[Music] [Jordan Dené Ellis] Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our lab today. If we haven't met yet, I'm Jordan Dené Ellis, and I'm here with Andy Lambert. Hi, Andy. [Andy Lambert] Hey, Jordan. Good to see you. You too. I'm so excited to be here today, talking about Elevating Your Social Media Content With Adobe Express, one of our favorite tools and definitely our favorite topic to talk about. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Let's dive in. Like I said, I'm Jordan Dené Ellis. I have been on the Adobe Express community team for three years. And before that, I ran a small business. So I have a background in running a scrappy online marketing campaign with not a lot, figuring everything out as you go. So I love Adobe Express because whether you have a design background or not, whether you have a lot of experience in marketing or not, there are lots of tools that anyone can use that we can't wait to show you today. Love it. And I'm Andy. And for the last seven years, I was cofounder of a social media software company called ContentCal, which got acquired by Adobe in 2021. Spent my whole working life in social media, creating social media strategies, wrote a book called "Social 3.0" on social media too, and now, I'm a senior manager of products working on Adobe Express. So we've got some fun stuff to go through today, and it's going to be a fast-paced session. But I'm excited for this one, Jordan. Me too. Yeah. Today, we're talking about Optimizing Your Social Media Strategy. So whether you already have a strategy you're working with and just want to, like, make sure it's the best it can be or whether you're starting totally from scratch, we can help you out. Then using Adobe Express to create the content that we're planning, and also scaling and actually posting it. So we're going to take you from concepting your strategy to making your post and actually getting them scheduled end to end, with the tools in Adobe Express. Love it. Well, let's start with some strategy because this is a bit that we need to get right to ensure that the rest of everything that we'll create lands as we'd expect it to. So as you said, Jordan, whether it's creating a strategy from scratch or whether it's optimizing, we've got you in both scenarios. But let's always start with the fundamentals. These are the non-changing rules of social media. Social media sometimes can seem like overwhelming and bewildering at times, changing algorithms, platforms, etcetera. But, actually, there's six core truths here. And it's always good to anchor ourselves to these core truths because it means that we don't get distracted by latest platform changes and shifts and, you know, what's new because we can focus on what's most important. Now scaling word of mouth is our ultimate ambition, and this is why I love social media and why Jordan had such success with social media as well is because for no cost, it allows you to light a fire under word-of-mouth. It allows you to reach the right people and for word-of-mouth to spread. In order for that to happen, it's about working with others. Collaboration creates opportunity. Jordan and I have collaborated so many times over the last few years because the more people you work with, the more your content proliferates across different people's accounts. For example, if you're using Collabs on Instagram, when you collaborate with someone, your content goes in their feed as well. So you're extending the reach of your content. Number three, participation drives engagement. So participation is about encouraging people to interact in your content. Your content is not about you. It's about others. How can you make other people feel seen and heard and part of your story? So that could be encouraging people to comment, encouraging people to interact, using that Add Yours stickers on Instagram, for example. All of that helps drive engagement. And the engagement, people interacting or watching your content, drives reach across all of the networks. This is how they work. Their objective is to get people spending time on the platform. If your content's encouraging people to spend time with it, then you'll be rewarded with additional reach. And what we mean by reach is your content being shared in other people's feeds and it going further. Then reach leads to awareness. More people seeing your content means more people become aware of it, quite obviously. But the standard marketing law says people need to see your message seven times before they become cognitively aware of it. This is where, like, the frequency of social media feeds can be very powerful. People need to see your message multiple times. This is, well, really important to, like, scale our content and scale content production that Jordan and I will be talking about later. And then finally, marketing sometimes is overcomplicated. We can keep it very simple because the best product or service is the one that people know, is the one that is first to mind. And that's where, like, the recency bias of that we all suffer from as humans is so important because if people have seen something in their social media feed and they happen to then be struck with a problem or, you know, need the solution that you provide, whoever is first to mind wins. That's why social media is so powerful. So, of course, it's only going to be powerful if we know what we're doing with it. And this is all about how do we make sure we orientate our strategy in the right way. These questions are quite simple, but they require quite some deep thinking to make sure we get the most from them. And there are only six questions we need to ask ourselves to really nail what a great strategy is. Number one. We need to understand who do we want to care. This is why I always think about minimum viable