A good marriage of content and marketing can royally change the game for brand growth and engagement. Let's take a look.

It has been said, “Content is king, but marketing is queen... and the queen runs the household!”

All good content stems from a great marketing strategy, a strategy created initially to serve your audience, but to be wholly effective must reflect your brand essence and tone of voice inherently too.

Creating content for social media can be a key part of your marketing strategy. It can be tricky to become a master of all channels, but with a massive 4.62 billion people using social media worldwide, it should be something you embrace wholeheartedly. 

With social giants Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn capitalising on short attention spans and picky viewing, they have produced easy yet effective ways to capture audiences. Most prominently seen in the 'Live broadcasts' feature, produced right from inside the various apps. It's a known fact that reels and stories on Instagram and Facebook specifically reach more of the community than if you were to post directly on your grid.

Interestingly, Facebook reports that the average user commits just two seconds when deciding to view content, thus making 15-second reels the golden ticket to content creators. They hold the viewers' attention long enough to share memorable information, serving their desire for immediate content.

As consumers of a digital age, we know that video and imagery outperform text-heavy content every time. The secret to audience engagement is being adaptable and dynamic, whilst forming a consistent foundation to grow a recognisable brand voice and consumer following. 

Once you have an initial following, you can retain your audience by giving them something a little extra - a richer form of content that people will come back to view more reliably. An example of this is by creating a branded podcast, a channel in which you can reach your audience in their everyday lives. Chatting informally about particular topics of interest whilst they are in a traffic jam, on the bus to work or walking home after a busy day. Music streaming service Spotify boasts its platform, ‘Anchor’, has all the tools to power a podcast, including free recording, hosting and editing on its platform. It also allows users to post on other popular mainstream services such as Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music, all of which will increase reach. 

Serving your viewer

It’s all well and good creating lovely looking content, but if your audience is not engaging with it, it cannot be hitting the spot.

Marketing should be a conversation with people that want to listen. However, your audiences may not be found all in the same place. By using the different social platforms in the ways they work best, you can start to segment new audiences. For example, you should be producing more professional, employer-facing content on LinkedIn, and taking a creative approach to Instagram by using all the tools on offer to spice up your reels, stories and grid posts. Finally, add a more personal and human touch to your content on Facebook.

Remember, social media is all about engagement, so think about what interests your audience and why they want to hear from you. We find revealing to our audience some behind-the-scenes secrets fulfils their curiosity and increases our engagement and reach. Along with this, make sure you are serving their needs too. How are you making their lives easier? What relevant content are you bringing to them? For example, our designers developed a Lorem Ipsum generator, a tool to create placeholder text blocks instantly from our website - we know this is a tool used often within our industry.

Go out there, get creative and start your conversation by creating content that engages your audiences.

Need a hand? Give us a shout at PO'Sh Creative, where we have a full social and marketing team to help you make good things happen.

Contact Rebecca Guice on 01926 699522 or email rebecca@poshcreative.co.uk