Inconsistency
Consistency across your branding, communications, post style and frequency are integral to creating trust with your audience. Having a strong brand plays into this and trains your audience to remember you and recognise you instantly. Consistency in content also sets a level of expectation from your audience that builds trust, but requires upkeep. On a technical level, the social media algorithms favour post consistency. They want you to keep posting, so reward you when you do. Facebook for instance, loves when you share a live video at the same time each week. Instagram pushes your post up the newsfeed when it knows you share regularly. Any edge you can get on your competition is worth considering and consistent, quality content is a good place to start.
Mismanaged Expectations
Your Instagram page has 237 followers but you want to launch your new product online, with no other forms of advertising. You have a small budget to work with when it comes to promoting your content but your management is shocked when sales flop. Sound familiar? Social media and paid digital marketing are powerful tools but need to be approached with a sense of understanding for its possibilities and limitations. Building a genuine audience that is engaged with your brand is not something that happens overnight and without an investment of time and in most instances, money. Set clear targets based on your own numbers and measure your expectations and success on these alone. Your goal should be to improve on your own results with each campaign.
Risk aversion
There is such a thing as playing it too safe when it comes to content. We aren’t telling you to go too crazy (though feel free to do so), we are just asking you to think outside of the box. Why would anyone follow you or engage with your company if it’s generic? Just as you want to share your unique selling points in other areas of brand communications, it is integral to create a point of difference in your digital marketing content. This could be the style of content you share (hello video content) or the tone of voice you adopt. Think about your competitors and decide what you can do to stand out or do it better.
Misunderstanding your audience
For content to be successful, you need it to be something your audience connects to. Taking an ill-informed stab in the dark is the fastest way to fail when it comes to marketing and in reality, business. Break down your audience into avatars or people and try to dissect and understand more than just their demographics. What do they do on the weekend? What influences them to make a purchase? Where do they shop most frequently? What do they think about greater cultural topics? This should be the framework from which you build your creative content, in order to give your audience what they want, or even better, what they need.
Failure to adapt
If you’ve been awake for any part of 2020 you have heard about brands who pivot. In fact, we wrote a whole blog on a few here. Your content needs to be more than just what your company wants to portray. You need to look at the world around you and respond to it using your brand tone and identity. When COVID-19 entered our lives it was the brands who changed their approach and moved into the digital space to innovate that swam. Sinking was inevitable for companies who were rigid and did not tailor their content to the new world we have been living in. This idea goes hand in hand with understanding your audience and looking beyond the boardroom for content inspiration.
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