Katie is the founder of KW Content, a global content and social media marketing agency that develops and launches content and social media programs for purpose-driven brands.
Her most recent project is called Strong Brand Social - where they provide the best and very accessible social media marketing education that empowers small brands to develop their own high-performing marketing programs that are guaranteed to drive growth. Their teaching methodology simplifies the process and demystifies the art of social media marketing to offer focus, efficiency, and measurable results to small business owners, brand directors, and social media marketers. Katie joined Matt on the eCommerce podcast and here’s what went on.
What is content marketing and why is it important for ecommerce businesses?
Content marketing, traditionally, is more long form content and how our website is ranking and SEO within search engines. It's the lifeblood, it's everything from your brand awareness, your brand growth, your brand equity, the intangibles around it to customer acquisition.
What is a content marketing strategy?
There's an overlap and an intersection between what your content strategy for social media should look like and what your content strategy for your website and SEO and all of that should look like.
All brands have three types of content; owned, earned and paid. And within owned, we have our organic content that we're publishing on our website, but also organic content on social media is just anything that we're publishing before we put dollars behind it.
Organic social media is an incredible place to nurture our relationships to build community with our customers and ensure that, you know, we're not thinking about customers in a one time fashion, we are thinking about lifelong relationships with them and inviting them to help shape, you know, the trajectory of our brand and our product development.
That's really where the intersection between certain types of content on social media and our SEO strategy lives and then you know, the thing that I don't hear enough people talking about that we're really focused on community building and loyalty, social media,
How to create a content marketing strategy
There's three phases to building and launching content and a social media marketing programme. The first is really strategic, but it leans towards the creative side. It’s developing the how, what, and who. You want to understand how your audience uses social media so you can meet them where they are.
The second phase is tactical. This is where you're saying ‘how do we get the right message in the right place at the right time?’ ‘What platform should we be on?’ ‘How frequently should we post?’ ‘Are we doing reels?’ ‘Do we have a little bit of a budget to bypass the stupid algorithm and make sure that our message gets out there?’
Posting every single day is not the answer. The answer is wrapping tactics around a communication strategy that's really going to resonate with your people.
The third phase is pushing your content into the market and letting your community give you feedback. How much information we have available to us about our customers and how they consume content is so important so we can learn before we push a programme to market.
For the folks who are not going viral with reels right now, we recommend allocating whatever you can afford, even if it’s just $20, to an organic post, to promote it, it's kind of like a little micro engagement campaign, and that has a tonne of benefits. One of them is that we're bypassing the algorithm, we're bypassing just the followers, we have to send it to a targeted audience to get our message in front of them to understand and get enough of a sample size and enough impressions on that to understand if it's landing or not. This way you’ll have a longer shelf life on your content, and you can be just so much more strategic and drive better results
A good baseline to use is 50 30 20 on each of your pillars respectively. But that is going to change. If you have an audience to sell through, and you have a new product launch, you're gonna crank pillar two way up from 30 to 70. So the baseline is 50 30 20, but it's on a dial, and you can dial it accordingly.
What are the top content marketing tips?
As businesses we have three jobs. We have to grow our brand, we have to increase demand and generate demand then we want to nurture people's average lifetime value to us.
Make sure that when you are creating social media content strategies, everything needs to be aligned to a business goal. Bridge the gap between the business goal side of it, and the social side of it.
People are going to go check out your social media when they hear your brand name, before they even go to your website in some cases. So make sure that you have a solid programme in place there and resources to support the ongoing life of your content.
When you're building a brand and you're building a business, the first problem you need to solve is steady, consistent, sustainable sales.
What you should be expecting for growth depends on what you are investing. Find that niche and produce content for that, keep going with it, don't zig zag and wonder why nothing is working for you.
Finding other organisations or folks who share your top target audience is an awesome way to grow. As a small brand, you don't need to go to someone who has 100,000 followers. If you have 1000 followers, and you can partner with someone else who has 1000 to 2500 followers, that's that should be percentage wise, a pretty decent boost.
How do you create a content strategy for social media?
Your content strategy is conceived at the intersection of your target persona mindset, your unique value proposition and your competitive whitespace. So depending on what industry you're in, it could look really different. So the first thing we want to do is understand our target market through the lens of social media. What are they like? Are they someone who is on social media all the time? Are they a content creator in their own right? Are they constantly publishing? And they want to be a part of that? Are they a more passive scroller? Or are they a mom who scrolls through Instagram for five minutes, at the end of the day, when everybody's gone to bed just to decompress, and never shares anything? Or maybe they reshare content that resonates with them. We want to understand what they're looking for out of this platform, so that the way we show up, nurtures that and meets them there and immediately resonates with them.
The way we construct content strategies is through three pillars. One pillar is for brand growth, one pillar is for sales and one pillar is for loyalty.
If we're evaluating a pillar one post, we're evaluating things like reach, how far to get, were people tagging and sharing it. We're looking for engagements, like likes, comments and shares, because that's where we want for brand growth.
If we're looking at a pillar two post which is meant to drive sales, or at least consideration, we're looking for link clicks, we're looking for sales or an engagement. That means on this level we’re looking for saves, because maybe they're not ready to buy right now. But we know they're in a consideration phase.
Social media is number one for personifying your brand and bringing it to life, right. You can't do that if you sound corporate or vanilla, or like everybody else. Even if you have a really distinct personality, you will attract many different types of personalities. When you think about your friend group or people that you love in your life, right, you have a bunch of different personalities that you're drawn to. So what we really want to do is make sure that we are showing up with a distinct personality, a distinct point of view, so that we can occupy a space in our customers minds and really carve out like an emotional connection with them that feels like a person to person connection, not a corporate to person connection.
Everyone immediately thinks about Facebook and Instagram with social media marketing - What do we need to think about for Pinterest marketing?
Pinterest’s user base is significantly smaller than Instagram and Facebook. It operates more like a search engine. So your content has a really long shelf life. You know, you hear these stories and see these accounts of folks who have a pin from like five years ago that is still responsible for 90% of your website traffic or something like it's pretty amazing, but it just depends on what you're selling.