How to reinvent your business’ social media presence during lockdown
As Sydney edges towards its third month of lockdown, there are only so many beach walks, DIY cocktails and at-home haircuts that can be used to fill in time. So, we thought it only necessary to give you a small insight into the strategies used by our in-house social media team that you can apply to your own social media presence.
Want to know how to shoot content in lockdown? Craft the perfect caption? Understand how hashtags actually work? Look no further.
To walk you through our process, we will use a fictional brand called AX Attire. AX Attire is a unisex leisurewear brand that launched in March. AX sells basic t-shirts, tracksuits, crewnecks and hoodies.
1. Understanding Your Target Audience
Most brands will have not one target audience, but several that can be sorted into primary, secondary and tertiary target categories. It is essential to build out these categories to understand the wants and needs of your audience as this will allow you to position your business in a way that attracts target audiences.
There are several ways to develop and group audiences, however, we find that the following format works well when initially developing your audiences:
AUDIENCE 1
Group: PRIMARY
Demographic: Young adults
Location: Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Canberra
Gender/Age: F/M, 20-35 years old
Interests: Working from home/online university, affordable quality clothing, minimalist clothing, latest fashion trends, comfort, seasonal trends.
AUDIENCE 2
Group: SECONDARY
Demographic: Fashion forward twenty something Australians
Location: Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide
Gender/Age: F/M 20-35 year olds
Interests: Emerging designers, fashion trends, affordable quality clothing, leisurewear, minimalist style.
AUDIENCE 3
Group: TERTIARY
Demographic: Inner-Sydney siders (eastern suburbs locals)
Location: Sydney eastern suburbs (Bondi, Bronte,
Gender/Age: F/M 18-35 year olds
2. Diversifying Content
Take this time to diversify your social presence. Heard that TikTok is all the rage but don’t yet have an account for your business? Unsure of how to use Instagram reels? What’s IGTV and why is it important? Learn how to use each platform and capitalise on its features - you won’t regret it.
One way to diversify your content base is to outline your social posting pillars for each platform. The content you post on Facebook won’t necessarily be the same as what you post on TikTok, as the wants and needs of your target audiences on each platform will differ. For example, the following pillars can be used for AX Attire:
Instagram (posts, IGTV, stories)
New Product
Sale Product
Influencer Content
BTS
Lifestyle (relevant industry news, partner brands etc)
Other (job postings etc.)
TikTok and Instagram Reels
New Product Showcase
How to Style
BTS (e.g. design process, the team)
Influencer Content
New Product
Sale Product
Influencer Content
BTS
Lifestyle (relevant industry news, partner brands etc)
Other (job postings etc.)
3. Diversifying Content Bank
Creating and utilising a diverse content bank is essential when attempting to boost your business’ social media. Whilst we would usually recommend looking at our packages (which are dynamic and can be adjusted to suit every business’ individual needs), lockdown has meant that businesses are required to get creative when looking to produce new content.
Luckily enough, smart phones now have seriously impressive image quality so creating content at home is not as near as difficult.
Here are our top tips for producing content at home:
Lighting: Golden hour continues to be all the rage, utilising lighting to your advantage is essential when creating content.
Angles: people want to see how your product/service can fit into their lockdown life and you shouldn’t disregard original (sometimes a tad rough) content. For example, AX Attire could capture content that shows their daily lockdown looks.
Experiment: iPhone not cutting it for you? Disposable film cameras can be as inexpensive as $20 and can produce sick images. PS: many photo stores are doing postal image development during lockdown.
Repurpose: still images to GIFs? That’s one of our specialities and favourite services during lockdown. Be sure to check out our Nexba case study to see some incredible repurposed content.
Outsource: influencers are an incredible source for content, look to connect with those who represent your target audiences and engage with these influencers to produce new and dynamic content.
4. Developing a Posting Schedule
A posting schedule is essential when looking to build your social media presence. How your schedule looks will depend on your business and you can use various programs and formats to develop a schedule (we love google sheets as they can be accessed by our entire team with no monetary cost).
When starting out on social media Only Everything recommends minimum once-a-day posting in order to engage your audience and build your profile within each platform. Posts should be diverse in nature and you should attempt to use each pillar at least once within the week.
5. Copy
It is essential that post copy is eye-catching and instigates action from your audience. Copy is dynamic and can be developed over time, however, here are 3 main pointers for developing copy:
Eye catching: present a desire - has your product/service been utilised by a well known person or received an award?
Action: utilise click through links and verbs to get your audience to perform an action e.g. BUY NOW or what is your favourite colour?
Specific: be specific with the product/service that your post is providing - this promotes intrigue and interest amongst your target audience.
“NEW IN! Grey marle hoodie for only $59.99”
Or
“Worn by X influencer! AX Attire Hoodies $59.99 - click below to BUY NOW.”
The first piece of copy is the bare minimum, it presents the product and price, however it does not engage the audience or promote action, whereas the second piece of copy provides motivation and promotes action.
6. Utilising Social Ads
Social ads are imperative to most businesses success and when low on budget, can be completed by the business owner. When starting out with ads, we recommend splitting ad spend across platforms and utilising around $150/week spend to start.
The internet is vast and sites such as YouTube have incredible tutorials on how to create and run ads for your business. You will be able to utilise the target audiences that you previously built to create specific ads that build your online presence and convert to sales.
We hope that this quick guide will help you to get a handle (haha) on your social media. Be sure to reach out to Only Everything to discuss our social media and content packages - they are dynamic and can be moulded to the needs of every individual client. Plus, we offer a free initial meeting to discuss our offering and outline how we can work with your business.