Using social media as a cornerstone of your business gives you the opportunity to connect with your customers in ways other marketing methods never could. You can be informal, casual, and even silly—and still score big points with your audience. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram let you share a side of your business and personality—and your employees’ personalities—in fun and inventive ways, especially if you’re in B2C. With this kind of creative freedom, the right platforms, and some careful planning, a B2C content strategy for social media can yield some major revenue generation.
Align Your Content Strategy With Your Business Goals
Social media can be fun, but it is still part of business, and a serious content strategy should play a big role. Your business goals come before any of your content marketing tactics, and your content strategy should support them.
If your goals are similar to the goals of other companies, you want to generate profits and have a reliable, loyal following of customers. Aligning your content with these goals is the foundation of your strategy.
Whether you are creating a blog entry, an image, or a video, it should inspire your audience to take action. It must create:
- Brand awareness
- Engagement
- Lead Generation
- Sales
- Customer Retention
Create content that caters to the buyer personas you have developed. Your personas dictate the direction of your content marketing, just as they dictate the direction of the rest of your marketing. They will more easily guide your way through curating both the type and the tone of the content you produce. This rids you of the “content for the sake of content” trap that many companies fall into during the early stages of content development.
Just how well integrated your content strategy is in your business goals will be reflected in your data. Measuring the results that your content produces will provide you greater direction in the future and help you tweak your strategy to make it more accurately serve your broader needs.
You glean this insight through several different ways:
- The amount of attention your content receives on social (likes, comments, shares)
- The traffic it creates on your website
- How engaged people are on your website after finding it through the content
- How many conversions the content helps with.
The more you analyze your data, the better you can gauge what content works and what doesn’t, helping you better understand your audience and refine your strategy.
Determine the Right Social Media Platforms to Reach Customers
You will find that not every social media platform is ideal to implement as part of your strategy. While LinkedIn and Twitter boast millions of active users, they are more suited for B2B marketing. Facebook and Instagram stand as the best ways to reach individuals on a personal level.
Instagram might seem limited in its format, which only supports images and short videos, but generous amounts of images and videos are exactly what you should be producing. Instagram’s 400+ million users respond strongly to carefully curated content, whether branded deliberately or slyly introduced into their feeds. Facebook is more agnostic in the kinds of content that it supports and lets users see. It also allows you to share blog posts and news articles related to your business.
Most importantly, both of these platforms have established the kind of personal and casual atmosphere that will let your business resonate more emotionally with people. You can do away with the formalities and connect with real people.
Appeal to the Emotions of Your Customers
Content that pulls at the heartstrings of your customers will stay with them the longest. Make them smile, laugh, cry, scream—whatever will produce the desired effect. Emotionally engaging content is your ticket to connecting with the people you are trying to reach.
Emotional appeal is nothing new in marketing. The content you remember most strongly stirred something powerful in you, like excitement, anger, awe, or sadness.
- Sarah McLachlan’s heartwrenching commercials for the ASPCA raised $30 million since they first aired.
- Insurance company Allstate’s Mayhem campaign, consisting of commercials of a man who deliberately causes accident and disasters to show how things could go wrong, raked in $7.9 billion and increased their sales by five percent.
Both of these campaigns succeeded through the power of inciting powerful emotions. The McLachlan commercials evoked sadness and sentiment, and Allstate’s Mayhem commercials aroused fear and amusement. Emotional content always trumps rational content in generating revenue for B2C businesses.
Create Content that Educates Your Audience
Emotional content may be paramount, but rational content still counts for a lot. Informed customers are happy customers. If they feel you are helping them make smarter decisions in the future, they will trust you and what it is you’re selling. Those top ten lists and videos flooding your newsfeed might seem gimmicky, but lots of people read them because they are learning something greater about the world or about themselves.
- Your audience wants to feel smarter.
- Your audience wants to feel more enlightened.
- Your audience wants to feel more aware of the things going on around them.
- Your audience wants to feel good when doing business with you.
Teaching them something new is the quickest and most sincere way to earn their trust.
A major point of any marketing strategy is establishing yourself as the best in the business, and being the most knowledgeable is an important component in reaching that goal. Educate your customers about the industry you are in as it relates to their own interests. It can be as fun and as quirky as you want it to be, as long as it is providing them with valuable information they feel compelled to share with others. Create it as a blog post, a video, or an infographic. You can determine which types of content get the most reactions from followers in your analytics.
The data reveals educational content marketing to be a big deal. According to Kentico, 49% of people trust educational content from companies, and that number jumps to 57% when it contains citations from named sources. If it’s shared by a friend or a family member, it increases to 69%.
You know something that no one else in your industry does; it only makes sense to share it with the rest of the world.
A B2C content strategy for social media succeeds when you give your customers more of what they want. The better you understand them, the better prepared you are to determine how content will fulfill their needs and ensure they stay loyal to your brand. We can help you map out where a content strategy fits into your goals and how it can provide you with more business.
