How To Create Genuinely Compelling Content For Your Customers: BrightonSEO 2022
This week our founder Corrie Jones spoke on the main stage at BrightonSEO 2022, the UK’s largest search and digital marketing conference, all about how to create genuinely compelling social media content for your customers.
If you weren’t there for the live talk or you want to recap on what we covered, you can check out the presentation deck on Slideshare and read the full talk transcript below.
Slide 1
There is no customer in the world that logs onto social media because they enjoy being sold to by brands. It’s an unavoidable fact. As brands, it’s like we’re turning up to a party where we weren’t invited and trying to shoehorn our key messaging and our calls to action in and amongst all the cat memes and dancing videos.
So knowing that we as brands are turning up to a party uninvited, there’s some things we need to do and ways we need to act to get customers to warm up to us and our content. To demonstrate this, I was thinking what is the time in life where we’re trying most desperately to get people to warm up to us and I settled upon the analogy of: dating.
Slide 2
And it turns out that most branded social media content is like a really awful first date.
It’s boring, it’s self centred, it does not leave you feeling good afterwards.
And that’s because most brands make their social media content all about them. They treat social media like a one-way broadcast of information about what makes them so great.
According to studies by Hootsuite, the number one reason for consumers unfollowing brands on social media is that they felt the content was too promotional, yet there are some brands who don't post anything except promotional content on their channels.
It’s the reason why the average brand engagement rate on social media is as low as 0.05 to 0.83%. But all is not lost.
Slide 3
We can fix this bad social media content phenomenon, by flipping the script and treating our social media content like a really really good first date.
And on a good first date, you listen more than you talk. You ask the other person questions and you make them feel important.
A good first date makes you feel excited and like you want more of the same, it marks the start of a positive, beneficial, potentially long-term relationship.
You can create genuinely compelling content for your customers, that makes them love you, trust you, and ultimately buy from you, when you give your social media content all the qualities of the best first date you’ve ever had.
Slide 4
So how do we do that? Well your approach to social media content should take 3 areas into consideration: 1 psychology, 2 data and 3 creative.
Slide 5
First up, psychology. In order to create content that puts your audience first, you need to understand exactly what it is that your audience wants. You need to know them inside and out.
And by knowing them, I mean that we need to build personas that cover both their demographics and their psychographics. Demographics being things like their age, where they live, the job they have, the gender they identify as, their relationship status, their education, their income… essentially anything statistical that relates to how we group them in the wider population.
But psychographics to me are where it really gets interesting. Psychographics are how we class people according to their attitudes and aspirations.
It’s looking at things like what do they like, what do they dislike, what do they value in life, what do they dream about, what strong opinions do they hold, are they for or against putting pineapple on pizza, and likely the most important question of all, what problems are they experiencing right now which your brand could potentially solve?
It’s too broad to just say that your audience is “20-40 year old women living in London” and you can’t make hyper-relatable content if you’re thinking broad.
The deeper you know your audience, and all the little details about them, the more you can create content that makes them feel seen, heard and understood by your brand.
Slide 6
Second component here is data. We cannot make compelling content if we’re not monitoring the data that tells us how our audience is receiving our posts.
On social media, you want to break data reporting up in two different ways.
One is looking at vanity metrics - which are likes, comments, followers, saves, shares, reach - everything that is happening on the channel itself.
A post with 5 times the number of comments than your normal engagement tells you that you’ve said something which really struck a chord with people. That’ll be a topic of content that you’d want to learn from and repeat again.
You can use all of the insights you gather to figure out what’s working and making people take action to engage with your brand, and what’s not working so well that you need to change.
That second way of reporting is looking at actionable metrics - that is all the data you have about what people from social media do when they click to your website. The bounce rate, the time spent on site, number of newsletter sign ups, products purchased; everything you can gather from Google Analytics or other website analysis tools.
