The Essential Steps to Producing Winning Creative for Social

Over three quarter of marketers state that social media marketing has been successful for them as a way of finding customers. Despite initial worries about how successful luxury brands could transfer their real-world exclusivity and appeal to the internet, the popularity of brand websites and social media accounts have shown that these fears were misplaced.

Over more than ten years, we’ve worked with luxury brands to deliver them greater online engagement and revenues. In this article, we share our six steps to creative winning content for our clients including:

• Knowing your audience
• Choosing the right platforms
• Defining goals
• Being original and authentic
• Varying your marketing collateral
• Testing and optimizing

1. Know your audience

To create content that engages and prompts a record, understanding your audience is key, particularly in the luxury sector. Using buyer personas, customer research and data analysis, it’s possible to come up with mind maps showing what they desire, how they think and how they behave online. Knowing your audience allows you to:

• Customize your content around known wants, needs, desires and habits
• Select the social media channels and types of content that will appeal to them
• Create engaging, compelling and occasionally provocative messages that inspire them to visit your website, follow you and/or make a purchase

In the luxury sector, the need to know your audience is more pronounced. High levels of disposable, access to opportunity and the social circles these consumers are members of are faster-paced, more dynamic and more demanding resulting in constantly changing tastes, trends, and technologies.

Four ways to find insights into your target audiences include:

• Get to know your current customers and social media followers: Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social and similar tools can give you a deeper understanding of your audience’s demographics, interests, likes, and habits. You can also use your website and social media channels to promote surveys and feedback forms for direct feedback.
• Listening to the buzz: Meltwater, Mention and other tools track what people are saying about your brand, products and industry across social media and other online platforms. Monitor Google Trends and BuzzSumo regularly to see which topics and trends your audience wants to know more about.
• Your rivals: Rival IQ and Socialbakers show you who’s following your competitors, what type of content your competitors produce and how well that content is doing. Facebook Audience Insights and Instagram Insights are also useful for this purpose.
• Influencers: Upfluence, AspireIQ and other tools can help you find influencers whose audiences closely mirror your own. Platform-specific tools like Instagram Suggested Accounts also do this well.

2. Choosing the right platforms

Now you know more about your audience, you’ll also know more about the social media channels they use. You can choose to use all of them or restrict the ones you use to the channels you believe are most likely to get the result you want.

Get this choice right and this allows you to:

• Better reach and connect with your intended audience
• Make sure of the unique features and formats of a platform to highlight your conent
• Ensure that your content matches the platform’s general vibe and culture

Choosing the right platforms can be challenging but we consider the following four factors when recommending a course of action to clients:

• Understanding your audience: Begin by considering which platforms your audience likes the most, their usage habits and the types of content they enjoy. Tools like Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social, Meltwater and Mention are very useful at highlight audience’s behavior and preferences and for tracking trending topics that your audience thinks are important across social media platforms.
• Defining your goals: What are you aiming to achieve with your content? Whether it’s brand visibility, lead generation, sales, or customer loyalty, you need to know before you get started to give your campaigns the best chance of success. Use platforms’ built-in analytics tools like Facebook Insights or Instagram Insights to measure your content’s performance and ROI. Hootsuite and Later are helpful in managing and optimising content across platforms.
• Content creation strategy: Get to know the best formats and styles to use for each platform to see if it’s a fit for the type of content you want to create (for example, text, images, videos, audio, live streams, or interactive content like quizzes or polls).
• Your marketing team: It’s important to think about the time, money and skills available for creating and managing content across platforms. The more platforms your team has to create for, the longer it will take. There are some AI tools that can now create content for multiple platforms and ad types from the same collateral, however, so this is becoming easier.

Consideration of these factors can guide you in selecting the best platform for your content creation and marketing strategy.

LinkedIn can be useful for luxury social media campaigns although, in the majority of cases, we select some or all of the following for our clients:

• Instagram: Great for visual content like photos and videos, Instagram is perhaps the foremost platform for promoting high-quality products. Features like Stories and Reels are great for brand building and storytelling. There is a wide community of experienced influencers on the platform too.
• Facebook: Still the most popular social network in terms of numbers and usage, Facebook offers many opportunities, particularly for luxury brands targeting consumers 35 years or older.
• YouTube: The best place for long-form videos such as product reviews, tutorials, interviews and documentaries. Luxury brands can create content for their channels to share their brand story and heritage and to present collaborations with celebrities and influencers to promote their products
• Pinterest: Perhaps the most undervalued social platform because of its wealthy user base, Pinterest allows users to pin different images and weblinks together on topics of interest and share them with others. Luxury brands can create boards and pins to inspire potential customers, linking their products to their website or e-commerce platform.
• TikTok: Best known for its short-form videos, TikTok is a platform on which luxury brands can engage with the younger consumer demographic. Participation in viral challenges and trends can significantly increase brand visibility and engagement.