audience. Minimum viable audience is all about addressing the smallest possible audience that can sustain your growth over the short term. Your audience may well grow and change as your business evolves, but, actually, your minimum viable audience is all about truly trying to serve that unique niche that really gets you. So who do you want to care? Number two, why should they care? The more targeted we are with our audience, the more that we can understand their unique nuances around their problems and challenges. Jordan did this fantastically with her small business, truly serving a niche and understanding why they should care, making people feel part of a community. And then how can you be sure? And this is a step that I see so many people miss. They think they come up with, "Oh, these are the people they should care. And this is why they should care." But they never test it with anyone. So it's really important that you get out and speak to people in your community, the people that you're seeking to serve, to make sure your understanding is correct. Once you've done that, you know you've rooted your strategy in real kind of sound known truths and some fundamentals. And from there, everything gets much easier. So when we know who we want to serve, we know their problems, and we're sure of it, then we can start thinking about what do we want to be known for. Your brand is what people say about you when you're not around. And people won't remember what you said. They'll remember what you did. Right? So it's really important that we try and think about what is it that we want to be known for. How are we going to create that emotional connection? Then we need to think about the mission that we're on. What's the change that we seek to make? The best marketing moves people, moves people from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow. So what is that next state that people should move to, and where do you want to guide them to? Being super clear on that from the outset will mean it will infuse across the rest of your content. And it's really important because people get bought in to the missions of individuals and their kind of chosen destinations that they're going. People love a story like that. So it's really important that we think about that. And then finally, this is the only question that's actually introspective and thinks about us, not our audience, because our audience are the heroes here. And this is, what do I want to achieve? Doing social media well is kind of like going to the gym, you know? You're going to have to do it over a long period of time. It's not going to yield short-term results. It's about consistency over time. So if we're just doing this now and going all in and trying to post every day, which might be unsustainable, I don't recommend that. I recommend creating a posting cadence that feels right for you, a consistency that feels right for you. And you're really clear about what you're trying to achieve over the long term because your social media strategy shouldn't live in isolation from your business strategy. It's one and the same. And that means that we'll make sure we can stick to whatever we're trying to achieve and whatever posting frequency we want to make sure we can maintain consistency.
Right, with that, with the kind of fundamentals of your strategy nailed, then we need to talk about how do we structure it. And we like the rules of three here to make it nice and easy to remember. Only three parts to a content strategy. Your pillars, which is the foundation, they never change. I'll show you what those pillars are in a second. Then the themes that sit on top of these foundations. The themes is the type of content you want to create, which is, you know, "how to" would be a good example of a content theme. Then topics live on the themes. So the topics are things if you thought about the theme of how to, your topic would be, in my case, how to create a content strategy or how to stand out on LinkedIn or how to make standout social media graphics. They're all How Tos. So with that structure, it means that you've got a real nice repeatable approach to your content strategy. So what are these pillars? So these are our preferences for what those pillars would be. We only recommend four and nothing else, basically, and everything builds from this. And these pillars repeat every single week. And if you looked at a lot of social strategies and a lot of those people that you think do a great job on social, you'll be able to look at their content through these lenses. They look at how we create an emotional connection through bond because the human behind the camera, the human behind the social account is the important thing. That's the emotional connection. They educate people. So education is the bit that I love the most because it's about adding value through educational content. When you add value to people, you build trust. When you build trust, trust is the thing that drives purchasing behavior. Trust is the underlying emotion that people need. You need to instill in people if they're going to make a decision to go with you. And then showcasing, this is your chance to kind of flex a little bit and subtly promote through taking people behind the scenes, showing them that your work process, what you're achieving for others. This is where, like, user generated content, if you can make your customers the heroes of the story, really powerful in showcase content. And then Tell. Of course, we'd have failed if we didn't drive an action from our social content. So we need to drive that action, whether it's encouraging people to sign up for something or buy our product. We need to drive an action. Bond, Educate, Showcase, Tell. That's everything. So in this next section, I'm going to show you these themes, these topics, and