Our Insights

A panellist Networx event exploring the concept of “Crafting Content for Social Media Success” was always guaranteed to attract our attention. With James Gauci facilitating, we had the opportunity last week to absorb insights around best-practice content creation in an already-saturated content landscape. The panellists Ashton Rigg, Flo Le Mens and Kurt Sanders all shared influential insights on how they’re cutting through the noise and providing valuable content to satisfy their overly-discerning markets. You can read a brilliant summary of the discussions here.

One idea of many struck home with our Reload Consulting team. It was to do with creating content that matters most to the target market. The question was raised: how does an organisation generate content that is meaningful and represents resources well-spent? Kurt Sanders answered with our team clapping. Kurt emphasised that the power is in nailing the customer journey at each point of that journey with relevant and value-adding content. I think it’s important to add that what is considered ‘value-adding’ may look different at various stages of the journey, from one organisation/brand to another. The trick is to create poignant content for each part of the customer’s experience. In other words, do your best to understand the journey that your customers (or stakeholders) are taking with your brand. Dig into their journey and see if you can spot any opportunities to outwork content better. Revel in knowing that content can have a purpose at all those different points. Then and there, is where you can strike powerful content.

???? this from @sanderlands at #nxbris

TO DO: Nail the customer journey at each point with content! Create relevant and poignant content for each part of their experience… what’s their conversion experience like? Their post purchase? Match content! ???? @NetworxEvents

— Reload Consulting (@ReloadConsult) July 24, 2018

We understand that the idea of ‘digging deep into a customer journey’ may seem a bit complex and time-consuming, this is because customer journeys are rarely linear and rarely super simple. We subscribe to the notion that there’s not always a one-journey-fits-all approach to most brands. Although this means that customer journeys can get complicated and timely to unpack, it makes customer journeys also incredibly exciting and nuanced.

Off the back of this core takeaway, we’ve sewn together 5 steps for you to follow to craft meaningful and stand-out content for your own social media success.

1. Know your customer’s journey. By that, we mean whipping up a journey grid on a whiteboard and using your insights and customer-intel to fill it in. Try analysing your customers’ behaviours, thoughts, feelings, touchpoints with the brand, barriers to them moving to the next stage of interaction and common influences they have – at each stage. Stages may follow a journey like awareness of need, initial research, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, post-purchase, satisfaction/dissatisfaction, loyalty and then advocacy.

You may like to start simple with asking questions like, ‘what content should we be serving up prior to conversion? Or after purchase?’ but the art of meaningful content management is with being hyper-aware of your market’s needs and desires, and what would help them reach a certain goal state (greater awareness, engagement, and conversion etc.). Break down a customer journey map into stages to tackle one at a time, but try to not sacrifice depth and specificity for the convenience of doing a quick and easy journey map. You may also like to rename your journey stages to align with the customer experience. For example, a boutique art gallery might have stages such as ‘arrive at the art square in the city, arrive at the boutique building, experience the exhibition, exit location’.

2. Select areas of the customer journey most in need of content, or the ‘lower hanging fruit’. If this is a new way of strategic content planning for you and the team, start easy and start by breaking up the journey into chunks. For example, what would make for an easy landing page or eBook download?
3. Design content around the customer journey. At Networx, one of the points tackled by the panel was how do you even begin to tackle content creation? We get it, sometimes creating content in-house (or even mapping out an action plan for outsourced content) is sometimes (quite honestly) overwhelming. The key as highlighted by the panellists however, is to just knuckle down and start simply. Ashton Rigg says to grab out a whiteboard, pull out some post-it notes and simply go at it with your ideas and with what could work in line with the customer journey. Put all your creative ideas as a team within the scope of possibility. Try not to overthink it at this point.
4. Post content to meet the market right where they’re at. Here, begin to integrate the appropriate content ideas within the stages of the customer journey. In this, you might like to be thinking about how to integrate content pieces with one another, or with the next stages of that customer’s experience with the brand.
5. Evaluate the effects of the content you’ve woven into the customer’s journey. Don’t stop at the execution of content, about your users. Perhaps your data sources will reveal a new need or behaviour of users on your website or out at your location. How can you adapt your content to meet this new need?

What I appreciate most about brand content is that it can achieve several purposes and conversion goals. Meaningfully-crafted content has the power to alter behaviour and mindsets; subsequently, it can cut through the crazy noise of social media and aid in achieving your social media success.