Investing in social media content should be a no-brainer for businesses trying to reach, engage, and convert their target audiences. Especially considering that people spend an average of 2 hours and 26 minutes daily using social media.
However, the harsh truth is that creating winning social media content for your brand can be challenging. It requires a strategic approach to the creation process — preferably one that prioritizes your audience’s wants and needs.
So, if your marketing goals include optimizing your brand’s social media presence, here are the seven crucial considerations you have to make to produce winning content guaranteed to wow your potential customers.
1. Is Your Audience’s Needs Your Biggest Priority?
Creating content about your solutions is an excellent way to educate your audience. Especially if you do so in a way that highlights the benefits your prospects gain by investing in your products or services.
Nonetheless, there’s one thing you must understand. Yes, 27.3% of people go on socials to find inspiration for things to do and buy. But it’s still essential to remember that using socials only to make product mentions won’t necessarily help you make more sales. Instead, it may lead to the contrary effect, making your audience think your business only cares about selling and not delivering great customer experiences.
When creating social media posts for your brand, focus on investing in high-quality content that gives your followers precisely what they need.
First off, start with creating buyer personas and identifying their pain points. Then, base your content production efforts around creating resources that benefit your potential customers — even if it means having fewer opportunities to mention your offer.
Example
If you check out MarketBeat, you’ll see that the brand’s primary objective is to sell a suite of research tools for investors. However, the business’ YouTube channel doesn’t include one single video centered around the company’s products.
Why? MarketBeat knows that its audience consists of people looking for solid investing guidance. That’s why it focuses its social media use on offering followers advice from industry experts. The result is a positive reputation of a trustworthy, customer-oriented brand. More importantly, it’s an engaged following of people who know that obtaining their info from MarketBeat means getting high-quality insights on which they can safely base their investing decisions (which also happens to make them more likely to convert).
Source: youtube.com
2. Do Your Followers Feel Emotionally Aligned With Your Brand Message?
Emotional marketing is an exceptional tactic for getting people invested in your brand and products.
Research shows that consumers make purchasing decisions based on rational and emotional factors. More importantly, when you combine emotional marketing practices with a high level of brand recall, brand recognition, and perceived product quality, the chances of conversion go up.
So, if your goals include boosting conversion rates, do your best to create social media content that triggers emotions. However, you must understand what kinds of feelings you should be trying to evoke in the first place.
Ideally, your emotional marketing tactics should align with your audience’s wants, needs, and moods.
Example
Check out the Lego Instagram feed, and you’ll see that most of the brand’s posts try to evoke emotion. That emotion can be a sense of belonging to a community, the pure joy of creating something fun, or, like in the video below, a strong feeling of wanderlust that can only be satisfied with a short trip (even if only in Legoland).
Source: instagram.com
But it’s not just positive emotions that can transform your social media content into a driver of consumer action. Negative feelings — especially frustration, anger, and fear — can inspire people to act.
For example, if you check out Dashlane on Instagram, you’ll see that many of the SaaS brand’s posts feature scary data breach facts. So, why does Dashlane use negative emotions in its social media marketing strategy? Well, the brand knows that its audience wants to avoid specific outcomes. And reminding potential customers of the consequences of inaction is a great way to boost engagement and sales. Moreover, addressing these fears highlights the business’s unique value, making emotion-based social posts the perfect tool for Dashlane to position its solutions as the answer to its audience’s needs.
Source: instagram.com
3. Does Your Repurposed Content Speak to Your Audience?
One of the best ways to get the most out of your social media strategy is to repurpose existing content. This tactic allows you to maximize the ROI for every post you’ve published — whether by attracting new followers with valuable info, driving more traffic to existing posts on your company blog, or simply getting more use out of well-performing content. Don’t forget that you can also repost other people’s content and use it as a jumping board for connecting with your followers.
However, when repurposing content, you must ensure that it’s not just a generic action aiming to fill your timeline. Instead, always ask yourself whether a repurposed post has the potential to resonate with your audience. There are a couple of ways to do this:
- Know what networks are worth your while. YouTube is a diverse platform that attracts all sorts of internet users. TikTok, on the other hand, is far more popular among young users than it is with those above the age of 50.
- Know what formats work best for your social network of choice. Instagram may be a great place to share aesthetically stunning short videos. However, if you’re trying to reach your audience on X, you’ll have to supplement those videos with engaging copy. Or, better yet, change up the format and use a combination of text and imagery to create attention-grabbing threads.
- Ensure that the content you feature on your profile aligns with your brand’s mission and voice. Moreover, ensure it delivers the quality your audience expects from your business.
Example
Take a look at Anytime Baseball Supply. You’ll see that this business built its reputation on its passion and dedication to baseball. It’s only natural that it regularly shares clips like the one below, which its audience of baseball fans enjoys.
Source: instagram.com
Or, if you look at Innocent Drinks, you’ll see that this brand has a distinctive approach to repurposed content (usually providing commentary on trending topics). But there’s one recent post that stands out from all the others.
