Social Media can be a challenging space for a B2B business because the algorithm thrives on photos and videos. It becomes meta when the said business is Digital Marketing. I get questions like, "...do you DO social media?' or "...how do I get more Likes?" To reduce the misconceptions behind our services, I've listed our approach below.
Understanding ACM
Our content falls under two categories; maintenance or campaign-specific.
Maintenance allows us to populate the social networking sites regularly to keep up with the algorithm. This type of content has no expiry date and can be used multiple times across platforms.
Campaign-specific is self-explanatory and has an expiry date. This approach applies to bank holidays, social media days and promotions. It is also action-driven, which include a call to action narrative such as visit the store or sign up now.
Understanding the client
It is our responsibility to keep up to date with what the company is doing, even when they do not share relevant information. We must be their ‘customer’ and connect with their audience by doing the necessary research to ensure we speak their brand voice.
Understanding the platforms
Our target market primarily uses Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Although similarities exist, we need to be aware of the unique elements of each network. For example, LinkedIn favours longer texts, while Facebook images respond to better engagement with a shorter copy. These global tech companies make changes rapidly, and it’s our job to know and understand the latest developments.
Using cloud-based solutions
This job goes beyond Content Creation and must include the full management of the Life Cycle of Content. From Ideation to Archive, we must ensure that the customer is part of the process before the content is published, as well as storing the files after it has been made public. We use multiple solutions that include Microsoft 365, Hootsuite and Filecamp.
4 Pillars of Content Creation
We use these steps to simplify our approach to creating engaging content: Strategy, Creative, Community and Auditing.
STRATEGY – What is the best way to achieve your goals?
Planning is the most cumbersome time for our clients because they must carve out space in their hectic timeline, for us to enquire about the vision of our partnership. We spend a few hours over a period of 3 months to create a plan that will include a documented approach to Content Management and Content Creation. Here are the top 3 questions:
What is your goal?
We must identify a target to aim your marketing dollars. Objectives may include followers, engagement and sales that will guide our approach to content creation.
Who is your audience?
Your customer has a digital footprint. Once you identify their behaviour, such as location, age and interests, we can guide you to the most cost-effective social network to build an engaged audience.
What is your budget?
For any business, Social Networks is a pay for play environment. To achieve timely results, you must put aside a monthly figure that will help grow your audience.
CREATIVE – Building your Digital Asset Portfolio
A digital asset includes any media we create on behalf of a brand, such as copy, graphic image, audio or video content. Everything we create has a specific Social Network in mind. Each piece of content is designed with a purpose.
COMMUNICATION – Managing your customers
Any online engagement with your customer is considered corporate communication. This type of communication includes responding via comments, Direct Messages and emails. We manage Earned Media organically as well as via automation. We use data from the audience to build chatbots to answer the most frequent asked questions.
AUDIT – Using data to make business decisions
Every step is tracked and measured. We create multiple versions of content and remove what doesn’t work. Over time the data tells a story, built on behaviour.
I hope I was able to share the calculated approach we apply to every client, which allows us to build a partnership. Doing Social Media goes beyond popularity.
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