As not­ed by most social media mar­ket­ing guides, con­sis­ten­cy is key. Main­tain­ing an active, engag­ing pres­ence is what will help you build a dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty, expand your pres­ence, and ulti­mate­ly, build con­nec­tions that will lead to sales.

But it’s not just post­ing in itself that’s key to this effort — main­tain­ing con­sis­ten­cy in your social updates is also a key ele­ment, as each update, each tweet and each sto­ry frame can be used to fur­ther your brand­ing, and help estab­lish your pres­ence. Using sim­i­lar col­ors, sim­i­lar tones, the same fonts — each of these should be con­sid­ered, and for most, that will also mean estab­lish­ing con­tent tem­plates, which can help on this front.

This is an ele­ment that’s often tak­en for grant­ed, or even for­got­ten — yet, tem­plates mat­ter because they help you com­mu­ni­cate your busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion more con­sis­tent­ly and efficiently.

Estab­lish­ing brand tem­plates should be a key con­sid­er­a­tion for all busi­ness­es look­ing to estab­lish their social media pres­ence — and while it may well be some­thing that you already use your­self, with­in your own post­ing prac­tices, it’s also worth high­light­ing core tem­plates across your orga­ni­za­tion and mak­ing them a focus.

Get into a “template mindset”

If you orga­nize your mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties with a tem­plate mind­set, then it’s much sim­pler to con­fig­ure new cre­atives, mes­sages and com­mu­ni­ca­tions across dig­i­tal destinations.

Regard­less of which spe­cif­ic tools, tem­plates or sys­tems you use today, we rec­om­mend defin­ing all your mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties into dis­crete con­tent or con­tent blocks and keep­ing close track of them.

To suc­ceed, you should always try to adhere to these impor­tant mar­ket­ing hygiene practices.

1. Develop consistent company-wide, service or campaign details

Admit it — you want to keep your cre­ative assets in one place, but they usu­al­ly end up scat­tered in shared files or appear live in dif­fer­ent media libraries across the web. Tem­plates help you avoid this.

  • Col­lect your cre­ative ban­ners, logos and oth­er brand assets and keep them updat­ed cen­tral­ly. At least use a shared access file.
  • If you have spe­cif­ic brand col­ors and fonts, then embrace and use them every­where that you can apply them — here’s an exam­ple of brand con­sis­ten­cy in col­ors and fonts on Insta­gram from make-up brand ‘Go-To’.
  • Know your lat­est com­pa­ny or ser­vice descrip­tion, both long and short phras­es, address­es, con­tacts. Make sure they’re list­ed the same on all your social media profiles.
  • If you’re run­ning a time-lim­it­ed cam­paign which alters your brand cre­ative and mes­sag­ing, make sure you have them pack­aged well for roll­out and rollback.
  • If you have dif­fer­ent cam­paigns for tar­gets, remem­ber where they exist via your social sites. Remem­ber to adjust tac­tics for chan­nel attributes.
  • If some of your web­sites or social sites are fal­low and no longer used, take time to redi­rect else­where or say where you’ve moved.

2. Coordinate all kinds of marketing activities through templates

For any busi­ness, your social com­mu­ni­ca­tions should have some­thing use­ful to offer or enter­tain­ing to say. Of course, keep­ing your brand sen­si­bil­i­ty and voice is impor­tant, while allow­ing room for your social media com­mu­ni­ca­tors to devel­op two-way interactions.

We believe it’s crit­i­cal to sound like the same orga­ni­za­tion through­out these activities.

  • Product/service offers, deals, sales and rewards – Make sure you have one “look” for your pro­mo­tions, so you’ll get rec­og­nized when things are shared from your social chan­nel. Here’s an exam­ple of a set of Sto­ries tem­plates built for promotions.
  • Com­pa­ny events in per­son or online – While you may have a great event, venue, vir­tu­al loca­tion, agen­da or even speak­ers, ensure you reflect your busi­ness while pro­mot­ing it.
  • Feed­back via sur­veys, polls, reviews, net pro­mot­er score – Remem­ber that rat­ings and reviews are part of your busi­ness, be ready to respond to cus­tomer responses.
  • Over­all lead gen­er­a­tion efforts – Devel­op your offers with care. Your response style, lead gen form and oth­er con­tact points should reflect your cur­rent mes­sag­ing and brand­ing, and not age out.
  • Dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing through newslet­ters, announce­ments, blogs – Always get com­pa­ny news, deals or prod­ucts out there, so that your read­ers can share and pro­mote effec­tive­ly for you.
  • Con­sis­tent mes­sages and offers ampli­fied to your fans – Focus on giv­ing your fans, prospects and cus­tomers rea­sons to talk about and share you among their cir­cles, via social media (with­out being overbearing)

Coordinate all kinds of marketing activities through templates

3. Rely on templates to market consistently across social posts, emails and your website

Per­haps the sin­gle most impor­tant rea­son to use the tem­plate mind­set relates to cross-chan­nel communications.

After all, your fans, prospects and cus­tomers will see you in dif­fer­ent places.

  • Make sure that what you com­mu­ni­cate on your social chan­nels aligns with your web­site content.
  • If you attract email sign-ups, make sure your emails incor­po­rate ele­ments of what you share on social channels.
  • If you’re tar­get­ing spe­cif­ic audi­ences in a social chan­nel, then ensure you’re con­nect­ing them to land­ing or web pages which match up.
  • When you run cam­paigns, make sure that your offers, expi­ra­tion dates, response chan­nels and sup­port details are ful­ly aligned.

How you can put the “template mindset” into action?

We strong­ly sug­gest orga­niz­ing your mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties upfront, rather than re-pur­pos­ing or copy­ing con­tent that’s mere­ly with­in reach.

There’s a cer­tain feel­ing of relief when you’re pre­pared. If you iden­ti­fy with one or more of these next state­ments, then you’re already well on your way.

  • You’re reg­u­lar­ly pro­duc­ing offers and events, at least once weekly.
  • You adjust cam­paigns and cre­atives and make changes across all mar­ket­ing activities.
  • You test lead gen­er­a­tion, with social media ads, land­ing pages and lead gen forms.
  • You dis­trib­ute mar­ket­ing tac­tics reli­ably and con­sis­tent­ly across email and social channels.
  • You have a mix of sta­t­ic and dynam­i­cal­ly chang­ing mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties to coordinate.

A tem­plate mind­set can help improve your social media mar­ket­ing, espe­cial­ly giv­en that inter­est­ed fol­low­ers may dis­cov­er you through mul­ti­ple chan­nels. It’s impor­tant to keep your mes­sages con­sis­tent­ly orga­nized among dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, and hope­ful­ly these tips will give you some­thing to think about and add into your process.

SOURCE: Social Media Today