To market your brand, it is crucial to create a successful content strategy. This includes both paid advertisements and organic content to sell their products.
With ads, brands can target specific audiences, which is great to increase sales quickly. But organic content is where the long-term strategies come into play.
Social media users experience a large number of ads while browsing their accounts feeds, which has caused the paid-advertisement format on social media sites to be oversaturated.
An organic content strategy opens the door for more creativity and can help differentiate your brand from other companies. But seeing good results on organic content is not the most straightforward task in the world as it can be one of the leading social media bottlenecks for professionals. When done right, employing a good organic content strategy can increase brand awareness and brand loyalty, and ensure your audience’s trust. This inevitably leads to conversions and ROI, especially if the initial investment is not that large in the first place.
Simply put, learning how to correctly leverage organic content can lead to great results and profits, without the need to invest in anything else than your own marketing team.
This article will help you fine-tune your efforts and give you some proven tips to create a successful marketing strategy.
#1. Analyze Your Content Strategy
Always start by looking at the data.
When finding the most effective content strategy for your brand, first evaluate what has worked in the past. To do this, take a look at your top posts and see what sort of posts bring the most engagement from your audience.
Seeing what your audience likes the most from your brand will help you plan your future posts in a way that will bring the highest rates of engagement. There are many formats of organic content that a brand can employ on Instagram and even more topics of interest.
Play around with photos with informative versus funny captions, graphics, images with flashy elements, videos or lives, and creative carousels. See which one is more appealing to the public, and where your engagement thrives. The highly engaging posts will be the ones that bring you conversions.
You can also see what formats are not as successful by seeing which of your brand’s prior posts did not have high engagement. Be merciless, and cut them out of your content calendar.
#2. Improve Your Content Calendar
Once you have the analytics data, use it to plan your brand’s future posts to maximize engagement and ROI.
But have your audience at the forefront of all decisions. Posting things that resonate with your audience, making it more likely they will like and share your posts, giving your brand high rates of exposure.
As a starting point, try to include more carousels in your content calendar. One of the most versatile and effective post formats on social media is the carousel post on Instagram. They’re a great option for brands due to the flexibility of the format.
Carousel posts are a great way to use a variety of different post formats to appeal to many different customers at one time: you can use up to 10 slides and include both images and videos in a single post. Think of the combined effects of an entire content strategy in a single post.
As you’d expect, carousel posts bring in higher rates of engagement for brands, and carousel posts have rates of 1.92% engagement compared to 1.43% engagement for images, one Socialinsider & Bannersnack study shows.
Furthermore, engagement rates reach over 2% per carousel posts that have ten slides, according to the same source. This is a valid option for brand storytelling, which has always been appealing on Instagram.
However, if you don’t have enough content to use up all ten slides, don’t force it. Your audience will notice and most likely get bored.
Another helpful data-proven trick is to combine videos and images. The study proves that carousel posts containing a mixture of pictures and videos are the most successful, with an average engagement rate of 2.33% – quite a boost!
#3. Find a Perfect Balance Between Carousels, Images, and Videos
As you begin developing your brand’s content strategy, make sure that you use a variety of different types of posts. Using only carousel posts, although they achieve high engagement rates, can be detrimental and lose your audience’s attention when done too much.
The same principle applies to any other post type like photos or videos- using only one sort of post may cause your audience to lose interest in your brand’s posts. The key to a successful content strategy is to focus on making posts in the format that achieves the highest engagement rates from your audience but also to add other post formats into the mix to maintain your audience’s interest.
Besides, different types of posts have distinct advantages. For example, video posts, or even video carousels, lead to an increase of comment. Despite the overall engagement being lower for videos than for carousels, people tend to comment more when videos are involved.
Finding a balance between all the different post formats is an essential factor in maintaining high engagement rates on your brand’s Instagram, but also in making sure your social media leads are quality leads that will eventually weigh on your ROI.
#4. Make Your Captions Short and to the Point
Many posts use extensive captions in hopes of resonating better with the audience. This practice does not work as intended, as short captions with less than ten words have been found to have the highest average engagement rates. Include a coherent message but ensure that the message is brief and to the point, while still expressing an important point that will resonate with the audience.
Keep in line with your brand voice, but keep in mind that shorter captions drive your messages forward, as they’ll be easier to understand. And don’t forget emojis!
#5. Post Stories
Stories help brands build authenticity and increase their presence on their audience’s Instagram feed.
Stories on social media are temporary posts that expire within twenty-four hours. This plays right into the “fear of missing out”(FOMO) concept that makes social media – Instagram especially – so addictive.
Stories are a great way to showcase your brand’s image and personality to help the audience connect strongly with the brand. Stories can be interactive and can be fun for viewers, which makes them extremely popular among Instagram users.
To optimize your Stories as much as possible, go back to data. Video Story posts filmed in the vertical position are the most successful format for Stories posts, research shows.
There are many tweaks that you can apply to your Stories to increase the brand’s engagement rates with the audience. For instance, try to limit your stories to six per day. With up to six posts on Stories per day, brands can keep more than 70% of their viewers engaged. Anything more leads to a decrease in the number of engaged viewers, according to the same study.
To keep audiences watching, add questions, polls, or music to Stories.
#6. Be Human
To appeal to your brand’s audience the most, make sure you show your personality when representing a brand and “be human.” This helps show authenticity to your audience and builds their trust of your brand.
Let the audience see that you take an interest in them, build a connection between them and your brand, and try to understand their expectations from your brand. Talk like a human, not a faceless corporation – it helps your audience connect with your brand and your brand’s values.
Customers will be more likely to purchase from brands that they feel a personal connection to. This personal connection must be built through posts that consistently express the personality behind your brand. Use the “help, don’t sell” motto.
Final Thoughts
Show that your brand can be original and exciting, and use all the weapons at your disposal: find a balance between all types of content, leverage engagement to your advantage, double-check your caption’s length and relevance, and inspire people to reply with videos.
Remember to also satisfy that FOMO (fear of missing out) through stories and be human to create stronger connections. Social media is all about “help, don’t sell.”
What do you think about carousels? Are you a firm believer in organic content as well? Let us know in the comments below!
DepositPhotos – instagram
