How Digital Content Marketing is Rapidly Changing Visibility for Businesses.

Whether you are just starting to build a digital content marketing plan or you have been utilizing the same tactics for some time, your plan needs to be informed with rapidly evolving trends now more than ever. Consistently showing up in the social media feeds where your customers dwell helps you creates a unique dialog, share knowledge and expertise, differentiates you from the competition and builds trust. Building content grounded in strategy and following a social media marketing plan will ensure that each piece of content produced is aligned with your business fundamentals. Using a solid business manifesto to build concepts and create ideas, keeps content focused on appealing to your most engaged customers and audience.

Following a strategy for creating a social media marketing content lets your story unfold, informs customers, and keeps you focused on your business goals.

What are your sales goals for the next 6 months? The next 5 years? What is the reason "why" you want to produce social media content? Leveraging social media marketing for your business can be tricky. Social media platforms have invited us in freely and given us access to the tools to market ourselves for "free." But as anyone who has started the process of using social media for marketing their business soon discovers, there are complex connections that require marketing knowledge to enable us to program these platforms to monetize for us. Learning this process is timely and requires acquiring knowledge of the complex user interfaces and data that are "programmed" to reach targeted customers.

If your business has a clear picture of the authentic storytelling aspect of social media down, but is failing to produce leads, growth, followers and engagement it's likely a problem related to having social media profiles that are not linked in a way that allows you to connect with your audience and track the performance of your messaging.

Learning to create digital content efficiently and not wasting time on tactics that are not delivering results will be an ongoing discernment process preformed by you or your social media manager. If you have been in business for some time, reviewing the engagement of your digital marketing efforts against your business strategy will be the key to keeping your investment profitable.

Weighing how your plan stacks up at reaching your target audience is important as well as having a customer retention process in place. It is crucial to capture and retain customer information on an ongoing basis and keeps your content building efforts relevant to customer interests. A successful social media marketing plan for business requires focusing on the engagement of existing customers (fans) and giving potential customers a way to get to know you and your brand (building trust) and take action.

Visually rich and relevant content delivered through engaging storytelling sparks action.

We all know social media is engaging and entertaining. And for the most part during this age of pandemic, it's taken the place of a break from work to meet with a customer for a Starbucks or lunch. But people are also on social media to learn, educate and find products and services they need. Building a social media strategy that is seeded authentically in the "why" of your business is what will make your business stand out from the sea of information in social feeds. Making it fun to learn about your product or service by using visually rich content like video or visual storytelling has proven to spark 73% of all viewers into action.

All Social Media Platforms and Google have an "ideal content creator" benchmark and set the bar high for creators to produce before they push content ranking upwards.

Like every business, all social media platforms, Google and YouTube are all competing for your marketing and ad dollar spend. In order to compete with each other, they want to be showing the best new and engaging content. And lots of it. Think of them hungry giants with a voracious appetite who are all sitting at the same table.

Social media platforms favor and reward creators who are feeding them the most content by pushing up views of posts and profiles, ranking profiles higher in search engine results (SEO), and delivering more engaged viewers and followers. It's a popularity game most of us are familiar with from high school that's built on highly specific tech algorithms combined with an addictive dopamine rewards system.

Adding content to your website blog will feed Google, who is hungry to add to their search engine content. Ranking higher in search engine results requires linking content in the way Google feels is relevant and useful to it's users. In contrast, social media platforms have ever evolving content guidelines for creators which are designed and governed by competition for screen time spent viewing their app. For example, as of today, the guidelines released for being in the top ranks of the popular social media platform Instagram require producing upwards of 20 pieces of rich visual content a week, including 8-10 videos a week for their new "reels" feature.

Consistent messaging and presence on Social Media targeted to your ideal customer will build brand loyalty and visibility.

The demand to spend time on social media platforms to market your business is growing. Being visible online requires tracking customers as they narrow or broaden their search criteria, and brands who are providing useful information and experiences to help customers take their next action are the ones aligning themselves to profit. Nearly 60% of consumers online have discovered their favorite brands while checking in with friends on social media or looking for guidance from influencers and reviewing lifestyle sites or apps.

Building a solid social media marketing plan will be the driver behind creating consistent messaging and producing digital content that delivers customers who engage with your business. The path to customer purchase is becoming more complex than ever. High visibility on social media is requires meeting certain benchmarks in producing digital content to gain views and engagement.

Finding an experienced digital marketing partner to guide you in creating a social media marketing strategy, and developing targeted digital content can be invaluable to keeping you on track and reaching your ideal customers. A relationship with a digital marketing partner provides experience, support and expertise in developing your brand and improving your ROI. And most importantly, frees you to focus on what you love to do most, run your business and serve your customers.

Know your company needs to grow deeper roots in the digital marketing or social media marketing but not sure what steps to take or how to make it happen? Floh Creative has launched successful brand campaigns for entrepreneurs, well-loved Entertainment Studios and Fortune 500 companies. Using our discovery framework, we help define and position your brand and produce a strategy to adhere to actionable insights for growth.

Ready to talk more about digital marketing or social media strategy for your business or brand? Reach us at 310-564-6881 or visit us online at flohcreative.com to learn more or schedule a free consultation.

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Mary Ellen Schrock is the CDO and Chief Disruptor of Floh Creative. As a bright, intuitive creative she has a passion for solving complex design and marketing challenges, especially when they require translating branding needs into compelling concepts and brand stories.

Mary Ellen loves building successful brands! She created Floh Creative to share her talent, knowledge and experience building brands through a proven process which is customized to your business to produce actionable insights and growth.

Sources: Google Instagram Google/Ipsos Connect, U.S., Consumer Discovery Study, n of 2,001 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 54 who go online at least once a month., Facebook Business Analytics , Instagram