Create content, not ads!

When you’re swiping through your social media timeline, what’s the first instinct you get when you see an obvious ad? You swipe past it!

Your potential customers or clients will do the same if the first thing they see related to your brand is an ad pushing them to buy your product or service because as a society we don’t like to feel forced into doing something. If you want to sell your brand through social media you need to make it feel like the choice of whether to buy into it or not is entirely up to the consumer, and not up to your ad that barks “buy my product”.

How do you do this, you ask? You create promotional content, not ads! This doesn’t mean don’t promote your brand, it means to create content that subtly promotes your brand and mimics the type of content your broader user base creates and watches.

Unleash your authenticity, be more creative with your execution of a promotional TikTok or Reel and make content that truly speaks to your audience. Think big trends that are happening on TikTok, and think about how you can manipulate the trend to fit your niche and attract viewers to not skip it as they would do with a typical ad. The best way to get someone to stick around on your video is to give it personality, many people roam socials for entertainment so make your promotional video entertaining and unique, instead of slapping your product or service on the headline of the video, weave it in gently.

Last year TikTok launched a campaign that told people “don’t make ads. Make TikTok’s” and since then, the changes brands have made in their approach to promoting their products caused TikTok’s branded content to be “the most genuine and entertaining” on social media.

Know your audience

The only way you will be able to make all of this work is if you know your audience. It’s no use using a popular trend in your subtle promotional video if your audience won’t end up understanding it, so get to know your audience!

Think about what kind of video will capture their attention long enough for you to get your point across; if you’re thinking of using a trend think about whether your audience will find it entertaining or if you need to use a different trend. The magic about social media (especially TikTok) is that there is an audio and a trend for almost everything, so one way or the other you will find a funny trend that you can manipulate to fit your brand and audience.

A good place to start with getting to know your audience is setting guidelines of what they aren’t: this will help eliminate many approaches that you know won’t work for your specific target audience. Once you have weaved out who your audience isn’t and what they don’t like, it’ll be easier to isolate who they are and what they do like. The next thing that will help you tremendously in getting to know your audience, so you can start planning how to approach getting your brand across to them in the most organic way possible is by using Google Analytics.

Once you’re signed in to Google Analytics you want to look under “audience”, where you will see information about your audience such as demographics, interests, geo, behaviour, technology and more.

You want to focus on Demographics, where you’ll find age and gender, and Geo where you’ll find location. Age, gender and location are critical pieces of information that can turn around the entire way you approach promoting your brand, so get into Google Analytics and start analysing, so you can plan the perfect ploy to get people addicted to your brand and it’s social promotion approach!

To finalise, the takeaway from this is don’t be too rigid with the way you promote your beautiful brand, have fun with it, be unique and be authentic! Get to know your audience, get to know the platform you’re using and show people why they should choose you. In TikTok’s own words: “Don’t make ads. Make TikTok’s”.

So, there you have it – get started with a content-first approach, considering your audience and thinking about what type of content you’d expect to see from brands you follow..

Need some further tips or advice? Get in touch with Team Monty today for a free fact finding call!