If you ask a business owner who has a strong online presence, they will tell you that content marketing is one of the quickest and most successful ways to increase organic traffic.
Many people will tell you that it is necessary to manage your social media pages to expand your customer base and grow your business. If you are working on both of these initiatives but not doing them at the same time, you are not doing it correctly.
content allows your business to reach new audiences, position your CEOs as a thought leader, and answer all of your customer’s most common questions while (hopefully) converting those clicks into sales.
Businesses rely on social media to show their brand to the public and to distribute content. Your business’s social media pages are a great place to get feedback from your customers.
Content marketing and social media both aim to boost website traffic, conversions, and create a loyal user base.
To make the most out of your content marketing and social media presence, it is important that your objectives are aligned. This will help you reach a larger audience.
Elements that Connect Content and Social Media
1. Plan Ahead With Task Management Software
The most important thing you can do to get your content marketing and social media teams to work together is to have them use the same task management tool, with shared boards or calendars.
If you want to keep your team organized and on track, a task manager like CoSchedule can be a great help. It can also be useful for seeing your marketing plans as a whole, rather than as individual pieces.
Sharing calendars between marketing team stakeholders helps social media leaders plan promotions for upcoming content initiatives, while content marketing teams review social posts and make suggestions for captions and creatives.
On CoSchedule, managers can tag social media users prior to posts being published so that social posts can be planned in-line.
It’s important that content marketing and social media teams use planning software to share new content and suggest improvements to content distribution efforts.
The right task management software can help you ensure that your team is publishing content regularly and giving readers a reason to keep coming back.
2. Compare Metrics and Engagement in Monthly Sessions
Frequent in-person meetings between content marketing and social media teams can help compare overall performance metrics and identify traffic wins and losses.
Use these meetings to discuss and set objectives for the following month and quarter, and to make sure that your business’s content marketing efforts are effective. If you have regular meetings, you can figure out what’s going on with people’s performance and involvement, and plan future content accordingly.
It can be easy for team members working on different projects to lose sight of the big picture. Make sure everyone on your team is aware of the end goal and is working towards the same thing. This will help keep everyone focused and working towards KPIs.
Unsure where to start? When analyzing your website’s traffic, pay attention to how much is coming from social media platforms, and how many conversions you’re getting from blog posts that include call-to-actions. To ensure productivity in these meetings, follow these steps.
Both teams should come to the meeting prepared with information about their wins, losses, and overall performance. The platforms that work best for us are the ones that generate the most sessions, engagement, and shares. In the long run, we’re looking for platforms that generate the most sign-ups, conversions, and sales.
What brainstorming ideas can you come up with to help align the goals of both the social media team and content creators? Some ideas might include the social media team re-sharing successful content multiple times, or content creators making more pieces that cover popular topics on Facebook.
You should send a weekly email with one big win and one big loss every Friday to keep the conversation going throughout the month.
Both teams can improve their chances of success by effectively sharing metrics and using those metrics to develop solutions.
If your content marketing and social media teams are the same, it is still important to set aside time to align thinking and compare successes between platforms.
3. Target New Audiences Based on Engagement
So you’ve instituted a monthly metrics session—now what? Now that you have found patterns and trends between platforms and on your blog, it is time to use this information. Look for what is successful and identify what is not working as well as looking for new groups of people to market to.
Once you have found patterns and information from your research, it is time to start using that data.
For example, social media can target specific hashtags, post content in different Facebook or LinkedIn groups, or work with other influencers or businesses to start new social swaps.
G2 Crowd did below to your tweets to increase engagement in new audiences.
4. Creatively Market Content With Graphics or Clips on Social Media
A common content marketing tactic that can be used to achieve various goals is creating e-books. E-books can be used to thoroughly explain a topic, secure leads, or introduce a new product.
It’s important to make sure that social media is aligned with the goals of the company before starting to produce longer form content like guides, which can be useful for increasing conversions. However, producing this type of content takes a lot of time and effort.
Designing graphics specifically for social media platforms is a great way to promote an e-book or tease its release before it is widely circulated.
Design a graphic for each step in an e-book on improving your business’s online security, with a brief description for each.
The release of these graphics will happen every day and will make social media followers curious enough to download the e-book and read the rest of the steps.
If there is nothing to list as steps, then using excellent pull quotes from the e-book can be just as effective.
To create your first design, sign up for Canva.
Choose a layout for your document, then edit the text, background, and colors to suit your needs.
