Whatever your social media marketing goal is, there are steps that you can take to ensure that your content is providing the desired results. Here are five steps that will assist you in creating marketing content for social media:

1. Have a goal

Setting out goals and objectives for your social media marketing will give your content a direction and a purpose. Generally speaking, your social media marketing goals should match your marketing goals.

For example, if one of your marketing goals is to create brand growth, then your social media goal should be to see an increase in followers on the respective social platforms.

2. Develop a posting process

After setting your social media marketing goals and objectives, you need to develop a social media posting plan or process for the social media platform you intend to post on. A recommended social media posting process will be as follows:
  • Identify the particular social media goal you are trying to achieve.
  • Brainstorm with your team about the right approach and content to achieve the social media goal.
  • Ask questions such as, is the brand going to use images or videos to pass across its marketing message on social media? Take into account what has been most effective in the past when answering these questions.
  • Create high-quality content using the chosen medium identified.
  • Identify the best time to post (this should be a time when your audience will most likely be online).
  • Post relevant and relatable content.
  • Visit content regularly to respond to comments and comment on other people's posts.
  • Analyse responses to content on social media and use data to recreate better content for your audience to respond to.

3. Use of call to action

Call to action is an essential way for your audience to interact with your content. Basically, it is a prompt for your audience to carry out a particular action. Examples of this would be to 'Like', comment or share your post.

Without a call to action, your audience might forget to interact with your content, even if they did enjoy it. Creating a call to action on your content has to be strategic because if it looks too engineered, this might turn your audience off. Here are a few ways to infuse call to action into your post:
  • Ask your audience a question in your caption. This will prompt them to leave a comment on your post.
  • Tell your audience of another exciting content they can interact with if they liked your post. This will encourage them to continue interacting with other content on your page.
  • Direct them to your other social media pages.
  • Encourage them to share your content with their network if they liked it. This will increase your post reach and promote awareness of your brand.

4. Have user-generated content

User-generated content is one of the most popular and low investment content-generating schemes for brands. This is because it makes use of content generated by loyal fans and followers of the brand.

As we know, there is power in referral, as most people would rather trust their fellow men to give them honest feedback about a brand or product than trust the brand itself.

That is why sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor and Online Writers Rating are popular. Therefore, encouraging your fans and followers to become ambassadors for your brand is not only an excellent way to create content, but to also meet your sales goals.

5. Create emotional triggering content

Emotional content is statistically proven to increase customer engagement, and emotionally engaged customers are known to have a higher lifetime value. Understanding how to create emotional content — and what emotional words or phrases trigger your audience to act and react — will ultimately lead you to create more content that converts onlookers into loyal brand supporters and buyers.

Here are three examples of emotionally triggering content for you to try out, which can be edited to fit your brand goals and direction:
  • Using the phrase 'Don't miss out' will trigger the fear of missing out on a good deal in the minds of your audience.
  • Phrases like 'Get it while stock lasts', 'one time offer' or 'offer lasts for 24hrs only' will trigger urgency in the minds of your social media audience.
  • Phrases like 'No hidden charges', 'ethically made', etc. will create a sense of trust and unified principles in the minds of your target audience.
Some of these emotional words can be used as a call to actions or added into the text of your social media content.

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So now that you've got a killer social media strategy, you might want to check out these four reasons why you need to focus on organic social media marketing.