How to Win at Social Media Marketing
(Remember the 3 E’s method)
Content and social media marketing for some businesses, means up-selling their products and services.
Wrong.
Here’s why:
1) It limits your content exposure because people do not tend to share or link to content that is purely promotional.
2) It gives your brand a very selfish and unforgiving ‘me me me’ vibe.
3) It isn’t perceived as ‘highly valuable’ to your target audience.
Switching your mindset
When you switch your mindset from self promotion to genuinely providing your audience with useful and helpful content, you will start to see a HUGE spike in your content performance, and your brand will become ‘likeable’.
When creating helpful and ‘highly valuable’ content you immediately switch your prospect customer’s mindset from ‘they’re just trying to sell to me’ to ‘that’s really helpful, I really appreciate this content’ and an instant connection with your brand.
What are the 3 E’s?
One trick I learnt is to remember the 3 E’s when producing content for your marketing objectives.
These are:
Educational - teach them something they don’t already know
Entertaining - be exciting, fun and inspiring or make them laugh
Emotive - touch on a topic which will strike an emotional connection
When you create content be sure to fit it into at least one of these categories.
If you can grab your target audience’s attention and pull them in to one of these 3 E’s mindsets, you’re setup to succeed with your content marketing efforts.
Examples of high performing 3 E content
To show you some real-life examples, I’ve pulled together some high performing content from each of the 3 E categories:
Educational
Here are some examples that fit the ‘educational’ content style -
Chris Walker from Refine Labs - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-walker-41597028/
Chris is the owner of a lead generation or demand generation business.
Rather than push his products and services, Chris creates content that is genuinely focused on helping businesses bring in more leads by educating marketing professionals and business owners on how best to produce content and marketing strategies to connect with your audience, and turn cold prospects in to hot sales leads.
Gary Vaynerchuk from Vayner Media - https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyvaynerchuk/
Gary V is a entrepreneur with many successful businesses under his hat, including a marketing agency, a gaming brand and a wine retailer.
He rarely self-promotes his own businesses, and concentrates his content marketing efforts on inspiring young business people, he attends events and gives valuable advice to start-up business people..
Neil Patel from Neil Patel Digital - https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/
Neil is the successful owner of an SEO agency, offering services to help business rank their website higher on Google through search engine optimisation techniques.
Instead of pushing his services and self-promoting, Neil creates content around teaching people how to do SEO effectively. This builds a genuine positive ‘likeability’ with his brand and positions him as a trusted expert in the industry.
Entertaining
Here are some examples that fit the ‘entertaining’ content style -
Red Bull - https://www.facebook.com/RedBull
Red Bull are the makers of the well-known energy drink.
With retail there’s only so much you can do with promoting your products with special offers until you start to bore your audience.
Red Bull focus on extreme sports, events and sponsorship, to elevate their brand awareness. By creating extreme sports videos that fit with the high-energy image of the drinks brand, they are gaining huge success and brand exposure from their content marketing efforts.
Lad Bible - https://www.facebook.com/LADbible
Lad Bible are a social media news and entertainment brand with a huge following on Facebook, who offer businesses advertising opportunities to their 37 million + followers.
They produce entertaining videos and headline news, that captures their audience attention and encourages viral shares.
5 Minute Crafts - https://www.facebook.com/5min.crafts
5 Minute Crafts are owned by BrightSide. An entertainment and helpful guides brand that offer advertising opportunities to it’s 63 million followers.
They create videos on DIY, crafts and how-to projects to entertain (and educate) people of what’s possible. There’s no up-sell or mention of self-promotion. The success of the brand comes with the shear number of followers.
Emotive
Here are some examples that fit the ‘emotive’ content style -
Surfers Against Sewage - https://www.instagram.com/surfersagainstsewage/
Surfers Against Sewage are a brand are cleaning up our oceans with the aim to become plastic free, saving animals and marine wildlife in the process.
Rather than beg people for sponsorship and fund raising, they create very thought-provoking content in the form of videos and high-impact photography, to really hit an emotional connection with their audience.
Cancer Research UK - https://www.instagram.com/cancer_research_uk/
Cancer Research UK are an established charity that are helping to fight cancer and support patients throughout the UK.
To really build an emotional connection with their audience, they create very powerful people-focused content that gently reminds their audience about the importance of supporting them and helping with donations.
WWF - https://www.instagram.com/wwf/
WWF’s slogan is ‘to build a future where people live in harmony with nature’. They are protecting nature and wildlife throughout the world and can only succeed with funding and donations.
Their content strategy is to not only educate people but also build on the emotional connection of what impact we are causing due to our neglect of caring for our world and our animals.
Which channels should you distribute your ‘E’ content to?
Generally, you should publish your E focused content on to as many channels as possible.
However, as a rule of thumb, certain channels perform better with certain types of content. I’ve highlighted the main type of E content for each channel below:
LinkedIn = Educational
Facebook = Entertaining
Instagram = Entertaining
YouTube = Educational
Medium = Emotive
Quora = Emotive
Email = Educational
Search = Educational
Display Ads = Emotive
TV Ads = Emotive
Radio Ads = Emotive
Billboard Ads = Entertaining
Now of course, some channels can produce great results with more than one E type. It’s knowing what will work best with your target audience.
Stay focused on your E
Ask yourself, what do your target audience want to read, watch or listen to?
As soon as you understand the type of content your audience will connect with, start creating, and stay on track, stay focused, and don’t stray away from your objective - your chosen E.
And remember - don’t up-sell. This will put people off your brand. It’s ok to use a very subtle call-to-action at the end of your content, but don’t over do it.
I hope this helps with your content marketing efforts.
All the best
Gary B