Social media campaigns that captivate your target audience
We don’t need to tell you that social media is - potentially - a huge opportunity to engage with your target audience.
However, with over 1 billion Stories being shared across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger daily* - alone - it’s easy to see how content can be lost in a sea of other posts (*Source: Meta).
With this in mind, a key consideration when creating a targeted social media campaign is to generate content that genuinely connects with your audience.
In this blog, we’ll be looking at how to create engaging social media content that captivates your target audience with 7 top tips.
1. Understand Your Social Media Target Audience
When considering how to make social media posts engaging, it pays dividends to know your target audience inside and out.
Creating detailed audience personas for your different customer types will enable you to tailor your content to that particular group. If you fully understand your target audience, you can adapt your tone of voice and style to align with them and enhance your connection with your followers.
Social media is in a constant state of evolution, offering more features and functionality. Because of this, it is necessary to keep up with current trends and updates to social media platforms as well as how your audience specifically utilises these platforms.
2. Ensure Your Content is Visible
When looking at how to create engaging social media content, visibility is key. To reach your target audience, it's important to have your content displayed in their feeds - this is where the algorithm comes into play.
The social media algorithm is a complex and fluid set of rules that determine the content that a user sees in their social feed. Algorithms are designed to curate and funnel content to provide a customised and relevant selection to each user’s interests and preferences.
Broadly speaking, algorithms analyse certain aspects of your content and rate it based on:
Relevance —
Algorithms prioritise content that is relevant to the user’s needs and preferences.
Action > Understand your target audience to create content that aligns with their interests and needs. This increases the chance of your posts being deemed relevant and pushed to others in their demographic.
Engagement —
Better engagement - e.g. more likes, comments, shares, views and click-throughs - will improve the visibility of your content.
Action: when you create content that encourages interaction and resonates with your social media target audience, it is more likely to be shared with others.
Consistency —
Posting regularly - at times when your target audience is active, receptive and responsive - will help you align with algorithm preferences.
Action: look at audience behaviour and schedule content to increase the likelihood that it will be seen.
Click to read our previous blog for an insight into the social media algorithm.
3. Provide Value and Avoid Salesy Posts
Another important tip is that your content should provide value to your audience, rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch.
Audiences can be fairly selective about the online content they enjoy and consume. It is likely they will see through an overly salesy social post if it doesn’t offer them any benefit (discounts aside!).
Instead, you should seek to offer value - this can be in various forms, including:
- informative or educational
- entertaining, thought-provoking or uplifting
- advice, solving a pain point or problem
- inspiration or motivation
- news and updates
- interactive e.g. asking for an opinion
- contests or giveaways
- Q&A sessions
- exclusives and offers
- useful product or service info and benefits
Circling back to engagement, these types of content are more likely to elicit a response such as a like, share or comment. As mentioned, the algorithm is then more likely to serve your content up to like-minded others.
4. Create Eye-Catching Content
When engaging customers with social media, it is important to be creative and generate visually appealing content that captures attention.
Eye-catching images and videos are more likely to attract your target audience. If you don’t have access to a bank of images or have the skills to use editing software, you can use copyright-free image sites and simple photo-editing tools and apps to create content.
5. Be Consistent
Establishing a posting schedule will help you to be organised and consistent with your content. You should look at the optimal times for your target audience to be active on each chosen platform.
Some social platforms allow you to schedule posts directly at the back end of the site. For others, you might need to use a third-party scheduling tool, such as Planable, in order to maintain consistency and efficiency.
6. Talk to your Audience
When you’re looking to build engagement with your audience, two-way communication is important.
If you invite your audience to respond to your posts, you should be mindful of replying promptly and properly to their comments, messages and mentions.
If you’re looking for someone who does it really well, take a look at innocent drinks (the smoothie people). They’ve established their tone of voice, their replies are always authentic ‘them’ and they have fun with it.
Having a dialogue with your customers and prospects will help to create a sense of community and nurture customer loyalty.
7. Analyse and Adjust
In order to gauge success, you must monitor and analyse your post’s performance.
Luckily there are many ways to track and measure tangible results, for example, by using analytics tools to observe engagement, reach and other key performance metrics.
If you spot something that works well, it makes sense to do a bit more of that. Likewise, if certain posts underperform then consider reducing that type of content.
Call Today - for Expert Advice on your Targeted Social Media Campaign
Follow our advice, for posts that capture the attention of your audience. Alternatively, call us on 01798 667167 to discuss your social media campaign. Our expert team knows how to create engaging social media content to ensure your posts get in front of your target audience.
