Goal: To educate Business Owners that nice Instagram photos do not necessarily bring direct results, hence content strategy is important
Description: Discover why Pretty Instagram Photos are no longer enough to grow your Brand and Instagram Page. Free Content & Tips on how to improve your Instagram Business so the content that you generated will not go to waste.
Irresistible hook: FREE Essential Content Strategy Tips. Here are some tested and proven Content Strategy Tips so that your Content creation effort will not go to waste!
Imagine: You managed to book a famous Food Photographer in Town for your Seasonal Menu; or hired the best Lifestyle photographer to shoot a pictorial of your Latest Collection.
Just to bring #Instagram-worthy (also called Insta worthy) photos for your Instagram Business.
Is that Enough?
Is a perfect, Instagram Feed enough to grow Results for your Business?
According to The Atlantic, Fast-rising Social Media Influencers are rejecting curated feed for a Messier, unfiltered Feed.
People are becoming more transparent. We are talking about writing longer captions, sharing how to make more money and how they do their Business. Your audience are no longer interested in seeing a 30-seconds long promotion advertisement of your New Menu.
They want to know beyond your product. Like what goes into YOUR Food and the Story behind it.
It is not the Consumers Fault. Where Instagram used to be just a visual feed of filtered and edited photos, the platform has now evolved into Stories, IGTV, Gifs & Videos.
All for a single purpose: to fight for the attention of the audience.
So now what?
Do not be mistaken. We’re not saying that having ugly, blurry Instagram photos will generate growth for your Business. We’re saying that Nice photos are important, but they’re not as important as a Content Strategy.
Good Brands don’t just post usable content whatever and whenever they like. Brands create a Strategy to drive results and attract the Right Target Audience. A right strategy would consider the Customer Journey and that will eventually lead them to become an advocate of your product.
Customer Journey Graphic
For Brands to have a cutting edge, they now share memes, close-ups or relatable cat videos that is a ‘mood’. (Yes, Meme Marketing is a term now.)
In 2020, people are no longer looking for an artificial life of you hanging out at Marina Bay Sands. They are looking for things they can ultimately relate to.
What’s a Content Strategy?
✓ Planning and management of media that you Create and Own
✓ Part of your marketing plan that shows who you are and what your business is about.
✓Shows what value you bring to your community and industry.
✓Getting the right content, the right people in the right place at the right time (& you won’t get the perfect formula on the first try!)
"High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online."
Kristina Halvorson,
Content Strategy for the Web
If you are new to Content Marketing, you are fine. Here are some tested and proven Content Strategy Tips so that your Content creation effort will not go to waste!
1. Define Your Audience
We cannot emphasise how important it is to KNOW your TARGET AUDIENCE. Who are you selling to? The greatest mistake that Business Owners always say would be: “I’m Selling to Everyone”.
Selling to Everyone is Selling to No One.
Scenario:
Who’s drinking your Brown Sugar Bubble Tea?
It’s not just Students. It’s the 16-year-olds studying for O Levels who just wanted a quick guilty pleasure. The 14 to 16-year-olds stay just 5 minutes away from your shop. It’s the students from a specific school.
Learn about the lifestyle of your Target Audience. Then find a gap and fit right into their lifestyle.
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# 1103STUDIOSTips
To have a better understanding of your Target Audience, we would suggest creating a Buyer Persona!”
2. Identify your Goal
If you’re working with a team of creative and copywriters, set up a Goal and Vision so that everyone work towards it.
Importantly, ensure that your goal is aligned with your Branding and Business goals. KPIs are not the most important measurement but they are one of the factors to analyse if your business is growing.
3. SEO Tool & Keyword Research
Your Content is useless if no one wants to know about it.
To put in simply, study how to improve your content so that it’ll appear relevant on Google. Look for tools (psst, we use Semrush!) to gather insights about what your researched audience cares about.
SEO Tool does not help only if they know your brand. For instance, they could be researching something and your content appears!
THAT is how your Brand will be known.
4. Analyse your Competitors
By now, you would already have an understanding of who is your closest competitors. Understand and track how your competitors tackle content and bring value to their customers.
Look at how their content is performing and analyse if their audience is similar to what you are targeting. Find a gap and that is where your content should be.
5. Decide Which Social Media Platforms
We talked about Instagram here but there are tons of other Social Media platforms to touch base on. However, that also depends on your audience.
If you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is a huge platform you don’t want to miss. If you have a catalogue or your product, Instagram would be perfect. Facebook is pretty much for everyone, so we would recommend getting on Facebook first!
6. Create a Content Calendar
The last thing you would want to do is to mess up the production of your content. Ensure that you have created the first two months worth of content in a proper calendar (Google Calendar works!) so that your entire team can get down to it.
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# 1103STUDIOSTips
As much as Content sells, posting three times a day and every day is not necessary. It may be overwhelming for your audience and they may have content fatigue! That will take you a quick trip down to an opposite effect of unfollowers and you don’t want that. Take it easy.
We would recommend a high-quality content of 3 – 4 times per week. When things get smoother, you may increase the frequency of your content. 👍 ”
Quality over Quantity. You know the rules.
7. Be Consistent with your Content
Content Creation is fun. It’s putting your ideas into visual or written content! This can be in the form of blog posts, videos and photos.
Remember to be extra mindful of the User Experience! This is to ensure that you can captivate your audience and ensure that your content resonates with them. In other words, make sure your content is well-designed to capture their attention.
Some examples would be:
- If your graphics have texts, make sure that it has structure so that it’ll be easy to read. Organise your content so that it’ll look pleasant on your audience’s eyes.
- If you’re using photos with natural lighting, take note of the visibility of your product.
CONSISTENCY IS KEY. A pleasant Instagram Feed would urge your Audience to tap the Blue Button & Follow your Brand!
Content Strategists // Content Creator, Start Creating!
Content Marketing would ONLY be effective with a Plan.
A good Content Marketing Strategy can deliver REAL results and drive Business Growth. Finding an accurate Target Audience may be time-consuming but once you do, everything will fall in place with proper planning. Start planning your very own Content Marketing Strategy now!
Without Content Strategy, Content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff.
Written on 21 January 2020. By Ferlyn Koh.
