Approaching your social media like a marketing copywriter

Call it your socal media content program, inbound marketing, or any other name you want, you are at least thinking about generating content on behalf of your company, if you haven't started already. But how do you make sure it is effective?

 As you move forward on this, consider adopting the mindset of a copywriter. Creating content, whether in the form of ads, websites, press releases, ghostwriting articles, or anything else the job retries, is what copywriters do

 Here's a quick checklist you can use to help ensure your content serves you, rather than just becoming an enormous time sink that will leave you overwhelmed and frustrated.

Begin with the end in mind

Before you start creating your content, get clear with the desired result. Not every piece will need a direct call to action, but it should serve some explicit purpose. Is it to establish yourself as a trusted expert on a subject? Maybe it's just to raise awareness of a specific problem or issue.

 As with a traditional ad campaign, every element of your content marketing program ought to have a single desired outcome. Most of your content should be geared toward building and maintaining your audience. Yes, it should inform or entertain them-- that's the type of content you're putting out. But the intent should be more focused. Here are some suggestions:

-          Draw in new viewers/ readers/ followers

-          Build rapport with existing audience

-          Generate trust/ engender reciprocity

-          Get audience members to share the content.

What is the overarching story?

Once the intent is established, what is the overarching narrative on your overall content campaign, and how does this piece fit into that story?

 Producing a ton of content is great, but each piece carries more weight if it ties into all of your content as a whole. Perhaps you have a theme for the month or quarter. Perhaps most of your content is intended to stage you as a trusted resource around a particular goal or issue. Perhaps you've created an avatar based on your top five customers, and you are providing information they have identified as important or meaningful to them, in order to draw more prospects like those customers into your audience.

What does the audience (1) want and (2) need.

 Now that you have established intent and identified your overarching theme/story, how will this piece serve your audience? Whether you are informing or entertaining, your piece should address one or more of their needs or wants.

 As an aside, when it comes to influencing your audience or building loyalty, what a person wants will trump what a person needs every time.

 Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for the rest of his life…true. But most of the time he still just wants you to give him the fish.

Why should they care?

Once you've decided upon your topic, you need to establish your hook. The best bait for your hook is a clear WIIFM,  or What's In It For Me.

 No doubt your content will be both enlightening and entertaining… but why should they care? What is this piece going to do to improve their life?

 Lead with that. Make them an offer they can't refuse.

What message can we convey to convince them that's the case?

With your lead you've made them a promise. You now have a short time to convince them you can deliver on that promise. You've promised them the recipe of a zero calorie snack that won't make then want to hit themselves in the head with a hammer to distract from the lack of flavor.

 What's the secret? Tease them with your strongest nugget of info right out of the gate as a show of good faith.

How do we execute that message on the platforms they inhabit.

We've started strong.  We know what we want the audience to do. We know it feels like a cohesive part of the story established by the whole of our content. We know it's information they want, or at least need. We have a hook and we have a show of good faith that they can trust us.

 Now,  where are we going to deliver this bit if info? The platforms your audience inhabit are distinct ecosystems with their own expectations and rules of engagement. This information should look and feel different on your website than they do on Facebook. It will look different on Facebook than it does on Instagram or TikTok.

 Making the content feel native to the platform in which it will be consumed will increase its likelihood of actually being consumed. The less the target has to change their behavior within the confines of a particular platform, the easier it will be for them to take the action we want them to take  (see my earlier post about reducing friction).

 And that, after all, is why we're doing all this in the first place, if we've begun with the end in mind. It's almost like we had it planned the whole time…