How To Effectively Create Social Media Content That Performs

Here’s the scenario: You’ve got your quarterly goals in place, the team is ready and you’ve got all the content ideas you need. Now it’s time to execute. Or is it? As the head of marketing, you have to make sure that your social media content performs just as effectively as your other marketing platforms. If it doesn’t, all that time creating what you think is the best content could lead to a badly spent budget and not reaching your goals! So, how can you avoid this? Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating social media content that performs.

ONE: Start with a strategy

What’s the use of having goals without having the strategy in place to meet them? When looking back at the content you create, it’s important to measure your content’s success against your strategy’s metrics and KPIs. You’ll want to have baselines like engagement rates and website clicks to hold your content accountable for performance. Part of your insights should also include customer feedback and FAQs etc. 

TWO: Understand your customer journey

With each piece of content your team wants to create, your first question should be, “How do you want our customer to interact?” This will help determine the key pieces you need first before you create your content. For instance, if you plan on using blogs to break out into social content, then the blogs need to be written first. Then you can understand how you will promote the blog within social media. 

If you’re getting a lot of questions that you feel like you’re already answering on social media then readjust your strategy. If you’re hearing and seeing feedback, that is an opportunity to educate your followers then use that to your benefit. It’s all about the customer journey and getting them fun, educational content to engage with.

THREE: Assess your need for creative and your team’s input

Tying into the previous point, you also need to understand what all parts, pieces, and people are involved and how it all interacts. This includes knowing what creatives you need i.e. photography, graphic design, how many team members or moving pieces are involved, etc. 

FOUR: Create your timelines

The key point here is to understand that planning and developing social content takes the longest out of the entire social content creation process. So planning for this part is most important when it comes to your team. Especially when it comes to video content or collaborations. For example, a holiday campaign usually takes 2-3 months to plan.

FIVE: Utilize your scheduling tool of choice

We prefer Later as our scheduler, but you probably already have one in place. Here’s the kicker though- do you know how powerful your tool is? Spend some time in your scheduler to take advantage of all the features it has to offer. It could make a huge difference in the scheduling process and potentially eliminate tedious tasks from other parts of your content creation process like analytics. Explore to get the true value out of your scheduler!

SIX: Be aware of the PR environment

In today’s ever-changing world you may need to rearrange or push back content based on our environment, world events, and major disasters. That’s where your scheduler comes into play as you can push back content to another day. The key here is to make sure you have an equal balance between timely relevant content versus brand content so you always have an extra post at the ready when others need to be moved.

SEVEN: Measure and analyze

Your cadence is up to you but pick one and stick with it! When you’re analyzing performance, don’t just look at social alone but look at the overall website, engagement, email, and your other content mediums to see overall performance. That way you can see the little details of post likes to the bigger picture where that post contributed to purchases.

If you’ve been creating content for an extended period of time with no results take this as your sign to create a strategy. Content Creative provides a place for clients to receive a quality experience with one full-service team to help execute a marketing strategy in alignment with your brand and message. We understand as a business or marketing team sometimes you don’t have all of the resources that you need to create a successful content program. Want a helping hand creating your content strategy? Reach out to us here.