Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Our goal is business results. Our content is not successful unless it is driving reader behavior towards positive business outcomes: leading people to sign up for newsletters, fill out a “Contact Us” form, or ultimately make a purchase, for example. 

Instead of writing headlines that attract as broad an audience as possible, we should be writing headlines that filter out everyone but our target audience before they click through to read the article. By dissuading non-interested people from arriving at our page in the first place, we’ll save on our media and distribution spend. And more importantly, our overall engagement and conversion metrics will go up – and those are key metrics we need to focus on to prove that our content is driving ROI.

Here are three strategies to use to craft more effective headlines...

To get a better understanding of which types of content salespeople are consistently sharing on their social media channels, we analysed all the top shared posts on our platform over the last 12 months to see under which large content “umbrella” they could be categorised.

The three macro-groups of content we identified were:

1. Company promotion – 49%

2. Thought leadership – 34%

3. Company culture – 17%We then decided to get more granular.

We identified a number of sub-themes within each group, divided as follows:

Company Promotion

Campaign promotion – content related to the company’s marketing campaigns – 24%

Informative blogpost – any informative and useful article from the company’s blog (not linked to a specific campaign, offer or data-capturing page) – 12%

Events – content related to a specific event sponsored or organised by the company – 7%

Company news/PR – media coverage or exciting company news – 6%...

Social media has been traditionally known for it's "soft selling" approach, meaning most users are not online for the sole purpose of shopping and, therefore, they must be persuaded in a different way. What does that mean for you? How do you "sell" through social media without causing your followers and friends to get tired of your overly aggressive tactics? The answer is in what you post and how you post it. Learn more below about effective social media sales strategies you can use to increase sales and keep your audience happy.