While planning and executing new campaigns will take center stage for many marketers and entrepreneurs this time of year, it’s also time for another annual marketing project: creating your marketing plan for this new year.
It’s always a time-consuming task, but worth the effort to get the new year off on the right foot. Having been through this cycle more than a few times, I have come up with several tactics to make the process go more smoothly and hopefully lead to more effective marketing strategies over time.
If there is a marketing project your brand needs to work on this year is content marketing. Content marketing can be confusing, especially when you consider the dynamics that take place when you combine your social media marketing.
If you have been looking for a formula to generate content for your social media accounts that brings in revenue, keep reading!
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a marketing type, which entails the creation and distribution of online items to a clearly defined audience. Content marketers do this to arouse interest in various services or products.
The online material (mentioned above) includes material such as e-books, educational articles, entertainment, webinars (these answer specific queries individuals have about the marketed products/services), and videos. By creating and sharing this content, you can turn the product that you are selling into something unique that is not available elsewhere.
You should bear in mind though that Content Marketing is not a strategy that you employ once, and it is completed. On the contrary, content marketing is a process that requires a series of steps, which you have to repeat to achieve results over the passage of time.
Why do People Favor Content Marketing for Their Business?
Content marketing is a preferred tool for several businesses worldwide. Some of the many prime benefits of content marketing include:
Cost-Effective Means of Bringing in Fresh Leads
There is no denying that content marketing aids your business in gathering fresh leads. Small businesses that depend on constant traffic to boost their sales rely heavily on lead generation. Content marketing is not only an ideal solution for lead generation, but it is a very economical marketing strategy as well.
Content marketing generates around 2.5 times more leads than conventional marketing strategies and costs about 60 percent less as well. Content marketing’s ‘easy to afford’ factor makes it a useful tactic for small organizations that wish to maximize their revenue on a limited budget.
Enables you to Highlight your Expertise in your Field
All your followers want to know that they are interacting with experts who know sound knowledge of their industry. With the help of content marketing, you can demonstrate your know-how in your subject matter and facilitate your readers/followers to make an informed buying decision.
Let’s assume that either the consumer has the option to buy a product/service from a business that frequently publishes quality informative content or from one that does not provide any content. In this scenario, the customer is likely to buy from the company that has showcased their knowledge via their content. In this manner, the consumer can rest assured knowing that he/she is well taken care of by industry professionals who will competently answer any future questions he/she about the purchased product.
Why do Social Media and Content Marketing Complement Each Other?
Think about social media as the all-important automobile that takes your content to the ideal destination.
There are a plethora of platforms that you may use on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and many more. What this means is that you do not have to confine your content marketing motor vehicle to a single street! With the help of social media, you can connect with your targeted clientele and reach out to a diverse customer base when building your brand awareness.
Many entrepreneurs and marketers make the mistake of pursuing tactics on social media, such as how to get more likes, how to get more followers for free, how to write captions that get more likes. While those tactics are important, it’s important to have a big-picture strategy first. The last thing you want is to chase vanity metrics. You can’t deposit likes or followers in your banking account.
To ensure that your content marketing strategies are an unmitigated success, you must align these with social media. This alignment requires planning.
However, before we dive into the strategies to align content marketing for social media, it is important to know the chief components of a content marketing strategy:
- -Business objectives: Your goals for content marketing and the Key Performance Indicators you will assess to measure the level of success.
- -Mission Statement: What will you accomplish via your content?
- -Distribution Strategies: What social media channels will you make use to distribute your content to your audience?
- -Target clientele: Who do you plan to reach out to distribute your content?
- -Measurement: Which metrics will you use to measure your success in social media content marketing?
These content marketing components will also serve as the crux of your social media plan. Here are some useful tips to assist you in aligning content marketing with social media.
How to Begin with Your Content Marketing Social Media Plan?
When you look for an efficient content marketing and social media plan, you should ask yourself some important questions:
- -What do your social media followers require? Keep in mind that each platform will connect you with different followers. Treat each platform independently. For example, I won’t share on LinkedIn the same posts that I share on my Instagram. My content for Instagram is more personal than my content for LinkedIn.
- -What do your social media followers need to know regarding your brand? Branded content is a must, if you want to use your social media channels to attract qualified leads.
Make sure your content includes the following:
- What makes you unique?
- What’s your story?
- Who do you help?
- What do your clients say about you?
- –What online content/material piques your followers’ interest? Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool to find inspiration for your content. You will be able to find similar pages your audience have an idea of the content that drives their attention.
- -Which social media platform you ought to leverage? Less is more. If you won’t be actively engaging in a platform, it’s better just to have a minimal presence. Review your leads and clients and see if you can track how did they find you. You should be able to find a pattern and see which social media platform is generating the best ROI.
- –What are your objectives for social media? Set up the right expectations from your social media channels. While there are industries that have burst their sales using just social media, for the most part, especially for B2B businesses, social media serves as a place to raise awareness and build authority. However, they won’t expect to close deals from social media.
- How many updates will you be sharing per week? Brands need to find the balance between staying in touch versus staying on your face. A general rule: if you don’t have great content to share, then don’t share. Your audience will appreciate you for respecting their time. Make it easy for them to follow you!
- –How would you go about measuring your results on social media to know your progress? As a forensic marketer, this is my favorite part! Most marketers and entrepreneurs miss to track their content, especially content they share via social media. Don’t make the same mistake. Build your UTM codes so you can track your content using Google Analytics.
Importance of Understanding your Clientele
It is of paramount importance to know clearly who your targeted audience is and how these individuals make use of various social media platforms to look for information. You need to create and tailor your content in a way that your social media followers like it. By utilizing this approach, you will be the first choice for your audience when they look up for information online.