All of this data goes deeper than the vanity metrics, because it tells you whether the people you’re attracting are actually your target customers and whether they actually bring money into your business.
So at least once a month, if not more often, look at all the data you get from social media (both vanity and actionable metrics) and listen to what it tells you about your audience.
Slide 7
Last but not least in this trio, we have creative.
Does the content you’re putting out on social media actually look good?
Are you posting a really slick piece of social-first content that was created vertically with TikTok in mind, or are you posting an old website video from 5 years ago that you’re now trying to repurpose somewhere that it doesn’t fit? Your audience can tell the difference.
The visuals and the tone of voice that you use on social media should be fit for purpose. Create your content with the knowledge of where you are going to post it, so that your content feels current and feels like it’s meant to be there.
A really good hack for putting out excellent social media content is to ask yourself these 3 words before anything that you post: who really cares? When you’re putting the creative together and you’re writing the caption, sit back and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Why would they care about this content? Why does it matter to them? If you can’t come up with a strong enough answer to this question, it’s not compelling enough creative.
Slide 8
Okay let’s look at these components in action.
First up, psychology. How can we actually get to know our audience inside and out, in order to create content that they find compelling?
The answer is by using social media itself. As a social media agency owner, I’m a little biased but, social media is the best, biggest and cheapest customer focus group you’ll ever use.
You can find out so much about your audience through social media listening. You can check through your Instagram comments, or search on Twitter or read relevant forums on Reddit, and you can start to find these golden nuggets of information that tell you how to create content that resonates with your audience and gives you ideas of what they actually want to see.
The same way that on a first date you’re trying to find out all the things you have in common with that person, you want to find the relatable moments that your audience shares, whether it’s a shared joke or a shared pain point, and start including those in your content.
Slide 9
For example. This is a piece of content we created for one of our clients’ Facebook page, a gamified piece of content encouraging the audience to take part in ‘pet parent bingo’ and let us know which of the 6 habits they’re guilty of.
But the thing was, through social media listening and combing the comments of previous posts and spending time in dog owner Facebook groups, we already knew that these 6 bingo items were things the audience was doing.
They had told the world they were doing these things, we packaged them up nicely and presented it back to them, so it was almost a guarantee that the content would resonate.
And it did, we saw an average 10-18% engagement rate overall on this Facebook page, 20 times higher than Facebook’s benchmark engagement rate, followers grew from 4,000 to 55,000 in 6 months, and this comment on the right here from Janis sums up where all brands should be getting to with their social media content for me.
That your target audience sees your content and says “that is me”, I see myself reflected in this content. It’s only at that point that they become true brand advocates and will click to take further action with you.
Slide 10
We’re also seeing this format of ‘listen and provide’ style content be encouraged more and more by the social media channels themselves.
A prime example of this is the catchily-titled Instagram feature called ‘reels visual replies’, introduced in December 2021, which lets creators reply to comments on their posts with a reel.
So you could ask your audience to let you know their top FAQs about your service, and you could have your team of experts answer those questions in quick videos on reels. Or if you’re a beauty company, you could ask your audience which make up tutorials they want to see next. If you’re a travel company, you could ask your audience to comment where they’re going on holiday this year, and then you could reply to all those comments with videos of the top 10 things to do in that city.
The possibilities of the interactions are endless but, in these screenshots, you can see how Ian Asher, a producer and DJ, uses reels replies to create song mixes based on the requests his audience have left for him in the comments.
He creates these song mixes knowing that people are likely to engage with the content because they’ve already asked for it, and by creating them it also encourages his audience to comment more because they want to see their mixes get made.
As an aside, half the trending music that you see on Instagram reels was mixed by this guy, @IanAsher, so if you want to be ahead of the trends then definitely do go and follow him.
Slide 11
Let’s look at that second component, data, in action and see how you can go a step further to use data in your content.
I think it would be fair to say that most of us would say our brand’s organic social media content is good for ‘brand awareness’, but rarely generates consistent sales.
