Digital content strategy: We love it when a plan comes together!

9 Jul

In the mad dash to get their brand online, a lot of businesses are neglecting to consider the long term. Wise men say only fools rush in, so we're looking at how a good strategy can boost your social media sustainability.

Let’s picture the freshest new startup in the Cambridge tech scene: GloboHyperTech. It’s not abundantly clear exactly what they do, but they must be hot stuff because they’ve burst onto the scene with a metric bucketload of backing. With GHT ready to take the world by storm, it falls to their in-house people to build an online presence which lives up to the hype.

Before long they’re plastering the GloboHyperTech message across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Myspace, Bebo, Google+, you name it. They’re also blogging; their first post was a visionary thousand-word masterpiece outlining the GHT vision for a brighter tomorrow. It’s all looking very rosy.

The demise of GloboHyperTech

Fast forward a year. Twitter and Facebook are posting the exact same content to save time. Instagram has devolved into an endless stream of ‘fun’ office selfies to make things look busy. There hasn’t been a blog post for eight months. Followers are falling off and with no engagement it just feels like shouting into an empty room.

What went wrong? In their mad dash to create noise on social media, the good people at GloboHyperTech neglected to sit down and think about how to make that noise mean something. There was no strategy. Here at Sookio, strategy is an integral part of the service we offer to our clients, something that takes place before we even craft our first tweet.

Picking the right digital platforms

Strategy means assessing where your efforts are best spent. It stops you spreading resources too thin by trying to do everything, often in areas where your customers simply aren’t active. If you’re providing data services rather than beautiful products, do you really need to be on Instagram? If you’re doing strictly B2B work, LinkedIn is going to do you more good than Facebook, which is a platform people use to relax and be their non-work selves.

Once you settle on what platforms are actually best for you, it pays to put a timeline in place for using them. How many tweets should you send in a day? What are you tweeting? If you know your audience (you should), you’ll know when they’ll be most receptive to the kind of content you want to present to them.

Special attention needs to be paid to blogging. Too often we see people start blogging with the best intentions, produce two or three stunning, detailed posts and never touch it again. We always advise allocating time to sit down and think about what topics you want to cover over, say, a six month period.

If you’re writing blogs of 1,000 words covering multiple topics, could these be split into two posts which each cover one topic in more detail? This way you can craft a narrative for your audience to follow and lead them through your world of expertise step by step. It also stops you burning out by running out of things to say.

Tell the right content marketing tale

The ability to craft this narrative, to tell the story of your brand, extends throughout your whole online presence. We’ve developed a comprehensive method to assess what we want the audience to get out of any given piece of content and then place this content within an ongoing plan.

Say you’re just starting out; you want to educate your audience so they know what you’re all about and inspire them to come along for the ride. As time goes on you want to convert this interest into active support, so you need to not just convince them that you’re worth investing time and money in, but also keep them entertained so it doesn’t all feel like a chore. By thinking about the messages behind your content ahead of time you can craft this journey for those who show interest in you.

In all of this, it’s important to maintain perspective. When you’re immersed in your craft all day it can be easy to view some things as mundane which are, in fact, an important part of your story. Likewise, certain aspects of your work which you’re really excited about right now might be too technical or specific for your wider audience until you’ve given them some of the context.

Digital content strategy from Sookio

Because of this, we find that our approach to crafting strategy for our clients works incredibly well. We work with people in a range of sectors, and this cross-sector perspective means we balance the best of strategic expertise with a fresh pair of eyes on your chosen subject.

For example, one client was having trouble thinking of something to post on Instagram, they just didn’t feel like what they did was visually appealing because, to them, it was everyday, run of the mill stuff. The client was a winemaker who kept extensive, beautiful vineyards in one of the most scenic, sun-kissed areas of New Zealand.

Are you just starting to establish your brand online? Do you feel like you’ve had a great time so far but are starting to stall? Sookio can help turbocharge your digital content strategy with a method that’s netted proven results for clients around the world, so get in touch today.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about any strategies your brand has tried, successful or otherwise. What platforms are working for you? What stories are you crafting for your audience? Leave a comment or contact us directly for a strategic chat!