Creating great visual content marketing
After my prior posts about Instagram and Facebook, I thought a few hints and tips on some great and easy ways to improve your content marketing for these platforms would be a good idea. Anyone with a decent camera phone or basic web skills can produce amazing content posts in minutes, and content marketing is a great way to improve your small business marketing skills. Here are five content marketing tips which will help you out:
Self generation of content marketing starts with your camera
The best pieces of content marketing on social media are short, snappy, and visually appealing. They work well because they are instant and of the moment (think about how much you cringe when a ten year old Facebook memory pops up) so keep it fresh. To keep it so you need images that are new, and lots of them. Have your camera handy and snap before and after photos of a job, arrival of new stock, your new menu, stalls at local events etc. If you have someone else
managing your social media for you, take photos of everything and send to them so they have a batch of things to work from.
Take some time to curate what you put up
As much as you need a treasure trove of content, take some time to think about how it all fits into your brand and how you want people to see you. What are your business values? What is your brand proposition? How does all that work with your pictures to sell your story and engage customers. Make sure posts nicely sit next to each other. The latter is especially important if you are using stories on social media, you want someone to read through your posts and have come away with a sense that it all flows and fits together. If you have the time then a content marketing plan or calendar on a spreadsheet which fits around your business year is a great idea.
Use free and cheap content design apps
You don’t need to be a photoshop wizard to produce great content, and you don’t have to rough it in MS Paint anymore either. There are some great free and cheap user friendly apps which do all the hard work for you - basically you pick a template, upload your images, and play around with the layout and text. Canva is a great tool for producing graphics which look smart and can easily produce great looking visuals, it’s great for beginners and is also very handy for sharing and saving content. It has a free level of membership so you can try it out but even the paid version starts at only £8.99 a month.
Another is Adobe Spark, which is what I use. For £10 a month you get access to thousands of templates which are completely customisable. You can save your own and clients’ brands on there which means at the flick of a button the template you choose will adopt that branding. It also has a really good feature which lets you search by content size (instagram story, Facebook cover, flyer, etc.) You can create easy peasy video montages, great for telling stories without having to produce any new video content. And it has a great mobile app.
There are also free versions of Photoshop which you can download to your phone, and just a look on the Play and App stores will show you hundreds more. So get one or two, have a play and get creative with your content marketing.
Speaking of video content.
Don’t be afraid to have a go. You can use the live features on Facebook and Instagram to show someone round your shop, broadcast a demo of a beauty treatment, hold a live Q&A or anything else that you want to showcase. Video is on the up; according to Wyzowl, 84% of people have been convinced to purchase from a brand through video, add to this that 66% of people would rather learn about a product through video (18% chose text based, the next highest one - remind me why I am writing this instead of filming it?) and you can see the benefits of trying out video content as part of your visual offering.
If you decide you like using video, then you can look to invest in some simple video editing software. Adobe Premiere Clip is a great app for easily editing videos together. And the more you try, the better you will get and the more ideas you will have.
Content marketing ideas with numbers and quotes
Find something interesting out about your products, how they make people feel, how many times people search for a particular term (Google Trends is a treasure trove here). What notes do you get from the manufacturer. These can easily be
turned into simple posts which back up what you are offering, and reinforce your sales messaging.
Assuming you are getting glowing reviews on Google and Facebook, take the best ones and turn them into a post shouting how great you are to the world. If you have won an award, boast about it and make sure you bring it in with every opportunity (our award winning xxxx). One of the great things about content marketing is that you find something great and reuse it until, like a Christmas turkey, all that is left are the bones.
What’s next?
I hope this post has given some food for thought on what and how to get some content up on your social accounts. You don’t need to be Ridley Scott, own an expensive camera, or be qualified in Adobe Illustrator in order to produce some great content marketing.
If you are still stuck for ideas, look at what your competitors are doing. If you need some expert advice and want someone to seamlessly manage the content marketing process for you, drop me a line - I’ll leave you with an example of what I talk about above which was of great use for mihu’s social posting.
Mike
07843 989 176