Rarely does any marketing strategy or tactic live on its own. This is especially true in the online world, where a buyer’s journey often touches many different paths. SEO drives people to your site, email brings them back and social media keeps them engaged for years to come.
The point is that most successful marketing strategies integrate different tactics and plans for how they can work together for more efficient and effective outcomes.
Content marketing and social media can work together to help you build your audience, increase sales and grow your business.
In order to get the most from both your content marketing efforts and your social media marketing, you’ll want to figure out how to make them work together. Let’s look at some specific strategies below:
Content distribution
The most obvious and ubiquitous way to use social media as part of your content marketing strategy is to use social channels as a way to distribute and promote the content you publish on your website.
Content promotion is an absolutely critical part of any content marketing strategy.
Many startups go through the motions with this, and social media distribution may not generate huge results if you don’t have a large audience to start. But, it’s still an important part of any marketing strategy.
It requires consistency and experimentation to learn which messages work best on which channels, how to optimize your promotion efforts and the best times to post or share.
Related: The Process You Need to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Audience targeting and segmentation
One of the biggest improvements in marketing over the last decade has been the ability to better target a precise customer segment.
Retargeting, in particular, has become a hugely popular and effective way to reach an audience that has shown some level of interest in your product or service but hasn’t pulled the trigger on a purchase.
You can use your content marketing efforts to build a retargeting audience of prospects who are already engaged with your brand.
Use retargeting on a platform like Facebook to create an audience of people who have read specific posts, indicating they have specific interests or are at a specific stage in the buying cycle. This will allow you to create tailored messages or show them targeted content that is most likely to be relevant to that particular buyer.
This can boost the effectiveness of social advertising and also generate more value from your content.
Social listening to inform content marketing ideas
Many startups struggle to come up with ideas for what kind of content to publish.
The easy and obvious way to tackle this problem is to find content that is already popular with your audience and find new ways to touch on those topics. One of the most effective ways to do this is called social listening.
Use search functions on social media platforms like Twitter to find the content that is already being discussed and shared by the people you’re trying to reach. Then, look for opportunities or trends that you can work into your content marketing strategy.
By using this method, you will already know if the content topics that you’re covering are interesting to your audience and help advance the narrative around emerging ideas or conversations in your market.
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Influencer outreach and promotion
Don’t feel like your reach is quite big enough? Build relationships with influencers to extend your reach, find new prospects and grow your brand’s visibility.
Influencer marketing is a very hot topic and there are many ways to approach it. But one of the simplest approaches is to reach out to influencers and connect with them on social media. This gives you a pretty easy way to connect. Then, if you have content that would be valuable or interesting to their audience, you can reach out to share it.
Each of these different approaches gives you a simple way to begin the process of integrating your social media and content marketing efforts. But they’re not the only ways.
The reality is that you need to begin your strategy planning by looking at these different parts of your marketing strategy from an integrated perspective. Tactics that allow you to connect your content marketing strategy with your social media marketing efforts will help you achieve better results from both.
