It’s no surprise that social media content is thriving in the digital world, and the more of it you produce that hit the mark for your target audience, the better it can be for the success of a business or individual. But how much time should be spent creating social content? Is there a secret concoction that a marketer should know about to make the perfect content in an efficient time period?
When it comes to small businesses that rely on using time wisely and effectively, it can be worth knowing the best methods when creating social content that serves its purpose and intent when out in the public domain. So without further ado, let’s dive into the creation of social content and how best to go about it when it comes to your marketing as a business.
The Role Of A Marketer
The role of a marketer when it comes to content creation is a detailed one. Content creation is a specific area of digital marketing. The person in question will need to create content that helps connect businesses with their audience. The aim of the content is usually to sell something or to bring awareness or knowledge to whatever the brand is about.
There are several mediums that content creation comes in from social media posts, video content, and emails, to name but a few. It is a genuinely talented role to have in the company because a marketer within the content area needs to know how to connect with the target audience every time, regardless of the medium it’s delivered in.
They are also helping to build brand loyalty and value to their audience. From each piece of content that gets put out, the marketer should be observing its performance through engagement and data analysis. That way, they can continue to tweak and refine future content marketing to make it better every time.
How much time should I be investing in social content creation as a marketer?
The amount of content you’re creating will likely dictate how much time you’re investing in it, and at the end of the day, it’s all about quality over quantity. A VerticalResponse survey stated that “43% of small business owners will spend six hours per week on social media marketing.” However, this can vary depending on what content you need to create, the logistics of arranging shoots for products, etc.
But then that’s only one part of social content creation. You’ve still got to schedule that content in, interact and engage with your audience and spend enough time on the platforms themselves to hopefully boost the reach and engagement of the content you’ve published.
There’s also the amount of social content you post per day via each platform. Some platforms like Instagram are likely to benefit from one to two posts per day, whereas Twitter would likely need half a dozen to a dozen tweets per day. Remember, there’s a lot of content being churned out onto this platform every minute, so you’re competing with many other businesses and individuals.
How do I monitor the time I am spending creating content?
Thankfully, there are many tools that marketers can utilize to manage their time effectively and monitor how much time is being spent on creating the content. Apps like Toggl can be effective because they help track time.
You could also monitor the time you spend on content by organizing your day with a little more detail in its structure. Task management software like Asana or Slack will help lay out your day, and you could update the schedule with the official timings spent on creating content. Over the weeks and months, you can look back at how much time you’ve given to creating content and what level of impact that has provided to your marketing success.
How do I know if something can be done faster or more cost-effectively by outsourcing?
Outsourcing is notorious for being more cost-effective than bringing in that resource in the form of a new staff member. Not only that but if you’re using marketers in your business who don’t specialize primarily in content creation, then you could find more benefit from using those who do, outside of the company.
It’s worth looking at how much time you’re currently spending on content creation when it comes to your marketing team and whether the amount of time spent on it impacts other department areas. Creating social content is a time-consuming job, not just creating it but promoting it to do well. If you find that your marketing team lacks time to get other tasks done, it might be worth outsourcing it. That way, your marketing team can spend more time on those other marketing campaigns and improving brand awareness to hopefully drive through more revenue.
How much of our budget should we be allocating? Is there a formula to know? What do others do?
Budgets for creating social content can vary a lot, not just due to the size of the business and the finances available but also the type of outsourcing required for better performance. According to Small Business Trends, marketers are allocating around 10% of their budget to social media. However, as the social media industry continues to boom, marketers may find themselves investing more of their budget into social content, especially if its ROI is worth it.
What are the benefits of hiring a team to create the content? Is it more important to do so as a smaller company?
As it’s been mentioned above already, certain benefits may come from outsourcing it to an agency or another company. One of the most significant benefits is that it does end up freeing up more time for your marketing team to focus on things that might have been missed or less energy was spent on those areas that may have needed the attention. The speed and quality in which outsourced agencies or companies could provide is something that small business marketers might not do.
For smaller companies, outsourcing can often be a more beneficial way of creating social content because time is essential for companies trying to attain growth in the business. With an excellent outsourced content team, you also have multiple individuals working together and separately to create consistent and high-quality content. In your small business, you might be the only marketer available, and so the workload can often become too much for one person to do.
What will happen if I keep doing it all myself? False economy?
The hope with social content is that something ends up hitting the mark, and it ends up performing exceptionally well, to the benefit of the business. The more content that succeeds and brings in more revenue, the better. Doing it alone isn’t necessarily a waste of money, but it could be holding you back from reaching that success. As a business grows, there’s also more demand, and that demand could exceed the resources available within the company.
Often when it comes to business, you have to be willing to let go and accept when things need to be handed over or changed to continue the success. With outsourcing, there may be more spending required to begin with, but the reward will likely make that investment worthwhile.
How do I persuade stakeholders that this should be invested in?
When it comes to business, sales are the main important element to stakeholders. Of course, they want to see their stake in the business flourish. For sales to be consistent and to grow in numbers is by encouraging customers to come back. It’s essential to start seeing customers beyond a transaction. Building brand loyalty and a community is vital and is often what builds household brands.
Social media has become a tool for businesses to do that because the relationship you can have with your customers has become much more accessible. You can only get so far with the more traditional channels like email and phone, for example. By creating social content, you can assess how well your audience engages, and from that data, you gain more insight into the customer’s preferences and journey within the brand.
It remains a popular form of marketing, and stakeholders within your business should be willing to invest in the creation of social content. The more that’s created, the closer you can get to perfect your company’s marketing. Content marketing can also influence other areas of the marketing department.
The saying ‘time is money certainly rings true, and it might be that your time is limited when it comes to content creation. Are you spending too much of your time on content creation affecting other parts of the business? Then it might be worth looking at outsourcing it for the sake of its success.