SES London Day 3 – Driving Business Value with a Social and Content Master Plan #SESLon
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SES London Day 3 – Driving Business Value with a Social and Content Master Plan #SESLon

14th February 2014

Bas Van Den Beld SESlon 2014

With content marketing so prolific the need to make sure that your content gets to the right people at the right time is key in developing the strategy and understanding what content is working for you, and what you can do to maximise engagement. One overriding question that always comes with publishing content and social is when to do, what time of day and what day of the week, in order to make sure its seen and read by the wider audience.

Heather Robinson, Internet Marketing Consultant & Trainer at Skittish explains how they go about building a profile of your target audience, understanding your customers and followers and of course, what content they want and when to post it.

Start Building a profile

Having knowledge about you customers is primary before creating any content, build the profile by:

  • Mining demographical data
  • Customers locations – where are they based
  • What language they speak
  • Gender – no good talking to men about women products
  • Where they hang out – what social platform are they on and engage with
  • What makes them engage with content – is it humour, interesting, fact based or controversial
  • What type of content do they share
  • When are they online – social media runs so quickly you need to think about your audience being switched on
  • What device are they on – does your content work on mobile

Use your tools build the profiles of your customers and readers

Google analytics will give you great insight into your audience, where they are based, what device they use to read your content and also see what time of day and day of the week that they are on your site.

Facebook insights will also add more to your audience profiling through its demographic behaviour, gender and who they are, how they have engaged with your posts and what that engagement is like.

Twitter analytics gives insight into gender, location and what they are interested in, but Twitter doesn’t ask a lot of information from its users, so keep this in mind when using the data.

Customer surveys are one of the best way to gain feedback about what kind of content your customers want. They will offer insight beyond any data that you can mine from Google Analyitcs, Facebook or Twitter. Listen to what the customers feeds back and then use it to shape your content strategy.

Gauge what content is working and being shared – within Facebook insights and Tweetdeck you can dig deep to see what content gets the highest engagement, review and map the content out, it will give you a great indication of what your customers or readers want and what drives more engagement.

Timing your updates

More and more people always ask “when is the best time to post”. Peoples personal and working habits vary from how and when they access social media. Facebook insights offers you data of when your fans are online over the day and week, so its better to check and time your campaigns accordingly. Google Analytics custom reports also offer similar data across the day of the week to when your customers access your site – you even break it down to hour of the day around what time they are coming.

Using a tool like SocialBro, will give you insight for the best time to Tweet, when your followers are online and engaging. SocialBro also offers tools for competitor analysis, identifying influencers and supporters and analytics around your account – great for understanding your followers and timing your tweets.

Use third party research, there are lots of posts on “when to time your social posts” covered by other companies, so search and find information around your industry and if it tallies up with your strategy (socialcaffience.com has a great infographic on timings of posts on social media channels). Make sure to analyse your data of your accounts to see what and when are the best times to post and share and make sure you are always online – social media is not a 9-5 task.

  • Never assume you know everything about your readers – ask them and listen
  • Use your own data to see what’s working – your data shows you what happens
  • Timing is everything –  make sure you know when your audience is online

Bas van den Beld from State of Digital takes us through your content plan, understanding the social principles of right content at the right time, how to use influencers and your own social followers.

Social Principles

It not about the number of followers you have but more importantly how you engage and use your followers. Understanding why they like or follow you and who they are is vital for engagement and growth.

As a brand in social and search you need to “interfere” in the conversation and be part of it. People use social to make choices, more often than not usually people will follow you because others are following you, use this to your advantage and understand that people are influenced by others in social media.

Content – its about the right content at the right time

Focus your content on what your customers want, don’t just shout out about products and what you as a brand are doing, the customer needs to find a piece of information that relates and is relevant to them. Find customer pain points of get feedback on what they need to know.

The mix needs to explore what you want to say, with what they are interested in – you can then create relevant content for them, publish and share it. Properly focused content marketing is all about storytelling, when you can share a story (content) and it sticks with people, they will remember and relate and more than likely share that content with others.

Right place, right time right topic

Some content is timeless and evergreen which can be found via search and social media, but make sure to repost (over periods of time) it via your social channels. Don’t be afraid to post more than one update about the post, change it slightly with the messaging or an image and then post again. Remember that not all people see all of your posts due to the speed and how social media works and engaged with.

Always vary your content, posting into a regular style Facebook post is great, but change it up by adding the title in first, with a link to the site and use a bigger image as you can see higher engagement rates. Try showing the human side to your brand by mixing posts with more generic posts, can you post something humorous?

How to use influencers properly

A great way to create more engagement is by having influencers contribute to your content strategy and social media. Influencers will happily then share your content and posts, which in turn will grow your audience and the amount of people who will know and see your brand. People are connected to others, involve your audience – ask your audience across content or your social media channels what they want to read from you as a brand.

So in conclusion, make sure to use the data you can mine from your different analytics packages in order to know and understand more about your customers or followers, it allows you to post at the right time and on the right channel, with the right content. Make sure you don’t just shout about yourself as a brand and tackle the customers pain points with the right content.

Time for coffee…

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Written By
Russell O’Sullivan is an all-round Senior Digital Marketing Manager. With over 15 years of experience in the digital environment, he has worked across varied disciplines such Content Strategy/Marketing, PPC, SEO, Ecommerce, Social Media/Marketing, Web Design and UX.
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