Make sure that you create the perfect blend of image and content. To that end, you need to keep your followers’ needs and interests in mind at all times. Put yourself in their shoes!
Stay Abreast of Trending Subjects
Staying abreast of trending topics is a great way to flourish when it comes to integrating content marketing with social media for your line of business. This enables you to become an important part of the conversations that interest your followers.
Just make sure you post your content at the correct time to maximize reader engagement as much as possible.
Hook Your Reader Base
When it comes to content marketing for social media, effectively engaging your readers is very important. You have to make sure that you connect with all your readers with the right content at the correct time. This will keep them hooked, and they will look you up frequently to check for new content. This also why it is necessary to post content frequently on social media.
However, posting too regularly in a single day might backfire as well. If you have quality content for your audience, limit yourself to post a couple of times per day. In this manner, you do not overload your readers with information and keep your followers engaged by providing them with useful content from time to time.
By using social media analytics, check out which type of content gives you the best reader engagement. Get a better understanding by studying the likes, shares, and comments received on the content. A thorough analysis of this kind will go a long way to help you to learn what best strikes your readers’ fancy. You will be able to efficiently boost reader engagement once you find out what your readers and followers like.
Ask the Audience
If you have no clue as to how, to begin with the marketing and require a sense of direction, you should take advantage of social media to find out the content type your followers/readers are actually looking for.
When it comes to content material, your targeted clientele will provide you valuable insights and point you in the right direction. Conducting a poll is the best way to get these insights. In this way, you will get assistance from your social media followers to promote and market your particular product/brand.
Content Ideas for Social Media
The infographic below outlines the social media content ideas that can be included in your content calendar.
- Inspirational Quote
- Feature a partner (or a vendor)
- Share A Tip Or Trick
- Share an article from your blog (showcase your expertise)
- Share A Free Resource
- Invite them to an event (or webinar)
- Share an Interesting Story (be vulnerable)
- Free trial
- Highlight testimonial
- Create a Poll
- Highlight a cause
- Show your audience behind the scenes
- Infographic
- Quick Video Training
- Promo / Coupon
- Ask me anything post!
Tips:
- Perform an audit of your existing content
- Make an overview of the major events that garner the interest of your audience
- Think of the interests of your audience
- Conduct a research on the best content to post and share nothing but the best!
- Plan and schedule ahead
Key Metrics to Gauge Success
Apart from engagement with your social media followers, it is crucial to know whether and how your social media and content marketing strategy is driving leads, reach, leads, revenue, and conversion. What did you plan to achieve by incorporating content marketing with your social media strategy? To answer this question, you need to determine what key metrics you will use to gauge success at every point of your sales funnel.
Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is at the top of the sales funnel, and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) at this stage usually includes:
Reach
This is the number of unique accounts that have seen your particular content. A greater number in this specific category indicates that your content is perfectly optimized for whatever social media platforms you are making use of.
Bear in mind that the awareness stage comes before the engagement and traffic stage in the sales funnel. You need to expose your targeted audience to your content before you can prompt them to take further action. Increased reach and impressions lead to higher customer engagement in the long term.
Impressions
This indicator is the number of times individuals have seen your content. Impressions gauge how successful a content marketer is in exposing the target clientele to the content that he/she wants to share. Similar to reach, a higher number of impressions mean that more individuals have viewed the content (and vice versa). You have definitely picked the right social media platform for sharing your content if the said content is showing up in more individual feeds frequently.
Engagement plus Traffic Stage
Key Performance Indicators that you should monitor for engagement and traffic tends to include:
- –Shares– This is the total number of times others share your content. An increased number of shares will eventually lead to a greater reach.
- –Clicks on your Website -The number of clicks on your website
- -Comment Received – The total number of comments (feedback) that people post on your content.
- –Likes- The number of individuals who have liked your content. You should bear in mind that you should not use the number of likes as a standalone Key Performance Indicator act as this parameter is not as impactful at measuring success as the other metrics.
- –Brand mentions: Number of times other followers mentioned the brand that you are promoting
- –Social Media Followers: Number of individuals in your social network.
- –Page views: This is the number of pages clicked on a website during a certain timeframe.
It is important to know that no single KPI from the above list will reveal the entire picture. Every brand is different and that’s why I don’t believe in the one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to create a content marketing strategy for your social media.
An increase in a number of comments and likes to your content will bear less consequence if your content’s page views are going down. When gauging engagement and traffic, you need to determine which key metrics are the most suitable for your brand. Furthermore, you should assess the results by keeping the entire sales funnel in context and bearing in mind the objectives you want to accomplish.
Action
Action is the last and final stage of the sales funnel. At this level, you should assess how engagement and traffic influence the generation of leads. You need to ask yourself the flowing questions:
- -Are your followers/potential buyers converting and making a purchase?
- -Are you able to generate fresh leads on social media by your efforts?
If the answer to the above questions is “No,” you might not be publishing the correct content on the right social media platforms promptly.
You ought to consider which content material will most successfully drive leads, which could eventually impact revenue and deals.
Key Performance Indicators for the action stage include newsletter sign-ups, website or blog sign-ups, and product/service webpage visits.
Most of the social media platforms have social analytics that is built-in such as LinkedIn Insights, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and so forth. These analytics assist you in gauging your success, but don’t stop there. I always advice my clients to track their social media marketing using Google Analytics, to have a better picture of your social media marketing performance and ROI from social media marketing.
Bottom Line
Needless to say, content marketing tactics should be a critical element of every social media strategy. In this way, you can expand your clientele reach, boost your brand awareness, and generate revenue, and leads by influencing potential customers at all phases of the sales funnel.
Similar to most things in life, a successful content marketing social media strategy takes time to perfect. To that end, be sure to experiment with new tactics and amend your strategy accordingly frequently.
