Social Media is one of the most powerful tools ever invented for business’s to make their impact in the world.
When Social Media marketing is done right, it has the following impacts:
– Attracts perfect clients
– Indoctrinates staff, vendors, stakeholders and everyone else around the business into your brand and your vision
– Reduces the sales cycle time by continually educating prospects as they make buying decisions
– Attracts referrals and other opportunities from everyone within your network. (Often you’ll be surprised by this impact!)
But the technology is only a few years old, and rapidly evolving. So, many business owners just haven’t had the time to leverage this powerful tool to its full potential.
When The Visionary Team are working on your Social Media Marketing, here are the main strategies and mindsets we’ll use to ensure you get the most powerful results possible from your Social Media presence.
Learn more from our Director, Sanjay in this 2 minute clip:
Understanding How Social Media Marketing Works
The flow of a viewer’s attention
When a viewer is on social media, often they are in what we call a “durrrr” state!
They aren’t really conscious. They’re just scrolling the newsfeed, only half paying attention. What stops them and captures their attention is a powerful image that stands out.
So, often we’ll use your Visionary Explainer Video scenes as the post image, because the Animated design stands out amongst everything else in the newsfeed.
Once a viewer’s attention is captured, they are more likely to read the copy (text) of the post.
To learn more about how video content can amplify your social media efforts, check out our B2B video production services here.
Post Frequently!
In this age, there are MANY social media posts being released every second, constantly competing for your target market’s attention. So it’s important to release posts frequently, with the understanding that most of your audience won’t see every post. This also means you can repeatedly launch the same posts every month or so without having to worry about boring your audience.
Awareness and Education
The main point of posting to social media is to educate your audience and build awareness. While they are considering buying your service, your content should be continuously educating them and allowing them to build trust with your brand and your ideas.
When done right … when it’s time for them to make a buying decision, because they have seen so much of your content, they will be able to trust your sales team and your staff.
Here’s an example from our work with tech company, Daisee:
See the full case study here.
Plus, beyond just lead generation, social media can deliver long-term benefits to your business. Learn more about these second-order benefits here.
“Visionary Content Calendar”
To support your team in posting frequently, The Visionary Team will create a “Visionary Content Calendar” for you, that looks like this (feel free to download this template!). This is a Google Sheet filled with content and images that you can repeatedly schedule to Social Media.
Having a central Google Sheet like this allows your team to edit and add to your posts over time, as you get feedback from your audience, and as your services evolve. The idea is that you can use a Content Scheduling tool like “MeetEdgar” or “HootSuite” to periodically re-schedule all your posts.
This ensures you’ll always have a social media presence, with the latest version of the content produced by your team. And you wont have to log on to every social media platform every day to make it happen.
Outside of your Content Calendar, you can also launch one-off posts to your social platforms as you please.
Create Content For Your “Perfect” Clients
Content should be written for your perfect clients. Don’t try to impress everyone! Write to the pain points, benefits and mindsets of your perfect clients. Use THEIR language and their words (not yours!). Aim to teach them what they need to learn about your services.
Over time, this will have the profound impact of attracting the perfect clients into your business – while also repelling the people that aren’t a good fit.
See our work with Teleca Systems as a good real-world example of this.
Types Of Content To Post
It’s always good to launch different types of content to your Social Media feeds. Different people will respond to, and be more comfortable, different forms of content.
As a general rule, The Visionary Team will create the regular social media posts that you can repeatedly schedule. Then, on top of that, your team can schedule adhoc posts and content as you produce them.
Here are the types of content your should launch to your Social Media feeds:
– General educational posts
– Testimonials
– Videos
– Examples of your work
– Behind the scenes photos and videos
– News and announcements
Be Unique and Specific
This is so important …
Almost everyone posting to Social Media makes the mistake of posting information that aims to get more views and likes.
The problem is …
… when you “pander to the mob” like this, your content starts to get more and more generic over time. It may feel great to get so many views – but chances are there are many others posting the exact same content.
In contrast, when you are writing specifically for your audience – you are providing deep insights they can’t get anywhere else.