But that’s a myth, organic social is good for sales and here’s why. Talking to your customers is the best way of knowing how to sell to them, and social media is your absolute frontline way of speaking to customers.
Organic social media content gives you so much insight that can help you to sell to your customers. Use it like a playground for testing different ideas and concepts.
If you’re stuck between two different campaign taglines, test them on organic social and see which one resonates better with your audience.
Look over your brand’s social media data. Spot patterns in what you’re seeing, where organic content over indexes on performance because of a certain factor. Maybe it’s that your posts always do better when you use your brightest brand colour, or when you use a question in the first part of your caption.
Use all of those organic insights to better shape your messaging before you uplift content to paid ads on social and Google.
Slide 12
To make that work from an organisational point of view, you cannot treat your social media managers like they have the easy job of sitting and scrolling TikTok all day in a silo in the corner of the office.
Your social community managers and your content creators needs to be sat right next to anyone in your company who is responsible for making decisions about how to get more customers.
They have their ears to the ground every day, getting immediate feedback and response on what your audience does and doesn’t like, so involve them in your wider campaign creation and ask them what they know customers will enjoy.
Slide 13
Last but not least, thinking about that third component ‘creative’. In a world where the average person sees 6,000 to 10,000 pieces of creative every single day, how are we meant to get cut-through with what we’re posting on social media?
When there are an almost infinite number of posts that someone can scroll to next on their feed, how can we get people to stop and look at ours?
One of the ways is through creating ‘water cooler’ content. Water cooler content is the content that taps into the psyche of your audience, and mirrors the topics and trends they’re talking about with their friends - the kind of talk you might have with a colleague you bump into at the water cooler.
It’s the “did you see the Superbowl” and “are you watching Bridgerton” kind of conversations.
We live in an age of content clutter and the creative that stands out on social media is the stuff that makes people feel something. Making people feel a sense of familiarity with content that’s in the moment and trending is a great way to be compelling.
Slide 14
A few examples of this, unless you’ve been on an Internet detox the last few months, you’ll have seen that the world became obsessed with Wordling.
In January this year, Wordle conversations on Twitter were seeing a 48% daily growth, and the brands who jumped on it early really capitalised.
Hilton and Ikea both joined the trend by sharing photos linked to their brands’ product, that visualised the Wordle board.
This only works when you don’t have a super lengthy sign off process for social media, if you have to go through 4 different stakeholders before you can get a post live then you’ve missed the wave and the post isn’t riding it. Social media works in dog years, so a day late is effectively 7 days late.
Slide 15
An even more recent example of the perfect water cooler moment on social is the Gender Pay Gap Bot which absolutely dominated Twitter on International Women’s Day on March 8th.
Set up by copywriter Francesca and her partner Ali, the bot would crawl Twitter for messages from companies celebrating International Women’s Day, and would call brands out by quote tweeting their original message and adding information about their median hourly pay gap, taken from government data.
Within a few hours of launching, the bot had 250,000 Twitter followers and over 150 million tweet impressions.
It so perfectly speaks to its target audience’s frustrations, where people are fed up that International Women’s Day becomes a performative, fake, egocentric day for brands where you can post about how proud you are to have women in the team but then behind the scenes pay them 73% less.
It was a simple but highly creative format that completely stole the show and got cut-through on a day where social media is flooded with even more posts than usual.
Slide 16
That almost brings us to the end of how to create genuinely compelling content for your customers, and I want to leave you with the takeaways I hope you’ll be going back to the office and implementing - this recipe for social media content that leaves your audience wanting more, just like that best first date ever.
Psychology: Get to know your audience and listen to what they’re asking for.
Data: Monitor your social insights for patterns and do more of what’s working.
Creative: Deliver your messages in beautiful social-first formats while they’re still trending.
Slide 17
If you have any questions at all or would like to chat more about social media together, do drop me an email or find me online. Thank you so much.