Just like our favourite fairytales, a digital story is designed to educate and entertain us. Your customers are very savvy and will run a mile if you try and sell to them. The most successful tactics are ones which create a two way conversation or story rather than pure sales messages.

Look through any Facebook feed and you will see post after post of sales messages. This is called push content where you are pushing messages out to an audience and it is one way communication. You are not trying to create a dialogue, simply forcing your message onto your fans. Your customers don’t want to be sold to but they do want to buy? Confused? Don’t me. They just want to get to you a little first, understand who you are, and why they should part with their hard earned dollars.  They want to date you a little bit first so they get to know and social media is a perfect medium for this.

They see through those silly sales and I am personally sick of the Facebook ads that promise to solve all your problems with a click of a button.  To really be successful you need to be real & share relevant information. No fluff, no bullshit! Customers want to see behind the scenes (the good and the bad), they want to know you are human, after all we live in the world of people to people marketing.

This is why content & social engagement is vital and being smarter will make you stand out in your industry and allow you to engage more customers. Here are 3 tips to get you started:

• Understand your audience – you need to understand who your audience is, what they want to know more about, which digital channels they are using and how they want to receive information eg: video, podcasts, text? Once you know this you will be able to create relevant content that makes it easy for them to consume.
• Have a plan – don’t just jump into the deep end of the pool. Take time to really think about your content plan. Think about how you want your content to be portrayed from a brand perspective, how much you need to be communicating, types of messages etc. A content plan will give you a clear direction and stop you wasting valuable time on the wrong things
• Invest time & resources– you will need to invest time & resources in to the process. Engage an expert if needed but at the very least it will cost you some time to create great content that tells your brand storytelling. The content that gets a lot of engagement and shares has taken time to create. It doesn’t just happen (usually)

Your goal should be to create content that informs, engages and starts a two way conversation with your customers. Stop shouting at your customers and start wooing them and you will start to see a different reaction.  And they all lived happily ever after!