3. Define your goals

Do you want to generate revenue? Do you want more followers? Do you want to build a community of fans that interact with you and each other? All and more are possible on social media. As with all other forms of marketing, you need to choose how you’ll measure success and the best ways of doing this are to:

• Align your content with your business’s mission and objectives
• Select meaningful to track your performance to target and return on investment
• Optimise your content to find ways to improve individual campaign performance
• Modify your content strategy and change course when necessary to hit target

Achieving this requires some strategic steps:

• Know what you want before you start: Do you want heightened brand visibility, increased website traffic, more sales and leads, better consumer enhancement, improved online customer service or to control the narrative about your brand? Be clear on what you want, why you want it and what constitutes success.
• Choose what you’ll measure: Decide which metrics like reach, impressions, engagement, clicks, conversions and ROI you’ll measure to track whether your campaign has been successful and to look for insights on how to improve if your target is not met. 
• Set a timescale: Prioritise each goal and then set a deadline for achieving each one. As each goal is achieved, re-allocate the resources you’ve used to achieve that win into your other priorities.
• Break your social media goals into smaller, manageable actions: Social media success takes time, money and effort. Instead of going for the one big goal from the outset, make that goal the culmination of a journey of smaller goals.
• Monitor, measure and modify: Regularly track the progress of your social media goals using the metrics you’ve chosen. Where possible, augment this with edback from your audience or stakeholders and adjust your goals or action plan if necessary.

4. Be original and authentic

Originality and authenticity are, arguably, behind creativity and intelligent ad placement in what makes social media marketing successful. Being both unique and genuine enables you to:

• Showcase your brand’s character, core values and distinct voice
• Deliver meaningful and relevant content to your audience
• Build trust and credibility with your followers
• Differentiate yourself from competitors

Accomplishing this requires certain considerations:

• Be honest: Don’t distort or inflate the truth about your brand, products or services. Don’t use fake or doctored images or videos that present outcomes that are unrealistic or features that are not genuine. Don’t mimic other brands or influencers. Instead, carve out your own niche and establish your unique style.
• Be transparent: Behind-the-scenes looks and stories about the hurdles your brand has faced in achieving an outcome are very popular. Reply to negative feedback openly and quickly addressing the complainant respectfully. When you do drop the ball, don’t be reluctant to admit to it and offer an apology.
• Be consistent: Don’t alter your brand voice or tone to mirror what you think a platform or audience expect – just be yourself. Don’t post content that contradicts your brand’s mission or values. Keep your social media presence active by posting on a regular and frequent basis.
• Be human: Steer clear of robotic or scripted language in your content. Don’t use AI – be human! Eschew jargon or buzzwords that your audience might not understand as most of them are enthusiastic laypeople. Finally, think of data and metrics as one of a number of important voices. Trust them, listen to them but don’t be completely guided by them.

5. Vary your marketing collateral

Over the years, platforms have allowed users and brand to present their content in a variety of different ways. Mixing up the type of content you use gives you the chance to:

• Increase your appeal to your audience
• Showcase your quality and uniqueness in different ways
• Create more of an impact by discovering which content types work best for different purposes

The four of the most common types of marketing collateral on social media are:

• Text: Use prose and UX writing to create captions, headlines, product descriptions and stories that build interest, address audience pain points and desire and give them a reason to get in touch with you. 
• Images: Images, from photos to infographics, are one of the most powerful ways brands can capture attention and deliver information. Luxury brands in particular need to have the highest quality visuals that are edited well while retaining their believability.
• Videos: Short-form videos are among the most successful tools marketing teams have. Longer-form videos are great for everything from product demonstrations to behind-the-scenes peeks. Make sure your videos are in HD (4K if possible) and professionally produced.
• Presentations: Case studies and eBooks, content that can be shared on social media and private messaging apps, are effective ways of presenting a deeper level of information on your products and services, particularly for high-end purchases like cars, houses and so on.

6. Test and optimise

By testing and optimising your social media content, you can:

• Gauge how well it’s doing and how much of a return you’re generating
• Uncover both strong and weak points in your content
• Improve the quality and relevance of your content
• Experiment with new content strategies and ideas

Here are some strategies for testing and optimization:

• Monitor your metrics: Track reach, impressions, engagement, and conversions to gain meaningful insights into the performance of your content across various platforms.
• Solicit and react to feedback: Gather audience feedback—comments, reviews, ratings and so on—and respond where you see there may be value in doing so. Use social listening tools to stay informed about online chatter around your brand and its content.
• Experiment with content variables: Test different constituents of your content like headlines, captions, images, videos, formats, tones of voice, hashtags and more to find which your audience prefers more.
• Improve based on data and feedback: Pay close attention to your metrics to find ways to improve content performance in general and, where necessary, alter the deal stages in your sales funnel to either address issues not adequately covered or skip unnecessary stages. 

Luxury Social Media with Croud Luxe

At Croud Luxe we’ve worked with luxury brands to optimise their social channels, tap into new audiences, improve engagement, drive extra website traffic and generate extra revenue from social media marketing.

To speak with one of our team, please get in touch letting us know about your brand and your goals for your social media marketing. We are a full-service agency offering luxury brands a single destination for marketing with services ranging from SEO to paid media. Click here to contact us. We look forward to working with you.