When thinking of words to describe your brand, “irritating” probably isn’t on the list. But what if you’re grating on your consumers without even knowing it? Competition is tough these days, so it’s important to know your target audience and to tailor content that will suit their needs. Read on to learn about irritating brand behaviour and how to avoid it.
Keeping It Cool on Social Media
Let’s start with social. Being active on multiple social accounts is the perfect way to expand your outreach and increase engagement. While blogs work great on LinkedIn, stats and quotes can be repurposed for Facebook and Twitter. These create an effective multi-channel approach, but tread with caution. One wrong move could spell disaster, with the below graph showing how US consumers respond to irritating brand behaviour on social platforms.
As you can see, over half of social users will unfollow irritating brands. Meanwhile 27% may even resort in marking content as spam or blocking the brand entirely. In fact, the results indicate that less than a quarter of people would actually leave negative feedback or share a negative reaction. This shows that while listening to consumers is important, you also need to be self-aware.
With this in mind, here’s what’s hot and what’s not on social media:
#1 Being braggy
If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone and it’s all about them, you’ll know what we mean! It’s a complete snooze-fest and as much as catching up on the latest news can be fun; communication needs to be a two-way street. Particularly on social media where interaction is an effective way to keep followers stimulated and wanting more!
The solution: Get your fans involved with quizzes, polls, interactive Q&A sessions and competitions. Post teaser videos with a very precise call-to-action. Try to provide additional content such as links from Twitter back to longer blog posts on your website, to encourage consumers to delve deeper into your brand. Make sure your content is varied. While sharing company news is fine, don’t take a ‘me, me, me’ approach that will put everyone to sleep and offer zero value.
#2 Irrelevant posts
Going off-piste is an extremely bad habit and one to avoid. You social audience is looking for content that’s on brand as that’s why they’ve followed you in the first place. Re-tweeting and sharing content is fine if it’s useful and relevant. But simply doing so for the sake of it could damage your social reputation.
The solution: Follow like-minded businesses on social platforms as this will make sharing relevant content easier . Don’t solely rely on rehashing and reusing other people’s work. Instead, take the time to generate new and unique content that has the correct tone of voice and provides useful takeaways.
#3 Vanishing off the face of the planet
One minute you’re highly active and getting everyone involved – great! The next, you’ve seemingly vanished off the face of the planet and that’s a bad brand behaviour. Consumers like consistency so doing a disappearing act is unlikely to impress. It could seriously damage the credibility of your brand, in fact, so think carefully before doing a runner.
The solution: Too busy for social? Why not outsource and free up time internally? Facing bad PR? Then it’s really important not to bury your head in the sand and instead to face issues head on. People appreciate honesty, so if needs be, release a statement or respond to consumers on a personal level to discuss the issue in more detail. Whatever you do, never delete negative feedback as this could prompt further backlash.
Let content marketing rock your world
Content should quite literally rock your world! The right strategy can take your brand from average to awesome. It can also prevent you from indulging in any bad brand behaviour. Content marketing has moved beyond one blog a week and is now comprised of many different elements that need to come together in unison in order to create a masterpiece. That’s why we’ve coined the term ‘content choreography’ as like any great ballet, careful direction and skill is needed in order to wow your target audience.
So what’s hot and what’s not? The graph below is from the results of a 2018 report by Adobe showing the most annoying aspects of branded content for consumers.
Let’s address each point with a solution:
- Too wordy/poorly written
The answer to this is to hire professional writers who know exactly how to communicate to your target audience without waffling or making grammatical errors.
- Irrelevant
Do market research to know and understand your target audience. Track behaviours and use the findings to help shape your content marketing strategy.
- Poorly designed
Content must be well-presented and easy to read. Long paragraphs should be avoided and this needs to be clearly communicated to the designer.
- Isn’t optimised for my device
Over 52% of all internet traffic comes from a mobile device. 90% of smartphone owners use their phones while making purchasing decisions so it’s essential to optimise your content for the web.
- Too personalised/creepy
While it’s important to take consumers on a journey and to segment your marketing efforts to communicate with the right people at the right time – use your judgement. You don’t want to look like a stalker by listing everything they’ve bought in the past 12-months. If you have this information you can use it to advertise products/services they might like.
- Content that’s old/stale
Search engines love fresh content, so it’s beneficial to create content such as blogs and videos on a regular basis. Content repurposing is going to be huge in 2019. Essentially, this is the art of turning one piece of content into numerous forms in order to maximise its outreach. So, a blog can provide quotes for Instagram, stats for twitter and can be transformed into an infographic for Facebook.
- No videos/images
Video content will dominate 80% of all internet traffic by 2020, so it’s well-worth jumping on the video production bandwagon now. Snackable content is also becoming trendy as it caters to our shortened attention spans and is easy to share.
Avoid irritating brand behaviour by contacting the Contentworks crew today. We’ve worked with leading finance, tech and lifestyle brands and understand the importance of tailoring content in all its glorious forms to your audience.