some premade templates that Jordan and I have made for you as well that you can take and remix. Jordan will show you how to remix them in a second as well. So under Bond, which is about introducing, engaging, it's about the human connection. We're not trying to make a sale. We're just trying to connect. So things like create a spotlight, share your story, so your origin story, for example, quote posts of which we'll go into a little bit more later, or AMAs, Q&A to help people understand or answer common challenges in the industry. All of that is designed just to introduce and engage and create a connection. Once we've built that connection, this is where we can start adding value to those connections through educational content. Could be sharing your favorite resources. Could be some best practice tips, like how to do certain things. It could be an industry news update. This is one of my personal faves. I've been doing this for about seven years of giving a news update every single week about what's happening in the industry. And favorite five influencers or you could change that out for favorite five books, favorite five blogs, favorite five podcasts, basically curating information together that will add value to an audience. And it's a really important thing to think about social, not through the lens of, like, I just need to create all the time. Sometimes our job is just to curate and find really useful resources for other people. If we find them valuable as us as individuals, it's likely that others will find them valuable too. So that's education. That's how we build trust. Then showcase. Showcase, again, the chance to flex a little bit, demonstrate our expertise, taking people behind the scenes, showing client testimonials, what you're achieving for people. Progress update. I like this one because it's like taking people behind the scenes of your mission that you're on, what are you doing. So, for example, when I was writing a book, I put in lots of different covers on social to get people to vote what was their favorite cover. Takes people behind the scenes, subtly promotes, but also enrolls people in that process. And then finally, case studies showing people how you've taken someone from point A to point B through your content. And then finally, tell content, which I think is nice and easy, which is about defining the action. Could be product/service launch, limited-time offer, a competition, which is always powerful. Competitions are great to drive an action on your content. Could be like, you know, to follow us to be in with a chance of winning this competition or liking, commenting, etcetera, or a flash sale. All of which have links to these, and we'll share this resource with you too so that you can go ahead and use this content for yourselves and remix it. And I really hope that you find that kind of structure to your strategy really useful. With that, it's time to get into the second part of the agenda where we're about using Adobe Express to create some truly standout content. So with that, it's over to you, Jordan. Yeah. Thanks, Andy. So like Andy said, we created this template library for you that you can use to plug and play your own brand, your own, ideas, just to make it a little bit easier. So to open the template, we'll just click into it, and it'll open automatically in Adobe Express, and hit this Remix link. If you haven't used Adobe Express yet, it's a quick and easy tool that's available on web and also on mobile. I'm using it, obviously, on desktop here. And I'm not going to go into a lot of the how to use Adobe Express because it's set up to be really easy. Basically, click on things, edit them as you want. And if you have any questions, there's, like, little info about what everything is as you hover over. So this is the starting template. It's a community spotlight. You can use this in a bunch of different ways, though. That's the beauty of templates. You can remix them to what you want. So I'm going to turn this into a little bit of an employee spotlight. You could showcase your own staff. You can showcase your customers. You can showcase clients. I'm going to customize this for myself with a fake or an imaginary cat cafe brand that we have branding that we're playing with here in Express. This is also great if you already have a brand set up as a Creative Cloud Library. You can use it here as well. So our little brand is set up as Clover Cafe is the name of our brand. Clover Cat Cafe. And so we have everything that we need. We have logos. We have a color palette. We have fonts, and we have some assets. I'm just going to start updating this and changing things. So I want my Cat Cafe brand here. I'm going to update all of the colors. We have an apply brands-- automatically apply brand option, but I want some customization. So I'm going to apply it manually. Again, our brand fonts are all saved. If you're in the wrong brand, you can just easily switch to the one you want. So my header and body fonts are here. I have all my brand colors here.
Just making sure that I stay fully on brand. So instead of title, we'll fill this into cafe manager. And, again, changing the fonts and colors to the brand fonts and colors that we want. This is also really nice if you're sharing with a team so that you can make sure that everything stays on brand the way you want. So whether you're creating it for yourself just to make it a little bit easier or you're setting this up to share with others, you can make sure that everything looks cohesive. So just continuing to update this a little bit. Instead of community spotlight, I want this to be employee spotlight.
And, again, the beauty of this is how easy it is to just tweak and change whatever I want. So instead of the generic put your brand name here, we will do Clover Cat Cafe.
And we have a placeholder logo here that I'm going to delete and add in the logo from our brand here. With this little link, you can see the this is a linked asset. So if you have brand libraries that you've set up in, you know, Photoshop, Illustrator, or the rest of Creative Cloud, you can actually automatically update those into Express, which is wonderful. Okay.
My favorite thing about Adobe Express is that not only can you create static graphics but you can actually add movement in as well. You can add multiple video layers. You can add animations. I'm going to do both. So we have a placeholder photo here. I can replace this with a different photo, either from the Adobe Stock library here, but you'll probably want to replace it with an actual photo of you, your community, your staff. But I'm actually going to replace this with a video. So I have just a little video of me waving, saying hi, and I'm going to add that in instead, which, again, I love how easy that is in Adobe Express to just make this project automatically into a video project. Now because I added a video, we have a timeline down here at the bottom. I can add audio. I can extend it. I can clip it, whatever I want. I actually want to remove the background of this video, which, again, I love how Express has all of these tools to make things like this super easy. So removing the background of a video is not something I typically know how to do, but with Express, it's just a one button option here, which is great. While that is removing oh, actually, there we go. Now I can just drag the corner to make this a little bigger so it fits my template better, move it around. Again, everything's super easy to edit. I love the way that looks. And I could finish here, but I just want to add a little bit more. Heading back into the brands, we also have these assets that were created custom in Illustrator as part of our brand. And by clicking, I can automatically add them into my project here. We have layers on the right, like, you'll probably know from other tools as well, so I can drag this to be in the order that I want. Just add a couple more flowers here, maybe this orange one and one more little guy. Again, I just love how easy this is to arrange things, adjust things. Especially if you're new to design, this is a really nice way to get started. So I have my video playing, and one last thing, I want to add in some animation. Express makes that super easy with clicking on one element, multiple elements like I did. We have animation here. Now there are different options. You can animate something in, you can loop it, and you can animate it out. So for example, let's do maybe a drift in. I'll grab these two purple flowers and have a little spin animation. We also have controls for everything. So if I want to turn down the intensity and then maybe add the same animation but change the direction, and they can animate at slightly different times. So let's see what this looks like with our video and our animations here.
Yes. I am loving the way this looks. Again, that was-- - Looking good. - Yeah. Thank you. Super easy to do in just a couple minutes, and you can go wild. You can add video. You can add sound.
You can really-- You can customize and update these templates or create your own in Photoshop and Illustrator and bring them over to adjust. So now that I'm done, I can download this as an MP4 or a static image, or I can actually share it directly out to social, which is what we're talking about today. There's a built-in content scheduler in Adobe Express. You can link your channels super easily. You can link multiple channels per platform, and send out to as many as you want. I think I'll send this to LinkedIn. And you know what? Let's add Facebook too so we can see what it looks like for multiple channels. Now while our video is uploading, I need a caption, which is my least favorite part of content creation. Writing is not my forte. But there is a AI generated caption writer. So if I just have a prompt, like, maybe introducing our new cat cafe manager, a prompt like that, we can generate a new caption. The beauty of this too is that this is trained to be, specifically for social, and we'll get the right number of characters for whatever platforms that we've chosen. You can also customize it. So for example, this has kind of a "name space." So I can go ahead, update that, fill in my name here, and also make any other adjustments I want, make sure it's in my brand voice. I can edit that however I want. You can also preview what this looks like so you know what your specific post will look like on all the different platforms before they go live. And then there's a calendar here. So I'll choose the date that I want this to go out, the time. I could save it as a draft if I want to, like, double check that this is right before it goes live. But I know that I love this, and I'm going to go ahead and hit Schedule. And there we have it, automatically scheduled, ready to go live. So went from a pretty standard template, customized to the brand, and then actually scheduled out to social in just a couple minutes. This is something you can rinse and repeat throughout your campaign. And Andy is going to show one last trick before we go. Awesome. Thanks, Jordan. That looks absolutely wonderful. Thank you. So let's go into the third part of this, which is about how do we scale our content. So, of course, we've now got the structure of our strategy. We've now got a bunch of templates that we can work from that's guided by those themes and topics. And now we want to think about how do we repeat things? How do we scale this up? So the thing that we're going to use for that is a quote post. Quote posts are a nice way of approaching evergreen content. So