How Content Marketing Fuels Your Social Media Marketing

Social media has become part of most people’s lives. Over 75% of all internet users have some active social media profile. It would be safe to say that a lot of people’s internet use now revolves exclusively around whatever they find on their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Youtube feed.

Successful companies have taken notice and in the summer of 2015, 91% of retail brands were active on two or more social media networks, pouring in at least 20% of their advertising budgets to social media channels. Being just one click away from potential customers at all times is too big of an opportunity to pass up.

Like all digital marketing strategies, your social media campaign will be all about providing valuable content to your followers. You find what your audience is expecting (and what they’re not expecting) and you produce content that they will find engaging and relevant.

Boost Your Online Presence with Social Media Sharing

The goal of a social content marketing campaign is to engage your customers with your brand via the quality content you provide. To that end, the biggest challenges companies face is understanding their audience and consistently creating great content.

Listen to Your Audience

One of the biggest advantages of social media is that you can get immediate feedback on anything you post. If you’ve had trouble identifying what your customers are saying, you can be sure they will speak up if you give them quality content.

Write some in-depth guides related to your product. Interview someone important that explains the problem you are trying to solve and then talk about how your product solves it. Create an exciting behind the scenes video of what you do.

Be advised, though. People love to speaking their minds. They’ll tell you what they like and what they don’t like. Be ready to use this unfiltered feedback to your advantage. Use their comments to identify problems you aren’t solving yet. You may even find strengths or weaknesses in your product that you didn’t think were that important.

People will talk back to your brand, but you need to give them reasons to speak up. That’s one of the goals of content marketing.

Make Sure Your Content Is Seen

Social networks have to make money somehow. The problem is the only way they can make money is by charging businesses to make sure their posts reach their audience.

Facebook and Instagram are the most famous for implementing algorithm changes to reduce organic reach from companies posts. Now, if you have a product or an offer to show your customers, you must pay.

To counter these changes, you must have a clear social content strategy and stick to it. Find the best times during the day to post. Research how often is ideal for your industry to post; as a rule of thumb, you should post something good every day. Post content your create and outside content that is relevant to your brand.

Have a Plan

You want your social content campaign to succeed, and to do that you need a professional plan in place. A lot of businesses only start posting images and articles they write without a consistent tone or image or even an objective in place.

Take one goal at a time. Are you looking for more traffic to your website? Focus on quality articles and calls to action throughout your site. Are you looking to spark a conversation? Find interesting content (external content is excellent) and tie it to questions or an event you are promoting. Having a specific goal in place will help you keep the language and content organized towards that goal.

Posting for the sake of posting won’t help you. In fact, it may even draw people away if you are not providing quality content consistently.

Diversify

It is true that most people are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But that doesn’t mean there are no people in other social networks like Linkedin, Slideshare, Tumblr, Vine, Reddit, Youtube, just to name a few. They may not all be the channels for your brand, but you should consider that maybe these networks that are more niche-oriented may give you access to more potential customers that are more willing to engage with quality brands.

Content marketing can do wonders for your businesses, especially paired up with a winning social media strategy. You will need to invest strategically, but you don’t have to break the bank to get the results you desire.

Want to find out more? Take a look at our Cloud-based digital marketing for business solutions and start your Content Marketing plan to fuel your Social Media channels today!