Your Website is Your New Front Door

Charles Stiles, Business Evaluation Services

Guess what, with COVID guiding how your customers’ shop, your new front door is now your website. With this newfound convenience for your customers, it’s highly likely they will continue this trend even after we recover from COVID. Clutter and lack of consistent visual content is usually an immediate turn off for potential customers. Here are some steps to head you in the right track.

With more than 300 million images uploaded daily, it’s clear that the world we live in today is predominantly visual. The benefits of visual content are endless: it can be used to:

● tell a story

● drive engagement

● break down complex content and more.

Brands who adopt a visual content strategy are able to build customer engagement and attract a broader audience. Follow along to read more for best practices to elevate your social media management strategy’s visual content in 2020.

#1 – Develop Your Visual Theme

A visually appealing social media management strategy starts with a consistent visual theme. Large brands like McDonald’s and Coca Cola have been strategically aligning their visual content with their brand to create a strong visual aesthetic. The key ingredients to a successful visual aesthetic on social media include:

● A color theme — Well known brands repeatedly use the same colors throughout their visual content, whether on social media, their website, mailers, and more. Use a consistent color scheme for stronger brand recognition and familiarity. For example, notice how all of Coca Cola’s main colors of red, white, and black are present throughout all their social posts. This creates a unified aesthetic that consumers will pair immediately with the brand when they see these colors.

● Consistent imagery and filters — Use imagery with a consistent theme and is in line with your brand’s personality. Images are one of the best ways to tell your brand’s story and convey emotion. Think about how you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand. The example below shows how Red Bull uses imagery that creates excitement throughout their social media to give an “adventurous” feel to their Instagram feed. Some brands also leverage brand filters to create a consistent emotion throughout all of their visuals. Social media apps like VSCO Cam and Snapseed allow you to save filters and edit your images for a cohesive presence.

#2 – Share Information Through Infographics

Infographics can increase your web traffic by 12%. Any data you want to share in the form of charts, diagrams, or icons should be included in infographics to present information. When creating an infographic, it needs to be relevant to your brand, industry, and products or services that you sell. Take our infographic, for example.

Here, we used visuals to break down the complex data we process daily, from reviews to geotagged images. No matter what industry you’re in, infographics will help your business share easily digestible data instead of trying to describe it all through words. Infographics can also be used as a teaser on social to your other marketing collateral, such as surveys and whitepapers. Canva, Venngage, and Visme are great places to start for building an infographic design template.

#3 – Leverage User-Generated (UGC) Content

User-generated content (UGC) is content created by consumers about your brand. They can fall under photos, videos, hashtags, and comments and be leveraged across all social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest. Your UGC shouldn’t just live on your social media platforms alone, either. They can be shared through your Google Posts, business listing photos, website, email newsletters, and other relevant marketing messaging. Incorporating UGC into your social media management strategy has multiple benefits. 90% of consumers say authenticity is important for choosing a brand to support. UGC content shows your target audience what real customers have to say about your brand, increasing your credibility. Leveraging UGC also helps you work smarter – it saves you the time of creating content on your own!

#4 – Expand Your Video Content

Creating social media video content can seem like a daunting task – it can take a lot of time and resources, but it’s a worthwhile investment. Not including video content can lead to a loss in engagement and revenue. Here are some powerful stats that show the impact of video content today on your social media management strategy:

● More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. TV networks have created in 30 years.

● Over half a billion people are watching videos on Facebook every day.

● Social video generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined.

● Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

When planning your video content, always think about what you want to achieve from the start. Are you looking to create brand awareness, drive customers to a certain product or service, or have consumers enter a contest? Next, what story are you going to tell with your video? Sometimes the most viral video content is created from a low-budget but resonates with people because of the story.

GoPro’s viral video tells a simple yet emotional story of a fireman saving a kitten shot on a GoPro device. GoPro did a great job of authentically showing consumers how their camera can be used to shoot brave moments. Whether it’s to educate, entertain, or inspire, storytelling and creating an emotional connection can help you create an impactful video that speaks to your audience. Social media apps like Videorama and Splice help your brand create and edit creative social videos. Creating video content can be made simple and easy, especially through Facebook Live and Instagram Stories. Through these social media features, you create engaging video content where you share the latest updates in your products and services, customer testimonials, introduce employees, host Q&As all for free or cheap.

GoPro: Fireman saves kitten, courtesy GoPro

#5 – Organize, Monitor, and Measure Your Performance

Now that you’ve gone through all this effort to develop and implement different types of visual content, you need to understand which content is driving the best results. Using a tool that can house all your content within one area can help you create content ahead of time and stay organized. Our Social Suite lets users create a content calendar and publish to Instagram, Google Posts, Twitter, Facebook for multiple social accounts within the dashboard.

Monitoring your social media performance is imperative to building long-lasting relationships with your social media fans. Your brand needs to be there to respond quickly to all comments, questions, and concerns through social media, so the consumer sees you care about them. Strive toward continuing the conversation with your fans throughout social as well. It doesn’t just have to stop at just replying; you can follow up with a question or incentivize them to purchase from your brand by sharing discounts.

Next, you’ll want to track analytics such as post impressions, engagements, clicks, comments, and any other feedback. This will help you get an understanding of how much engagement and traffic you’re receiving, as well as your top-performing content over time. This is crucial in understanding how to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness.

Tracking and analyzing your content as a brickand-mortar brand with hundreds of locations can get pretty tricky unless you’re automating your social media management strategy. Being proactive by using a social media management tool can help you streamline your content management process – leaving extra time for creative content creation.

Check out how Business Evaluation Services Social Suite can take your brand’s content marketing strategy to the next level with our free brand audit. ❚

888-300-8292

https://www.mysteryshopperservices.com/solutions

https://www.mysteryshopperservices.com

Business Evaluation Services was founded by the current President, Charles Stiles. Charles comes from a background in retail; owning several retail gourmet food and gift stores in national malls for over 8 years. Quickly realizing the only way to differentiate his stores and stand out from the competition was to develop a consistent service culture and create a process for measuring the success of the training that was implemented. Through this process in 1996, Business Evaluation Services was founded. Today, BES is an International Mystery Shopper Company with over two decades of experience, serving a variety of industries.