1. Clarity & Commitment:
A highly-focused strategy that is consistent and clear will build a better brand for your audience than one that attempts to target all people. Bailing on a strategy if it doesn’t provide instant results will hurt you in the long-run. Take equal care in selecting to whom it will be said to just as much as what you say. As long as the strategy has a crystal-clear target audience and persona, your chances of a successful campaign and hitting your goals are much higher.
2. Monitor, Listen & Engage:
Listening, reading, and learning about your target audiences’ messages and comments have become more important than what your brand has to say. By actively positioning yourself in conversations, you’ll learn more about your audience and what content resonates with them. Social Media Marketing requires more listening and less talking. This will allow you to cut through the noise and clutter while adding value to them during your next content push.
3. Patience & Pivot:
Remember our First Principle about commitment? This requires patience. It is easy to become anxious about a post, how it will perform, or if anybody will see it. By sticking to your strategy, the right audience will see it. You can easily adapt or pivot by adjusting the time, channel, or quality of the message – the power of analytics. Be data-driven within your posting calendar and make small adjustments but remember, stick to your overall strategy.
4. Quality & Consistency:
Quality prevails quantity. Yes, we’ve all heard the guru’s say “just post it!” or “people like the real you!” While this can be true, if the quality of your message is being compromised by a quantitative number of content pieces – you may be headed down the wrong direction. One impressive piece of content over a period of 3 days is better than 3 mediocre pieces of content once per day. You won’t run into mediocracy if you have clarity about what your strategy is trying to accomplish. Raw content can be just as effective as creative content if you have the right strategy in line. You earn the right to market to your audience through consistency but earn the right to stay with quality.
5. Intensify & Influence:
Once you start building out amazing content that resonates with your audience, you can start influencing and intensifying messages. Your audience will trust your content and then start to share it, like it, and engage more. This can open up your brand to new alley-ways and audiences that are good fits for your business. This will boost your engagement rates and word-of-mouth marketing (WOM). Referral and WOM are the most powerful weapons of marketing. Influencer marketing is a great way to reach new audiences and increase market attention. Make sure the influencer you’re working with fits your brand values and your target demographics before making that investment.
6. Value & Vulnerability:
Once people voice their comments, opinions, and concerns on your social channel they have opened themselves up. This will require you to humanize your brand and medium. Respond and take care of these concerns online, where then you also become vulnerable but also human. Businesses aren’t perfect and it’s refreshing to be heard and nurtured. Remember, it’s about your audience, not about your brand. If you are also spending all of your time pushing products and promoting services, people will stop listening. Add value to their feed rather than clutter. Show them that you are here to answer their questions without them having to ask. Show them that it’s not acceptable if they have a problem. Open up your brand.
7. Acknowledgment & Accessibility:
If you aren’t accessible to your audience and respond in a timely manner, you will be replaced. Positioning yourself as an industry thought leader through your content will have no substance if your audience cannot access you almost instantly. It’s great to have a work-life balance and not drown in the brands you work with but it’s often way too easy to be disposable online. Be reachable and available. Check your notifications and often these questions or comments can be answered quickly. Acknowledge someone has made a comment, positive or negative. If it’s positive, find a way to keep the conversation going. If it’s negative, find out why and how we can overcome the problem at hand.
8. Sharing & Socialization:
Teaching and learning are pinnacle reasons why your audience consumes your content or other pieces of content. Let’s put the social back into social media. Even if your content is stellar, you can’t expect to get engagements if you are not sharing as well. A portion of the time you spend on social should focus on sharing what your audience is doing that aligns with your brand and publish content by others, often known as User-Generated Content (UGC). UGC is also widely trusted by other users and audiences.
9. Delight & Delivery:
If you notice a piece of content gain more traction than others, you may want to double-down on this type of messaging for future posts. Often, it’s not what is said, it’s how you say it. This may sound cliché but everyone has the ability to interpret messages online differently. Deliver your message with excitement or seriousness – this all goes back to establishing your brand voice and strategy. Consider using emojis or any other thought-provoking messages. Ask open-ended questions in your posts and get your audience involved.
10. Competitive Analysis & Creativity:
What are your competitors doing? Right and wrong? Take note and capitalize on their weaknesses and alter your strategy to what they may be doing right that you can do better. Be creative, bold, and find unique ways to stop the scroll.
