You know the adage: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…
Well, here’s another version for you: before you spend precious time leading your horse to water, confirm the water is good. You don’t want to arrive and the horse becomes mortified because whoa that’s some nasty water and oh geez now it’s running away, you better go chase it that’s your horse and what a pain it’s going to be wrangling it back into the barn; hopefully you don’t lose it forever.
What an avoidable mess. If only you took a bit more time ensuring your horse could quench its thirst with appealing, desirable water.
If you’re still with me, here’s the analogy: If social media is a vast body of water, you want to know or create the most effective and efficient route to it. But remember to confirm the content of the water is ideal and suitable for consumption.
Opening a door to customers via social media marketing hinges on its infrastructure. What platform are you going to use? What is the target audience? What is the campaign objective? Should I use a pixel? But successfully opening a door requires two hinges. No one will feel comfortable stepping through some odd hanging-on-by-one-hinge door. If that’s the entrance, what’s the inside like? Let’s also not forget the content when developing a social media campaign –both the content of the ad itself and the content found where the ad directs users.
Content is critical to meet social media goals, develop brand recognition, establish trust, and more. Trying to “play” in the social media space without content consideration is like showing up to the sandbox without any toys. No one will want to play, and you’re left making a sandcastle with your hands and whatever weird toys were just kind of left there.
Consider this Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) account example, which we shall refer to mysteriously as The Client. They required an asset overhaul and invested in Crowdriff, a content marketing platform that combines image discovery, digital asset management and content delivery. Here, The Client could communicate with social media users and acquire permissions to use their photos and videos on social media platforms. Year over year, the CVB saw progress in their Facebook efforts:
84.29%
increase in
link clicks
104.87%
increase in
post reactions
189.11%
increase in
post comments
52.25%
increase in
organic page
likes
45.60%
increase in
organic impressions
Improving and updating the asset library enriched The Client’s social media community and provided upticks in performance not only on Facebook but also its website. Cutting through the noise requires content investment. Anyone can get in front of the right audience on social media, but not everyone can stop their audience from scrolling past them.
Don’t develop a social media campaign using just display banner ads. Contemplate your current assets and what kind of content can be created for platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or the “so hot right now” social platform. Taking your campaign from good to great can be accomplished by curtailing reliance on stock photos.
Content consideration galvanizes your audience and enables consumption. You led the horse to water, and it took action. That thirst is quenched and he’s going back for more; the horse is ravenous for that water. The water is so appetizing the horse may even now start leading other horses for you to this beautiful body of water.
Put the work into the content, and the content puts in work for you.
Contributed by Brad MacDonald, Social Strategist
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