How Much Do You Know about Content Marketing And Social Media Marketing?

What is the unique relationship between content marketing and social media marketing?
Can I use just one for my marketing campaign?
Before you start wondering about these things let me ask you this question;
What do you understand by content marketing and social media marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating and distribution of relevant, valuable and engaging content to a specific target audience with the ultimate aim of getting new customers or get an increase in business from existing customers.
Social media marketing centers around using social websites and social networks to market a company’s’ products or services.

RECOMMENDED READ: 4 CONTENT MARKETING PROS AND CONS

 Social media marketing is content marketing but content marketing is not social media marketing.

Social media marketing and content marketing are made up of the same thing: images, videos, and storytelling. This typically means if you have no content, then you cannot market your products or services on social media and most importantly if you have no valuable content then you cannot drive engagements on social media.

RECOMMENDED READ: 5 SECRETS OF CONTENT MARKETING THAT WILL TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS

What are the connecting elements of content marketing and social media marketing?

COMPANY GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Content marketing and social media marketing serve a similar purpose in your marketing strategy. They help to properly educate your audience and cause them to grasp better what your business is about. Furthermore, they entertain them and most important is to sufficiently convince them that your product is worth having. Content marketing and social media marketing work to positively enhance brand recognition, reach potential customers, retain existing customers and to make sales. The company’s goal and objectives most allow the two types of marketing to play each other and achieve a collective goal. Therefore, before developing any new piece of content, accurately identify the company’s goals and objectives. Subsequently, decide how the content and social can play off each other to achieve precisely that collective goal.

YOUR AUDIENCE
How do you identify your audience? You can achieve this with these two steps.
What are you offering?
Create a buyer persona.

What are you offering?
This primarily is recognizing your unique selling proposition. You need to be able to identify why your customers come to you for your product or service. What do they love about you? What are their problems and how do you solve them?
Create a buyer persona.
Think about who wants what you are offering? Divide them by their age, location, position. You can even give them names, and when you are developing a marketing strategy, make sure that everything you are doing fits into the persona.

HOW DO YOU BRING CONTENT MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOGETHER?

Test content on different social media platforms for effectiveness with your audience
Test varieties of contents across different social media platforms will allow you to know what type of content engages customers and which platform works best for you.
Optimize content for each platform you’re using
Twitter has a specific 140 character-limit, Facebook is more flexible just add pictures or videos to gain traction. While Instagram focuses majorly on pictures and videos with the option for text and captions. Consequently, it is very critical for your content to be optimized for each platform, so as to be able to connect better with your audience on that platform.
Get Ideas from Your Audience.
It is a general practice that a marketer creates content and turns to social media to promote it. This process is and has been immensely successful. But a lesser-used method gets excellent results. Which is, using your audience to generate ideas. You can take your time to ask them what type of content interests them, the insider information they wish to know about your product or service. Social media discovery engines like Nexalogy, Bottlenose, can help you to know what your followers are talking about.
GoPro is an excellent example. They make use of user-generated content. Videos and pictures created using GoPro camera by their followers are featured on their social media account. This is an effective tactic because people are very receptive to content created by their peers.

Social media marketing is an effective tool for marketing but very much so when it works in harmony with content marketing. With a strategic goal in mind, the synergy will maximize the effect of each content.