How Content Marketing and Social Media Work Together
While social media and content marketing may appear to be two distinct things, in reality, they are in fact a team. Brands can increase the impact of a huge piece of content such as a white paper or blog post by sharing small pieces of content on their social media channels.
A strategy helps you to focus and optimize your efforts to get the most out of every piece of content. It can also help you avoid wasting time on vanity metrics and determine what matters to your business, such as brand awareness or website traffic.
1. Identify Your Audience
Social media marketing is an excellent tool for building relationships with potential customers. Before you can develop the most relevant content for your audience you must first understand the people they are. This will help you develop a strategy that is more likely to reach your goals and improve your bottom line.
Begin by watching who follows and interacts with your company in social media. What are their interests? What do they want? What information do they seek and why? This information can help you identify similar users on other social media platforms.
You can also learn more about your audience by studying the content of other companies in your field. What type of content are they creating and sharing? What kind of content works for them? This will give some insight into how to create content.
Finally, you can also contact your audience on social media to see what they want to hear from you. ModCloth, for example frequently asks its followers to submit photos of themselves wearing its products. The photos are then showcased on ModCloth's social media accounts. This makes the brand feel more connected to its followers and can increase engagement.
It's time to write and share content once you've identified and defined your target audience. Remember to track your metrics however, only those that connect to your KPIs and SMART goals (which you established in step 1). Remember that not all your content will perform perfectly in the first few days, but you will eventually see the outcomes if you're consistent and stick to your plan.
2. Create a Strategy
You need a strategy to grow your social media presence. Posting random content with no reason or plan isn't likely to help you gain new followers or get people to visit your site or turn into a customer or client. Develop a written strategy for content that you and your team can follow. This will allow you to set SMART goals and create and share regularly-published content.
Begin by developing your social media marketing plan by defining your buyer personas (or fictional representations) of your ideal customers. Then, you can think about the types of content they prefer and the formats that work best on each platform. For instance, Instagram and TikTok are excellent platforms for visual content, such as photos or short videos, while Twitter is more suited to texts-based posts and links.
Think about how you can utilize each platform in a unique manner to present your brand. For instance, Instagram is a great platform for fashion brands to highlight their distinctive designs and products. Stumptown Coffee Roasters also uses their Facebook page for highlighting events and locations across the country.
Another great way to drive engagement on your social media accounts is to invite your followers to engage with you by including calls-to-actions within your posts. If you're running an event or announcing invite your followers to share, tag friends or leave comments.
Remember that social media is an excellent place to showcase customer testimonials and reviews. They can be extremely efficient in building trust that your audience has in you, particularly when they come from other social media users who are recommending or using your product or service.
3. Create Content
You must create content that is relevant to your intended audience to effectively promote your company through social media. This can be achieved through various methods, such as blogging, videos, podcasts, and infographics. It is also crucial to consider the type of content your target customers will want to see and share. For instance, research suggests that personal and plain fun content is well-liked on social media, whereas information and promotions score lower.
Once you've identified your target audience and marketing goals, it's now time to determine the kind of content you'd like to create. It is recommended to mix promotional posts with entertaining, informative, or educational posts. This will help your audience connect with your company and increase the chances of turning them into customers.
Interviewing thought leaders is a popular way to produce content. This is a great way to gain insight into the latest trends and tactics within your field as well as gives you a chance to promote your company by sharing the article on the interviewed individuals' own social networks.
Other types of content include industry news tips, tricks, and hacks. Think about adding images to your posts. This has been proven to be more effective in attracting attention and increasing engagement.
It's important to track your content performance, and make any necessary changes. For example, if one type of content isn't performing well, you might need to change the subject or angle from which it is being shared.
4. Share Your Content
It's important to share your strategy and engaging content on social media. This is an excellent way to broaden your reach and get new customers. Keep your updates brief, and make sure to use catchy headlines. Don't forget to diversify the types of content you share video, images text, links and text can all be good options.
It's also an excellent idea to generate interest in your content by putting it up on various platforms at different times during the day. This will ensure that your content is seen by the greatest number of people.
You might also want to think about working with influencers or even running a contest. This is an excellent way to drive traffic and generate buzz for your brand.
When your audience starts to trust you as an information source, they're more likely to be engaged with your content and turn into customers. This is why it's essential to focus on quality, rather than quantity when it comes to marketing content.
One last thing to consider is that If you're using a foundational content marketing strategy it's a good idea to share the links to your lengthy content on social media. This will give your readers an idea of what's to come and encourage them to click through and read the full article or blog.
It's often difficult to understand why a certain piece of content is more shared than others. However, it's worth investigating the psychology behind sharing to determine what might be driving people to share specific pieces of content. This will help you develop a more effective marketing strategy in the future.
5. Keep track of your results
It is crucial to keep track of the results after having created your content and then shared it. You'll be able to see if your plan has been successful or if you need to modify it. For instance, you could observe that one kind of content is performing better than others, or that certain platforms are delivering more engagement than others. You can monitor your social media's performance and reach using tools like Mention or Hootsuite.
It is also important to keep in mind that the fact that your content is performing well doesn't necessarily mean that you should stop sharing it across all platforms. It is important to tailor each platform's content to its intended audience and best practices. This way, you will avoid overdoing it and annoy your audience.
When you analyze your results, make sure to look at every single one of the metrics that are important to you and your team. Select metrics that are aligned with your SMART goals and KPIs. Make sure you differentiate these metrics for each of the social media platforms you utilize.
It is possible to integrate content marketing with social media effectively if have the right strategy and techniques. This will help you to increase brand awareness and increase traffic to your website and increase leads, boost revenues, establish authority and much more. Take a look at this free guide from DemandJump for more information about how to implement an effective strategy for content marketing. rewrite article software contains examples, tips, and more from companies like yours that have defied the algorithms and achieved success in content marketing. Sign up for your copy today!