Having created a couple of AI-generated marketing slogans, Innocent’s team decided to pit them against human-written content, asking followers to vote for their favorites. And the results are super-satisfying. The activity was a success, garnering more than 146k views on X. More importantly, it got the brand’s followers super-invested in the polls by doing something as simple as asking them to choose between two pieces of content — one original and one repurposed.
Source: twitter.com
4. Does Your Product-Focused Content Offer Real Value?
Pinpointing the right way to create product-focused content can be tricky, especially as 54% of consumers use social media networks as product research tools yet still react negatively to overly sales-oriented marketing messages.
But the thing is, you don’t have to say goodbye to showing off your solutions on social media. After all, if you’re proud of your products and services, you naturally want to get other people as excited about them as you are. Nonetheless, to ensure that the reaction is positive (and that it benefits your business), you need to approach the creation of product-focused content through the lens of user value. Explore ways to use product-focused content to do something for your followers.
Example
Knowing that most people go on socials to entertain themselves, the Wendy’s X account tries to use every opportunity to deliver humor — even when its ultimate aim is to introduce a new product.
Source: twitter.com
Or, for a slightly more traditional approach to user-oriented, product-focused social media content, check out FOCL. On its Instagram page, this brand has a highlighted stories section called “Fusions.” There, it gives customers easy access to multiple recipes that use the business’ products — an excellent method of inspiring people to use the drops and gummies they already own and get them to get more out of their purchases.
Source: instagram.com
5. Do You Give Enough Exposure to Your Followers?
One of the biggest drawbacks of branded content is that it lacks authenticity. Yet, if you look at survey data on how to make businesses more relatable, the most successful way is to give exposure to your followers.
According to data from Nosto, 60% of people find UGC the most authentic content format. It’s three times more relatable than branded content and seven times more genuine than stock imagery. So, if you’re trying to connect with your followers and nurture loyalty, you need to include UGC in your social media marketing strategy.
There are, of course, multiple ways to do this, so let’s check them out through some great examples.
Example
You can do something similar to GoPro and invite followers to participate in a contest in exchange for exposure and awards.
Source: instagram.com
Or, if offering up awards is outside your budget, you can still repost every mention you get. Hydro Flask, for example, created a special hashtag — #mondaymomentsofjoy — and invites followers to share the moment they enjoy at the start of every week. It’s a great way for the brand to connect with its customers. More importantly, this action’s exposure to the Hydro Flask followers creates an excellent community-building strategy that encourages engagement and loyalty.
Source: instagram.com
6. Does Your Content Embrace Platform Conventions?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating social media content for your brand is thinking you can get away with sharing the same posts on every social network you’re active on.
Admittedly, creating multiple versions of each post isn’t exactly time-efficient. But if you’ve done your research, know that your target audience is active on a particular platform, and want to invest your resources in transforming that platform into a source of traffic and sales for your business, then you have to know how to create content that matches your followers’ expectations.
One easy way to ensure your posts align with platform conventions is to consult the research about what type of content performs best for each platform and how consumers use each app. And, of course, if your audience is active on a platform that requires a unique approach, don’t hesitate to invest in creating content just for that network.
Example
Knowing that a big portion of its audience is on TikTok, Pumpkin has a unique social content strategy for the platform. And what stands out is that these short videos are completely different from what the brand posts on Facebook, Instagram, or X.
The style is more relatable and personal. The voice is conversational. Most importantly, the main theme is that the TikTok content primarily aims to empower followers with pet care information. On Facebook and Instagram, their content is more conversion-oriented.
Source: tiktok.com
7. Does Your Content Invite Engagement and Discussion?
The last consideration for creating winning social media content is asking yourself if your content invites engagement and discussion.
Some social media posts are great at inspiring followers to like and comment. And seeing how engagement represents one of the most important indicators of your target audience’s relationship with your brand, you must do your best to encourage it.
Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do in the content production stage that will result in more discussion with your audience.
Example
If you check out Popsicle on X, you’ll see that the brand regularly posts content encouraging replies. The “Finish the punch line” CTA in the image below is a fun way for followers to interact.
Source: twitter.com
Naturally, if you can turn engagements into conversions without increasing the number of touchpoints, that’s an even better outcome. Explore content formats — like shoppable posts — that will make your customers interact with your brand while encouraging them to purchase. The post below by MUJI is an excellent example of such a strategy. And seeing that it’s easy to recreate, it should definitely make it onto your content creation to-do list.
Source: instagram.com
In Closing
There you have it, the seven crucial considerations for creating winning social media content for your brand.
As you can see, producing high-quality conversion-driving social content can be easy and inexpensive. All it takes is asking the right questions and identifying the most impactful KPIs to track.
And once you’ve found a formula for producing and publishing social content that makes your followers tick, reaping the benefits is as easy as continuing to use that formula in the future. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t experiment or adjust based on your results. But it is important to remember that, most times, social media success doesn’t require bells and whistles. Instead, getting the basics right will often be more than enough to secure a high ROI for your business.
Featured image by Pexels.
