Does your social media strategy look and feel something like this:
- Get photos from a real wedding you worked on.
- Publish the real wedding on your blog (or not).
- Post a few images on social media and exclaim: how much you LOVED working with the couple and what a great time you had!!! ❤️❤️❤️
And crickets…
One of the biggest problems I see with wedding vendors’ social media is that it all looks and sounds the same. It doesn’t speak to their target market, let alone attract their ideal clients.
But it’s hard to constantly be on social media, right?
And you don’t even know what to say, right?
And you’re busy running a business, you don’t have limitless time to sit on the internet, right?
So the next time you get online, with the recent memory of your failed posts, it hit’s you: Social Media Writer’s Block
You have no idea what to say.
You’re stuck.
How to Eliminate Your Social Media Writers Block in Two Steps
I’m here to tell you, that you don’t need more social media in your life, you need more strategic social media.
Once you get strategic about what you’re doing, you know exactly what to say to attract your ideal clients. The best part is you won’t have writer’s block.
Oh, and the really best part is you can easily outsource your social media and still get results. So it won’t really matter if you have writer’s block or not 🙂
Here are two foundational ways to get strategic about your social media and virtually eliminate writer’s block this year.
1. Don’t guess, research
The first step that any marketer or Agency worth a dime starts with research.
Always.
The best marketers never skip this step. Whether you’re organizing a $100K worth of focus group research or are a scrappy small business owner spying on people on the open web, you need to do a bit of research to understand your market and validate any assumptions you have.
For example. I had a photographer client who knew that his ideal clients were interested in “great photography,” but what does that mean, really?
Great photography is subjective. It’s like a so-called “great book” on Amazon or a “great show” on Netflix. It depends on who is doing the evaluation. What I think is a good book or a good show may not match what you think is a good book or show.
We needed more information so we could craft marketing messages that would attract his ideal clients.
So we turned to some good old-fashioned research and set about asking his audience what “great photography” meant to them. And when I say “asking” I really mean spying on the open web.
The photographer went online looking for instances where his ideal clients were talking about “great photography”online.
The key was to make sure the instances my client captured resembled his ideal clients as closely as possible.
For example, he wanted to avoid price shoppers like the plague, so we avoided capturing responses from people who seemed to just be looking to spend the least amount of money irrespective of quality or professionalism.
This research not only gave us natural language his audience was using (so we could mimic it in his content); it also gave him a bajillion ideas for generating content that could help and guide his ideal clients. From tips and tricks to what he decided to highlight in his captions.
If you plan on doing a bit of this type of research, make sure you create a system for capturing the data.
We used a simple Google Sheet to capture about 100 comments from forums, book reviews, online reviews of his business as well as his competition. We also explored online reviews of photographers he admired, mostly out of his market, but who seemed to attract the type of clients he wanted to attract.
We made sure to copy and paste the entire comment. Cherry picking from comments leads to poor and fragmented data.
Following these steps gave us a good sense of what his real ideal clients dreamed about when it came to their photography and any challenges they faced in achieving their dreams. All of which is great fodder for content.
Now my client gets online to help make dreams come true and solve challenges for his ideal clients. No writer’s block, no drama, and much more engagement!
Want to do your own research? This article will give you step-by-step instructions for researching your ideal client.
2. Use Core Themes to Clarify and Streamline Content Creation
Once your research is done, you’ll likely see strong themes emerge.
Going back to the photographer example above, we found that his ideal clients wanted a photographer who could make creative suggestions about location possibilities and posing without being cliched or cheesy.
- They wanted someone who could help them look great in front of the camera and document their love for each other.
- They wanted help expressing themselves in natural ways in front of the camera (which can be both awkward and unnatural feeling).
- They also wanted to capture all of the thoughtful details they painstakingly curated to wow their guests.
- Lastly, they wanted someone who was timely in their communication and the final deliverables.
His ideal clients used words and phrases like “adventurous,” “legacy,” “wow my guests,” “beautiful light,” and “timely.”
Now that we had more specific themes, we could be more purposeful with his social media (and blogging) editorial calendars.
We could delight his readers and help them solve problems like natural posing, looking great in photos and adventurous places for portraits in his local area.
This, in turn, would help audience members get to know more and better trust him as the exceptional professional he is. He would become the trusted authority in his location when it came to photography and he would almost effortlessly set himself far apart from his competition, all of whom were posting the same tired, posts and captions.
These themes provided a roadmap for how to talk about real weddings on social media.
We still used the same images, but now we got purposeful with the captions and how we told the story of the images. Using the core themes we discovered in our research, we framed his messaging around “adventurous” locations, “natural” posing techniques that tell the story of the couples love, and details that “wow guests”.
These were all terms and ideas that surfaced when we evaluated the research.
The result: more engagement and (more importantly) more clicks to his website.
Did it happen overnight? No.
But by being consistent with his themes and watching his insights and analytics for what worked and what didn’t he was able to start telling a more consistent and compelling brand story and identify content types and themes that worked well so he could optimize his feeds.
Reality Check
Here’s the deal:
If you don’t have ideal client clarity that’s backed by real-world research, nothing else will work right. Basic marketing tasks like social media posting become a struggle.
Worse, your content will be lackluster at best and at likely look like everyone else’s’ content. Either way, don’t expect much engagement or interest from your ideal clients.
Even worse, when potential clients can’t distinguish one vendor from another, do you know what happens? That’s right, they resort to price comparisons.
However, what feels like price-shopping to you may, in fact, be a matter of not hooking your ideal client with an emotionally-compelling and relevant (to them) brand story and value proposition. Be clear and meet your ideal clients on their terms with specific stories and themes that they are most interested in.
Base your social media content strategy on research and you can’t go wrong.
Not only will you attract your ideal clients, but you’ll also set yourself far apart from the competition, who will still be doing what everyone else is doing and still attracting price-shoppers.