This naturally alienates viewers who are not relevant to your business. But it gives much more value to your real audience – the people who would actually consider buying from you
Amplify Your Content
Competition for your audience’s attention is INTENSE. A key skillset for successful social media is to skilfully amplify your content. Here are some tips:
– Paid Advertising – the power of paid advertising to put hyper-relevant messages in front of hyper-relevant people is profound. Not leveraging this technology is a mistake in the era of Social Media
– Engagement PODs – On LinkedIn particularly, you can join forces with our business owners to engage and amplify each other’s content. Building connections, relationships and networks online is an important step towards amplifying the impact of your content.
– Tag your prospects and clients – tag your prospects and clients on relevant posts. This helps educate them, gets them engaged into your ideas and allows them to see your social proof.
Rules For Writing Quality Social Media Posts
Don’t Be Too “Sales-y”
Your Social Media posts should aim to educate your audience about your service and the problems you can help them with. Sales-focussed messages should be rare.
Even Call To Action’s like “click here now” or “Contact Us” should usually be left out, to keep your posts casual.
On Social Media, the focus will be to give value to your audience.
Your Opening Line “hook”
In almost all online communications the first line is by far the most important. Skilled advertisers understand that the first line should be given 80% of the time and attention when writing an entire piece!
In this age, with thousands of marketing messages competing for a person’s attention, people have evolved an ability to immediately and unconsciously decide whether a social media post is worth reading. This is largely based on a quick scan of the first line of your post.
Here’s how to hook their attention and keep them reading:
– Subtly call them out to jolt them to attention. For example, in Visionary Social Media posts, you’ll often see us mention our audience: “Tech Companies” or “IT Leaders”
– Make your first line highly relevant, promising a benefit or answer to a conversation that regularly runs through your target audience’s mind
– Use a unique emoticon! A professional, unique emoticon immediately has your post standing out from the rest. At Visionary, we’ll use a “💎” in almost all online communications to ensure we stand out in the newsfeed, inbox and calendar
– Use a hard-hitting, specific fact or statistic that is relevant to your reader
Text Spacing
As a general rule, each paragraph in your post should be 1 – 3 lines long at the most. This makes it very easy and casual for your viewer to read.
It has the impact of keeping your reader engaged until the end of the post.
Users on social media aren’t in the state of mind to read long complex paragraphs of text!
Make It About Them, Not You
Like all excellent copywriting (online marketing text) – your posts should be focused on your viewers and their pain points and benefits. You should be saying “you” in your posts, much more often than you say “our” or “we”.
Remember your audience doesn’t really care so much about you. They really care about themselves and the value your business could bring them!
Be Unique & Authentic
There are MANY messages being launched to social media every second, competing for your audience’s attention. Almost all novices on social media make the mistake of blending in with posts that aren’t exciting.
Always aim to be unique. Aim to stand out on the newsfeed.
This should apply to both the messages you are writing as well as the images and photos you select. In a crowded newsfeed, you will not get noticed unless you are truly unique and your posts stand out.
Similarly, it’s important that you are as authentic as possible. Understand what truly makes your brand unique and valuable for your target market. Understand the deepest values of your brand. Over time, being authentic in your social media posts will attract the right type of people to your business – while repelling the wrong audience.
When you get this right, the impact is uncanny.
Other Adhoc Techniques
Here are some more techniques you can use to keep your copy interesting:
– Add questions to keep your viewer engaged and thinking
– Short sentences alone on a line keep your content snappy
– Occasional use of slang of shortened words to keep the copy conversational and light
– Be emotive – whether that be a SLIGHTLY offensive rant, or showing SLIGHT frustration
To see these principles in action, see our social post for Visionary clients, The Gild Group: [ VIEW THE ACTUAL POST HERE ]
Learn more about how this works in the real work from our Case Study with The Gild Group here.
How Does This Look In The Real World?
See plenty of examples of Social Media Posts we’ve created for Visionary clients below:
[ Visionary “Code V” Content – EXAMPLES ]
You’ll notice all of the techniques in this article are incorporated within these client posts.
If you want to see how these types of strategies work in the real world – follow Visionary Digital Studios on your favourite social media platform. “Like” a few of our posts so that the platform knows to show you more of our content.
And you’ll start being educated by our content regularly.
And finally, always remember – mastering Social Media Marketing is a journey that brings increasing returns over time.
Because Social Media is a relatively new area of marketing, and because digital technology is evolving so fast – there are no hard and fast rules.
As long as you are launching regular content, and then adapting to your audience’s responses … you will achieve success over the long run.
Interested in learning whether you’re a right fit to have this implemented in your business? Request a call with a Visionary Strategist here:
