Wondering what is social media content marketing?
You are looking to use social media to improve your business conversions and optimize your content marketing?
Wondering what is the difference between social media marketing and content marketing?
Don’t go any further!!
We have all that you need in this social media content marketing ultimate guide!
We have divided this article into the following sections for your ease of reference:
- What is social media content marketing
- Benefits of social media content marketing
- Social media marketing vs content marketing
- How to do content marketing on social media
- Establish your social media content strategy
- How you will measure the success of your content marketing on social media
- Evaluate your current social media channels
- Takeaways
What is social media content marketing
Social media content marketing is a marketing strategy where you use social media channels to market and prompt your content to your targeted audience so to create brand awareness, get them to react to your content and ultimately spark their interest in your company’s products and services.
Combines social media marketing and content marketing
Social media content marketing is a perfect combination of social media marketing and content marketing strategies.
Fundamentally, social media channels are used to create brand awareness and social engagement while content marketing is used to provide valuable content for consumption.
With social media, you are looking to grow a base of relevant and targeted audience, with content marketing you are trying to attract prospects looking to find information on how to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.
When you combine social media marketing and content marketing, you end up with a great combination where you can create useful and relevant content intended to generate leads.
You are targeting your audience more actively
Typically speaking, content marketing is more of a passive approach.
You create content that you publish online so your target audience can find the information they need when looking to solve a problem or satisfy a need.
So it’s through your audience’s own desire to find information and content that you may have published on your blog or website.
With social media content marketing, you are taking a more active marketing approach.
You are essentially finding a way to put your content in front of your audience.
You are directing your audience to go and read the content on your blog or the material you published on your website.
You are using social media to direct the user’s attention to the information you have to offer.
Benefits of social media content marketing
With the right social media content marketing strategy in place, you can enjoy many marketing and business benefits.
Social media platforms are fantastic channels to target your audience and develop a community or following around your brand and business.
Social media is now part of our lives and used by billions of people around the world.
It’s a place where people communicate with one another, share ideas, get entertained, express their views and exchange with businesses.
Build brand awareness
With social media content marketing, you can enhance your brand awareness and get people to know that you exist.
After all, to make a sale, someone has to know you are there!
As you strategically interact with your targeted audience, as you promote your content directly relevant to them and cater to their interest, you will attract more qualified leads and ultimately sell more.
Social media content marketing is a great way for you to increase your conversions and increase your sales.
It takes a lot of effort and dedication to achieve this but it’s certainly at your reach if you are willing to put the time and energy to make it work.
Develop a loyal community
By developing a community of loyal followers interested in your brand and following you of their own will is priceless.
Your followers will use the social media platforms to exchange with your brand but also to exchange among themselves.
With the right strategy, you’ll create countless of brand ambassadors promoting your products and services encouraging others to follow you or engage with you.
Increase traffic to your website
With more followers and a community of loyal audience around your brand, you’ll see an increase in traffic to your website and potentially more conversions.
If you develop a large audience, whatever you publish will organically drive a lot of traffic to your website and digital properties.
If you publish content that goes viral on social media in a positive way of course, the end result can be phenomenal for your business.
You’ll drive tons of traffic and you’ll be on your way of converting them to real customers.
Social media marketing vs content marketing
Anyone can quickly tell you what social media marketing means.
When it comes to content marketing, people may get confused.
Although you need content to do social media marketing and you may need to advertise your content on social media, social media marketing and content marketing are not exactly the same thing.
What is social media marketing
Social media marketing is a type of marketing strategy where your primary objective is to create social engagement, create direct communication channels with your audience, get your audience to interact with you and others, build brand awareness and leverage these communications to generate leads and sales.
With social media marketing, you can evoke emotions in your audience, you influence their behaviour and social interactions.
Social media marketing is executed on the social media platform itself.
Depending on the type and style of the social media platform, the type of content you create will follow closely the behaviour and style of the social media platform itself.
The core essence of social media marketing is to engage and develop a communication channel with your targeted audience, have a dialogue and interact with them.
What is content marketing
Content marketing is a type of marketing strategy where your primary focus is creating content that is going to help your audience solve a problem, educate them on a topic or give them useful tips and information.
Content marketing has less to do with the emotions and behaviour of your audience but more to do with creating valuable content that your audience needs and will search for.
A notable difference between social media marketing and content marketing is that the content you create will be hosted on your own website or on your own digital properties.
You will also have full flexibility on how you produce and publish your content.
You can produce a document of 500 words or 5,000 words, it’s all up to you and based on your content marketing strategy.
On social media platforms, you will need to respect the content format of each social media channel.
In some cases like Twitter, you can only put 140 characters.
In other cases, you may have more flexibility like on Facebook.
Social media and content marketing go hand-in-hand.
You can create content that is valuable to your audience and engage with them on social media to generate a reaction from them.
How to do content marketing on social media
There are some proven ways you can promote your content on social media.
The idea of social media content marketing is to merge social media marketing techniques with content marketing objectives.
What should you do to get the best results from your social media content marketing?
Use a lot of visual content
Make sure you use lots of visual content.
Photos are proven to drive more “likes” if you are doing Facebook content marketing for example.
They also drive a much higher click-through rate when your content has a lot of visual content.
You can use images, videos or infographics.
Publish content on popular and trendy topics
Publish content on popular and trending subjects.
Look at what your audience is currently interested in and find ways to create content that will drive conversions and will be relevant to what’s popular.
Leveraging popular topics can help you increase the number of social shares and interactions.
Pay careful attention to your audiences’ feedback
Your audience will give you direct clues as to what they want.
Pay attention to their feedback and make sure you take action as needed.
If your audience is liking a post or something has gone viral, you should quickly jump on the opportunity to create more relevant content to surf on the same wave.
Through the analysis of your audience interactions and the expression of their emotions, you may engage with them to acknowledge their feeling or create content to deliver a message to your audience based on that.
It’s really up to you to see how you can engage with your audience and the type of content you should create based on the feedback you get from your audience.
Establish your social media content strategy
For your social media content strategy to be effective, you need to plan ahead and ensure you follow through with your plan consistently to achieve the intended results.
The way you can differentiate yourself from your competitors is by having a regular presence on your social media channels, keep up with the social interactions you generate and regularly publish content.
The goal of social media marketing is to create a dialogue with your audience and if you are not committed to responding back to them or engaging with them, you might as well think of another marketing strategy.
What should you do to create your social media content strategy?
What is the goal of your social media content marketing
The first thing you should think about is what is the goal of your social media content marketing?
Are you looking to improve your brand awareness?
Do you want people to share your content?
Do you want people to visit your website?
Are you asking them to register for something?
Do you want to direct traffic from the social media platforms to your own website and into your marketing funnel?
You must define your goal.
To be effective, your goals should be specific enough so you can track your results and ensure you are on the right track.
If you are going to spend a lot of time creating content intended to be promoted on social media, your primary objective may be to convert these social media users to customers.
With that being said, what social media platform should you leverage?
What social media channel should you use
There are so many social media platforms out there, do you want to be on all of them?
Are there social media platforms that present a better fit with your business?
Should you do Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or another?
You have to make a well-informed and strategic decision.
Unless you have the budget, manpower and resources to be on all social media platforms and routinely engage with your audience, then this section may not be relevant for you.
Most businesses don’t have an unlimited budget and resources, so they’ll need to select which social media channels they will use to promote their content.
You must select the platform that will help you target your ideal customer persona.
What content does your audience want to get
Once you’ve defined your social media content marketing objective and channels, you’ll need to think about what your audience is looking to get.
Every social media platform will have its own content format and different user behaviour.
If your targeted audience is on Facebook or LinkedIn, what type of content are they consuming or how are they interacting with your competitors, with each other?
As you think of the content intended for your audience on each social media platform, think about their informational needs.
Think about what gets your audience’s attention.
What makes them want to share or to engage with your content.
Will your audience prefer videos, images or text?
Do they want to be entertained or are they looking for factual information?
Consider how your ideal customer engages with the social media platform and deliver content that is suitable for them.
How often should you publish content on your social media channels
Content that is visible on social media is short-lived.
If you publish content today, you may no longer see it tomorrow unless your audience is actively sharing it and becomes viral.
You will need to publish at a regular pace so you constantly have a stream of activity or content visible to your users.
Should you publish content once a day, once a week or at another interval?
What is the publication cadence that will give you the best result?
Are there times in a day that you should publish your content?
If you are using different social media channels, you may have a different publication velocity for each platform.
It’s up to you to consider your audience, the type of information and content they need, how much resources you have to dedicate to your social media content marketing and what is a cadence that your business can sustainably work on long-term.
Define your brand persona
You are ready to interact with your audience but what type of brand personality do you want to project?
In what style, tone or voice will you engage with your audience?
This is where it is important for you to think about your brand persona to ensure you will connect well with your audience and you remain consistent across all your social media channels.
Your brand persona should follow your company’s values, culture, look and feel.
To be effective, you may want to consider putting together a brand persona guideline where you are clear about how your brand will engage with its audience.
Depending on the nature of your business, types of products and services you are selling, you may adopt more of an entertaining persona, more intellectual and geeky, more authoritative or more adventurous.
Once you’ve defined your brand persona, you will then engage with your audience in a way that will be consistent with your persona and you’ll create content designed for your social media content strategy in light of the same persona so you can remain consistent.
Analyze your competitors
If you want to see what works and what does not, analyze your competitors carefully.
You can gather a lot of business intelligence by looking at the content marketing on social media done by your competitors.
What type of brand persona are they projecting?
What type of content are they publishing?
How often?
At what time of the day?
How are they interacting with their audience?
Are they on multiple social media channels?
Where are they active the most?
What is the success of their website landing pages linked to their social media channel?
With the information you gather, you’ll need to find ways to distinguish yourself while at the same time take advantage of what appears to be working for your competitors.
How you will measure the success of your content marketing on social media
Measuring your success is key in your social media content marketing strategy.
Combine content marketing KPI’s with social media marketing
Before you started your social media content marketing, you should set goals for yourself.
For example, your goal is to increase traffic to your website and get people to sign-up for your newsletter.
If that is your goal, you should then track your success.
You’ll do that by establishing KPI’s to measure your success.
Remember that social media marketing is fundamentally used to create brand awareness and social engagement while content marketing is used to drive business conversions.
You’ll need to define KPI’s that will help you merge your business objectives with your social media marketing strategy.
If your business objective is to increase the number of sign-ups to your newsletter, at the end of the day, you are looking to get leads, nurture your leads and eventually convert them.
The sign-up to the newsletter is not the end in of itself in your social media content marketing, it’s a means to get to an end.
What are different types of KPI’s
Depending on where your targeted audience is situated in your marketing funnel, you can set up KPI’s for each stage of the buyer’s journey from the awareness stage all the way to the decision stage.
You can track the success using KPI’s like total number of impressions and your total reach.
Total number of impression is how many times your content was exposed to your audience.
Your reach is how many unique visitors have viewed your account.
Then you can track the number of traffic you were able to divert from social media platforms to your website.
If you have a separate landing page on your website per social media channel, you can use your website analytics to track how many visits you generated to your site and how many conversions you were able to achieve.
You can track KPI’s specific to the social media channels as well such as number of shares, the number of comments generated by your content, how many likes, how many brand mentions, the number of pageviews and number of followers, among other KPI’s.
The KPI’s you’ll establish must have a tangible and quantifiable business return for you.
If you are just creating brand awareness and you are not concerned with the immediate tracking of your business results, you may focus less on business KPI’s like conversions, number of qualified leads and sales and focus more on impressions and reach.
In most cases though, you are going to do social media content marketing as you are looking to drive immediate business benefits.
Evaluate your current social media channels
As you are setting your social media content strategy, you’ll need to consider the social media channels you currently have in your portfolio, your current audience, the perception your audience has of you, your strengths and weaknesses.
Using social content optimization techniques and social media marketing techniques, you’ll want to steer your overall social media strategy in the right direction.
If your current social media presence is working well for you, you’ll be enhancing and optimizing further to expand on what you have.
If you don’t have a presence, you’ll need to take the necessary steps to create a meaningful presence.
If you have a presence but you neglected your brand, you’ll need to refocus your strategy and avoid making the same mistake again.
Takeaways
Social media content marketing is a great way to achieve both brand awareness and achieve concrete business objectives such as conversions and sales.
Social media marketing focuses on brand awareness, market reach and engagement whereas content marketing is informational and delivers content value to your audience.
Using social media content strategy, you can bring your content to your targeted audience instead of waiting for them to find you.
In this article, we’ve looked at social media content marketing in detail and hope that you were able to take a few pointers.
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