Social media is one of the most important tools in your content marketing toolkit, helping you reach more people with your content, interact and engage with your target audience, and understand your engagement patterns so you can refine your content strategy. In this article we’ll explain how social media serves as the bridge between your business and your customers, and why no content marketing strategy is complete without it.
1. Distribute Your Content:
Social media platforms are the perfect channels for sharing your content widely and quickly. The key to success with this is to focus on the social media platforms that are most valued by your target buyers, and to produce the content that most resonates with their needs, concerns, and interests on those sites. If you get this right, social media will help to amplify your messages, building your profile on social media and on the search engines, and helping you reach new audiences beyond your immediate followers.
2. Start A Conversation
Social media platforms are, first and foremost, social. Content posted on social media should not be seen as a fire and forget exercise, but as the spark of a conversation. Sharing content through social media helps facilitate direct engagement with your customers through comments, traffic to your website and other landing pages, shares, likes, direct messages, and sometimes, sales leads, too. This helps to develop a real time ‘community’ around your business, further enhancing your search visibility and credibility as a service provider.
3. Brand Awareness
Your brand is the way that customers see your business, encompassing various factors such as your professional credibility, your market position, core messages, and visual image. In content marketing, brand is important because this is what links your content back to your business and what turns an article, video, or webpage into a specific lead generation tool. A big mistake that many SMEs make is to not be consistent in the way they portray their brand through their digital content. Social media is a potent content marketing tool because of the way it allows you to consistently reinforce your brand messages and image over time, and across multiple content types. This helps you to build trust, as well as maintain your brand visibility and recognition.
4. Data And Insights
Social media platforms are great for helping you gauge how effective your content strategies are at engaging with your target market. Social media feedback on your posts, content, and adverts is often immediate and refreshingly candid, giving you the insights you need to fine tune your strategy to maximise appeal and engagement. It often comes as a surprise to some businesses which posts gain the most traction on social media, and which ones fall flat. In content marketing, publishing on social media is like testing your skills in a boxing ring or sports arena. You very quickly find out what works and what doesn’t, and it forces you to sharpen your skills in light of real-world experience. Without social media, it’s very easy to become disconnected from your target market without even realising it, so that you fail to gain the results and conversions you expect from your content.
The data analytics and tracking tools provided by the social platforms are, themselves, also extremely valuable content marketing assets. You can use these tools to find out precise information about shares, likes, click throughs, repeat visits, and other important metrics, as well as where your customers are coming from when accessing your content. This will help you optimise your publishing schedule so that you reach more of your target audience at the best times for them.
Next Steps
Social media is a cost-effective way of transforming great content into meaningful connections and growth for your business. By integrating social media marketing into your content marketing strategy, you can sharpen your approach to content development while also strengthening relationships with your target customers. To find out more, please contact JDR today.