something that doesn't really get old that we can reuse regularly. We don't want to overuse it for sure, but it does make it a really nice, easy way for the audience to feel seen and a great way for us to connect at emotional level because we understand the quotes that will resonate with our audience. All right. So here we are in one of those templates. I've just clicked this Quote Post, and here we are in this. Already applied the branding. And as Jordan was mentioning, it's one click Apply Brand is an absolute lifesaver to make any of those templates easily reusable and feel uniquely yours straight away. So what we're going to do, however, we're going to go to Add-Ons, and we are going to go to this bulk create and generate feature. This allows us to create multiple different variations of this particular design. Quote posts are a good example of this, but you could apply this to any different type of social content that you want to regularly reuse and recycle. Here, I'm just wanting to replace the quote, the author, and the background image. I don't want to do that by duplicating and manually creating this each time. I want to do this automatically. So I'm going to press Bulk Create and Generate, and I'm going to get started. So firstly, I'm going to click on the background image and tag that as a background image. Then I want to replace this text for the quote. So I'm going to call this quote and link. Then I want to go to the author. I'm going to add that and just type in author. Press Link. Right. That's it. We're all linked up. At this point, you would download your CSV template based on those parameters. And the way this works is that it will give you a CSV template of which you can easily add in whatever your prompt is for your background image. So we're going to actually use AI to generate the background image trust, but you could actually just use your own content too. And we're also going to put in, into that spreadsheet, our quote and also the author. Now with that, once we download the CSV template and we've up and we've added the data into it, we press Next. So we're going to upload that spreadsheet that we just used. As you can see, it's all ticked. So, we filled in the right details, press Create Pages. And with that, it's going to use the prompts that we added in that spreadsheet along with the quote and author. That's it. So nothing much to it, really. Really nice and simple way of repurposing content. It's going to create us, I think, five different variations because I've only put five lines in spreadsheet, but you can create many more. Again, a real nice way of, like, constantly remixing content and using the power of AI to do that for us too. So with that, here we go. We've got a whole bunch of generations here. So what we can do in this kind of multi-page view, we can go ahead and select these multiple pages. And similar to what Jordan shared earlier is that we can share directly to social here. However, because I've selected multiple pages, we can share it as an Instagram carousel. We know that carousels perform very well, and each swipe of a carousel acts as an engagement. More people spending time with your content means more reach, etcetera. So there we go. We're going to do that.
We're going to add some copy here. Again, we could use the caption writer, but we won't in this instance. And in fact, I'm not going to use a caption at all. And I'm just going to put in a hashtag in this instance, and we'll just call this Cat Life. And then that is it. Nothing more to it than that. I'm going to go ahead and schedule this because I want to go ahead and make some final tweaks as well. I'm going to save this as a draft. Drafts are really useful for planning your calendar for the things that you're not quite sure you want to schedule yet and you're not quite ready to publish, we can just save it as a draft. So, again, we can choose the date for this. And once that's busy and uploaded, we can just go ahead and add that to our calendar. Now, final step. Let's go ahead and view our calendar right now. So this is what the calendar looks like. Once you've built that strategy aligned around those pillars that we mentioned, potentially use some of the templates that we shared as well, this will now allow you to create a really well targeted organized content strategy that will allow you to have a real consistent publishing cadence. So here we can just move our content around if plans change, etcetera. But we've now got a real consistent approach and a really well organized content strategy, all implemented into our content plan, which we automatically publish through Adobe Express. You've got all of the templates that you can create from and the bulk creation opportunities that will allow you to create at scale. So anything else you want to add before we close out today, Jordan? Just that I hope that the things we've taught you today or shared today are helpful to you whether you have a design background, whether you like creating your own designs in tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, or whether you're just getting started, there are lots of things in Adobe Express that help you create faster, easier, and get your content actually posted. So our goal is that you know what you want to post, when you want to post it, and you have everything you need right here in Adobe Express. So, yeah, thanks for joining us today, and I hope that this makes your life a little easier. Thanks so much, everyone. And you'll find the resources that we've referenced in this section with the linked templates as well that we've shared. You'll find that in the Resources section. And with that, thank you so much everyone. - Bye. - Bye-bye.
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