren't. Is there an opportunity for you to fill in a content gap and gain a niche? After having researched your target audiences and identified popular content, it's time to set some goals. When creating goals, it's a best practice to set overall content performance goals as well as more specific goals for individual pieces of content. For e.g. an overall social media objective might be to increase traffic to a landing page from Facebook by a certain percentage in Q1. A corresponding content goal could be to share 10 white papers in Q1 that generate a total of 3000 click throughs to that landing page. The final step of your content strategy is your plans for distribution, consider what types of content you'll be sharing on which networks and how often. When choosing what to post where, look back to your social media audit and your specific content research. Taking into account what types of content have performed best as well as upcoming and current content trends. Such as live video. While your content may changed based on network, it's important to your overall tone and brand voice remain consistent. Next, create a guideline for the pacing of your content distribution. The frequency in which you choose to post should be tailored to your organization. Test posting frequencies for each of your networks. In order to determine what works best for your brand. For e.g. if engagement consistently decreases after your third daily Facebook post. That could be an indication that two post per day is ideal for your audience. Make sure you're considering frequency on a per network basis as engagement thresholds are guaranteed to differ. Your content distribution guideline will be a valuable tool when you begin working with monthly or weekly content calendars. By having preset goals for the number and types of posts you can begin charting out your content calendars in advance and have a specific copy drafted. This will help you determine how much content you will need to curate or create from scratch to support your goals. As with all strategy documents ensure you create them in a way that provides value for you and your team. Creating these documents isn't an academic exercise. They should be something you can use as a reference point.

A content calendar works in tandem with your social media strategy allowing you to map out your publishing schedule and ensure your content is consistent, balanced, strategic and relevant week after week. The content calendar is an evolving document, containing your planned and scheduled social media posts for all of your social channels. It should be an extension of your content strategy a tool that ensures a good mix of content and support social media goals and objectives. There are a few best practices to consider when creating a social media content calendar: First, make sure it is easily accessible to those who need it. Placing it on a platform like Google Drive or Google Docs makes it easy for people to collaborate on it with ease. The ability to collaborate is especially useful when drafting the company's shared content. Social moves at a fast pace, so don't plan too far ahead. Allow yourself flexibility to accommodate new trends that might appear. A best practice is too keep a larger monthly calendar with general information about upcoming launches and events that impact content strategy. In addition to a detailed weekly calendar with specific copy and assets. Your larger monthly calendar may contain items such as: Campaign starts. Influencer takeovers. New blog posts. While your weekly calendar should be a detailed schedule of every post for each of your social networks. In work weekly calendar separate your daily posts by network and include a specific time you have scheduled for your post to go out. Your weekly calendar should also contain information on the type and topic of the content your posting, the specific copy of each post, including any relevant hashtags and emoji as well as the link of the content your posting where applicable. To make it easy for you to identify the ratio of the different types of content your sharing, colour code your calendar by type. It's a best practice, particularly on Twitter, where content loses visibility quickly to repost content that is performing well. When reposting, make sure to vary the accompanying message between posts. It's important to know that not all social channels are suited to reposted content. You may want to post more sparingly on Facebook and LinkedIn and never reposting on Instagram and Snapchat. To make reposting content easy maintain an evergreen content library that contains vetted content, social copy and images that have been successful. Your evergreen content library should contain successful variations of the accompanying social copy. Keeping a living document of posts that have resonated best with your audience will make filling out the calendar much easier going forward. Be sure to update your evergreen library, adding new successful posts and removing those no longer performing. As you fill in your monthly and weekly content calendars remember that social is flexible. Make sure that your team is always listening and watching for current trends and important events that are happening globally and in your industry. It's especially important that you understand the context behind social media hashtags and trends as they may reference serious events. A message scheduled a month in advance could take on a new context should a natural disaster or a current global affair occur. By listening what's happening on social and changing your content calendar accordingly you can ensure that your content is always consistent, relevant and engaging.

Shared content on social can be categorized into two different ways: Curated - Which is content gathered from trusted sources relevant to your industry. Created - This is content produced within your organization. For most organizations content marketing on social media involves a mix of these two types. While ratio will vary by different industry and organization a good rule of thumb is to share 60% curated and 40% created content making sure to adjust this ratio to whatever resonates with your audience best. Created content includes things such as: blog articles, white papers, infographics, guides and visuals produced by your organization. As well as the copy on social messages. Even if your organization has a team dedicated to creating branded social content, the social media teams should still produce channel specific content. Such as: Facebook live shoots, Instagram photos, Snapchat stories and tweets. There are many benefits to sharing created content on your social channels, but the most valuable is that allows you to position your organization as a thought leader with unique insight, knowledge and perspective. Created content is also good at driving conversions and traffic to your website. Especially when the call to action is clear and the accompanying copy is also providing value. If there are important product launches or announcements in your organization, make sure that your social team works directly with the marketing team to help them create assets that will help them spread the news more effectively. Social media is not just a megaphone for your branded, internally created content. Organizations may find that only sharing created content results in minimal engagement. Curated content is a great way to grow your audience and demonstrate your company's position as a trusted advisor in your industry. Curating content from trusted sources provides your audience with a diversity of view points and balances out the shared promotional content you're sharing. A practical benefit of content curation is that it won't require much resources, which is useful for an organization without a dedicated content team. It can also be a great way of building relationships within your industry, while positioning your brand to be in the know. When choosing content for curation, think about whether it's valuable to your audience. And ensure it aligns with the personas your organization is trying to target and the values it espouses.