People of all ages are on social media and have made it part of their everyday routine. Since your customers are online, your business should be too. Using social media in your content marketing strategy is a smart way to connect with customers. Since its a budget friendly-tool, it’s a great method to amp up your marketing efforts. Through social media, you can connect with your customers and start a conversation with them.
Social media and content marketing: the two terms aren’t interchangeable-although social media is driven by content. Think of social media as an integral component of content marketing but it is only one part. Other aspects of your content marketing strategy could include search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), or videos.
Why is Social Media Important?
Unlike most forms of traditional marketing, social media allows brands to directly build relationships with customers and reach an online community.
When you’re active online, your brand has a convenient avenue for communicating with customers. You can reach out to potential customers and target them with social media ads. Customers who are already loyal to your brand can now engage with you online and become brand advocates, sharing your brand’s content with their friends and recommending you.
Make yourself accessible for interaction with people who want to follow and talk to your brand online. They want your vital business info like your hours; address, and website link available to find on their favorite platform.
The first place many customers go to ask a question of a brand or complain about a brand is Twitter. Big corporations have someone hired just to handle customer service inquiries on social media. But small businesses should answer inquiries and be available online too.
Return On Investment
Businesses might be wondering how much of an ROI they can get from social media marketing. A research study into how social media communication influenced how consumers perceive brands showed that it had a positive influence on brand attitude and brand equity. Both of these were also proven to have a positive influence on purchase intent.
Social media can be an affordable part of your content marketing strategy. By managing your social media accounts strategically with clear goals in mind, you can get an impressive ROI.
You can measure your success by different metrics such as how many clickthroughs you get to your website or blog through a social media post. You can also measure success by the level of engagement. Did your post reach a hundred likes? How about a thousand? How many people commented?
When done right, social media can increase brand awareness as well as drive website traffic and sales. Using social media in your content marketing strategy can really boost traffic as well as give you customer insights.
An amazing benefit of having a business account on social media is that you can gather detailed data and insights into your customer base. This might include what they care about and their concerns. Perhaps you have a larger female audience than you realized before looking at the data and you’ve only been targeting your content for males.
Getting Started
Plan ahead and allot time or resources to maintaining your social media accounts. Pages which haven’t had any activity for months look abandoned and can make your business look lazy. An outdated social media page can look worse to existing and potential customers (those seeking you out) than being absent on the platform completely.
It’s recommended to only start up your social media if you can maintain a presence by regularly posting. Managing the page is another important aspect which involves responding to people who leave comments, messages, and reviews. It can involve outreach efforts too.
Focus your efforts on the social media platforms that your main audience uses. Don’t worry about being on all the different ones, do your research and be present on the ones that fit your brand best.
Decide your target market before you start posting. These are the group of people most likely to buy from and be interested in your brand. This group will be who your social media content appeals and is relevant to. You will craft your content to attempt to engage this demographic.
How often you post may depend on your business and audience size, the goals you’d like to achieve from your social media, and the time you can designate for this effort. Some brands post every single day, others post every week. Either way; consistent content and management is important to growing your following and meeting your social media goals.
10 Tips for Using Social Media in your Content Marketing
- Choose a tone for brand’s social media and stick with it. This is how your brand will speak to the world. Will the voice be more professional or casual? Friendly? Informative? Do you speak as the brand “we” as a collective entity or as the real individuals behind the brand?
- Does your business have a blog? Get more organic views by sharing new blogs on your different social media accounts.
- Share company news. Social media posts are a fast way to let your audience know about new products, seasonal sales, general business news, and changes in your business like closures or different hours.
Photos
- Imagery makes a big difference on social media. Facebook posts without a picture aren’t eye catching on a constantly updating feed. The same is true for Twitter. An image with a tweet stands out more than a text-only tweet.
- It’s fantastic to share quick snapshots of company outings, events, or holidays. But you should develop a content plan so your posts have a cohesive look, feel, and are purposely crafted to meet your business goals.
Analysis
- Many platforms have built-in analytics to help you better understand the success and audience of both social ad campaigns and organic social posts. Facebook has a great option for businesses to “boost” a normal post for whatever amount they want (as low as a dollar or two) and target it to a certain audience.
- Share company news. Social media posts are a fast way to let your audience know about new products, seasonal sales, general business news, and changes in your business like closures or different hours.
Promotions
- Social media platforms like Instagram are a fantastic medium for holding contests and giveaways. You can grow your audience and increase brand awareness with these type of promotions.
- Special sales for your followers can drive up online sales or get more people in the door.
Stick with It
- Monitoring the accounts is important. When people tweet at brands, they expect a quick response. A prompt reply is more expected the bigger the brand is. But small businesses should still be available and respond as well even if their volume of inquiries is drastically lower.
- Don’t be afraid to share content across platforms and more than once. For example, retweeting your blog link later in the day for your followers with a different schedule or time zone who missed the original tweet.
To get a leg up on smart digital marketing, take advantage of the Intrix free website audit and find out how your website is really working for you!