“So much more than meets the eye”
We’ve all heard this phrase before, right? When it comes to content creation, it’s certainly true! Effective social content isn’t just posting a photo to Instagram and adding a caption. As much as we may wish it was that easy some days, there’s a very calculated process that goes behind each and every post. I’m here to help you understand the thought process, planning, and execution of our content creation strategy here at ID.
1. Understand the Client
Content creation starts from day one of communication with our clients. It is important to take the time to research and gather as much information as you can about the client and develop perspective on what the company / brand is all about. This is the first step to assist us in generating new ideas on how we can develop fresh, new content to help the client grow.
It is also crucial for us to gain an understanding of what our client’s goals are for their social channels. Are they aiming to generate new leads? Looking to increase online sales revenue? Or are they trying to grow their presence on social media to increase brand awareness? Knowing what the client’s objectives are helps us understand what we need to create to help them meet their marketing goals.
2. Develop a Style Guide
It is important to have a style guide to help stay consistent with your brand content look and feel. Many of our clients have brand guidelines that they utilize in their content already, such as brand fonts, colors, and logos. If a client does not have a style guide, we assist in creating one with them to ensure the content we make and post on their social media accounts stay cohesive. Having this style guide will make executing content ideas much easier.
3. Internal & External Brainstorming
Now that we have all gathered information about our client and have a good understanding of their goals, along with a style guide to follow, it’s time to brainstorm with the team. We now discuss what we can do as a whole to help grow our client and help them to meet their brand goals for social media. This step in this process includes creating graphics and post ideas with our team to help show our client what type of content they could benefit from posting, and delivering examples of these posts, which then leads us to the fourth step.
Here, we will meet with our client and show them what ideas we have come up with as a team, and what areas of social media we think we could help them. We display a grid of sample posts and discuss with them what they like or about what changes we can make to also implement their ideas as well.
4. Execution
The final step in our process is execution. This step involves piecing together client/brand research, developing or implementing the style guide, internal brainstorm sessions, and external brainstorming. Here we are able to confidently create content that we know will have the same look and feel, that we believe will benefit our client, and that we know our client will love. We use many different platforms to help us in creating content for clients. A couple main softwares we use to create content include Canva and Adobe After Effects. This is, of course, the easiest step, because all the work is already done, now it’s just time to create more content and run with it.