After you finish making changes, you will have an eye-catching graphic to use to promote your e-book.
A good way to get people to watch your full YouTube or embedded video is to post a clip or a few clips on social media, and then provide a link so people can watch the full video.
If you post a video on Facebook, you will on average get 135% more views than if you posted a photo.
To get the best results, the person who creates the content and the social media team should work together to decide which steps, quotes, or clips would be most popular with a social audience.
5. Define Your Goals
The first thing a content or social media marketer should do is define what their objectives are and then make sure they are aligned with those objectives.
Social
What are your goals with social media marketing? If you want to increase brand awareness, you need to earn more shares, likes, and follows. Are you looking to increase traffic to your website and use social media to help promote and sell a product? Would you like to use SMM to communicate with your current customers?
Content
Your content marketing strategy should begin by asking what your goals are, just as your social media marketing strategy does.
Some possible goals for a business could be to increase its brand authority, be more visible, offer value to its community or industry, improve its website’s search ranking, or to get more customers for its product or service.
6. Define Your Audience
Who is it that you’re hoping to reach? Who actually benefits from your content, product, or service?
Who would you like to see reading and engaging with the content you produce? Consider who would find your content the most valuable, and then produce content with those individuals in mind. Define your audience and meet them where they’re at.
Social
You will never be able to reach all of the 77% of Americans that have social media profiles no matter how hard you try or how often you post. Which social channels is your niche audience using? What types of content are they engaging with?
Content
What content is your potential audience already interested in and sharing? Where is this audience engaging with content online?
Which publications regularly publish content in your industry or niche? To find out where your audience is most likely to go for recommendations, consider the following:
7. Research
If a content or SMM strategy is not based on research, it is not a good strategy. You need to figure out who your competition is, what they are doing that works well, what they are doing that is not working, and make sure you present your own unique selling proposition to your target market. What sets you apart? Highlight that to your audience.
Social
After you’ve identified your competitors, take a close look at their social media presence. What direction do you want your social media strategy to go in, based on what you’ve learned? SproutSocial has an extensive guide on how to analyze your competitor’s social media presence, including a template.
Content
You should never create content solely for the purpose of SEO, but rather for people. However, you should still research keywords that your audience is searching for and aim to rank for them.
A keyword analysis of your competitor’s website can help you understand which keywords to focus on for your own content strategy.
Planning your keywords allows you to better understand your audience and what content they are looking for so that you can more effectively serve their needs. By providing content that answers their search queries, you can better communicate with them and provide them with the information they are looking for. Google’s Keyword Planner is a great starting point if you’re not sure where to begin.
8. Content Promotion and Distribution
Social
Once you start integrating your content and social calendars, you can begin to see the real benefits.
Your content provides opportunities to share on social media, and your social analytics will tell content creators what type of content is most popular with your audience.
Your social media posts should be coordinated with your content calendar, and you should have a plan for unique, strategic messaging for each piece of content you publish.
Content
Ashley Carlisle discusses the importance of promoting content in addition to performing keyword research to ensure that content is found organically through search engines.
We focus on digital PR outreach for most of our client campaigns. Doing outreach for your content can help your brand by building links and trust from other publishers.
9. Reporting and Analysis
Social
In order to improve your social media presence, you should keep track of how well your posts do in comparison to your competitors. What is working well should be kept and improved, what is not working should be removed, and what your audience is saying should be listened to carefully. Did your total followers or engagement increase? Did you drive much referral traffic?
You can’t just schedule your social media posts in advance and forget about them. In order to be successful on social media, you need to be interactive with your followers and join in on conversations.
Content
How did your content perform? What was the general reaction to your work? Were people receptive to it, or did they react negatively? Did your conversion, visibility, traffic, or engagement improve?
Make sure that the metrics you are using make sense for the goals you are trying to achieve and the content formats you are working with. If you would like more information on how to measure the ROI of your content marketing, we have written a comprehensive guide.
A content strategy and social media strategy are very similar and can be easily integrated. This would be beneficial.
Your social media strategy should exist to help your content do well by making it more noticeable on social media, distributing it to a lot of people, and giving you information about what is and isn’t working so you can plan better.
Amplify Your Content With Social Media
Content marketing can improve your bottom line by increasing brand awareness, trust, authority, leads, sales, search ranking, organic traffic, and industry recognition.
The problem is if your content is not seen or doesn’t reach your audience, you won’t get the benefits from all your hard work.
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