If you’re intimidated by digital marketing, you’re not alone. For many small businesses, learning in that space means juggling new buzzwords and trends day-by-day as new technologies shift the landscape. However, here are some basic takeaways for effective digital marketing. Chief among them: creativity drives traffic.
Rather than pure advertising, content your customers genuinely value as educational or entertaining is the building block of digital marketing strategy. To be educational and entertaining, it must be memorable, which means it must be creative. Competing creatively in an unfamiliar market is a daunting task, but it’s easier than you may think. If there’s anything the business world has learned for sure throughout the social media boom, it’s these three things.
Info-tainment
The biggest lesson to be learned from brand content on social media is it must be a product in itself – your customer should gain something for free by looking at the content. The sorting algorithms of social media feeds (particularly on Facebook and LinkedIn) have strategies to filter content by quality, so even if your post is shared, it’s less likely to be seen than a post that the algorithm deems information-rich.
So what is “high-quality” content? Tutorials, stories, nice pictures, interesting facts, entertaining videos, funny memes, and anything else that is likely to be shared. Make sure to include a call-to-action, but also leverage customer personas, FAQs, and your understanding of their customer journey to inform what content they want to see. What types of content should you start with, however? Well…
Mobile-Friendly Content
Mobile users continue to dominate social media in 2023. Optimizing your web content for mobile and making sure you’re linking to a mobile-friendly website for your company is very important. Remember your viewers are scrolling through content in a feed, and need something to grab their attention. They aren’t likely to stop and read multiple paragraphs of text, so try to keep your captions short (300 words at most). And an excellent medium for grabbing attention is…
Video
Video is the top performer in social media post types. If you’re not sure which medium to use, and there’s a smartphone on hand, try video! They don’t have to be long – in fact, 15 seconds or less with a single message and call-to-action works best. Vertically-oriented video is preferred, as it makes the best use of mobile screen space and fits YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. Also make sure to use captions, as a large percentage of video views will happen without audio, and videos autoplaying on a social media feed generally start muted by default. The motion captures their attention, the subtitles capture their interest, and when they unmute, your brand should capture a spot in their memory.