April 22, 2021

By Tim Moran, Client Alchemist, Rogue Water

We’ve all been there. You have this important information that you need to put out, but no way to distill it into an engaging social media post. What do you do?

For starters, you can learn from my mistake. I had information about my client’s water management customer portal that would help ease the set-up process for their customers. The problem is the info didn’t naturally fit into a fun Facebook post. Even for someone like me, a member of the Rogue Water creative team, I’ll admit I sometimes struggle to write a quality social media post. When I get stuck, I go back to the basics.

My first thought was to put this important info right up front, on the post’s image, so the audience would see it on their feeds, and I could consider it a job well done. Right? Not so much. As I followed the metrics, I found that not many followers paid attention to this post. From that, I could have inferred that the customers are probably only on Facebook or Twitter for funny memes and baby animal videos.

That’s when it hit me… The information won’t matter until I get the audience to care in the first place. I started thinking in a new direction, shifting my focus from simply delivering information to considering what’s in it for the audience. What is the value proposition of the water management customer portal? How does the customer benefit from the information or from the system itself?

‘Ok, this time I’ve got it!’ I thought post-snack break. ‘Who is my audience? What is their story? What can I help them with? These questions will make my social media post more impactful!’

Remember, while we may have information that we want to share with the customer, it isn’t about what we want. It’s all about what the audience wants. The Rogue method is to dive deep into creating a story around who the audience is. We let who they are drive the creative messages we create. Instead of just talking at them, we address their needs, wants, desires, or concerns in the post.

So, I set about fixing that unengaging post in which I plopped the customer portal info onto the image itself. Instead, I focused on the story behind my typical audience member — let’s call her Lucy. I think about how Lucy is a working mom with two kids, how she has to watch her spending closely, and how she has only a little free time for herself.

With that in mind, I knew I could help Lucy worry about one less thing by getting her signed up with the water company’s customer portal and set up text notifications. Here’s what the worst post and the fixed version look like side-by-side.

With a little thought and tweaks here and there, I had a shot to convince Lucy that the information I wanted to share was relevant to her. My best post achieved a 3x increase in click-throughs over the worst one. And that’s how focusing on the audience made an impact — and how all my future posts will, too.