Eighty-one percent of Americans are using social media. Worldwide, there are nearly 2 billion social media users and this is expected to grow by a half billion in 2018.
Having a presence on social platforms is vital if you want to maximize the visibility of your brand. Social media is today’s version of television and radio combined. If you want to reach your intended target audience, chances are, you can do it on social media.
But simply opening up a social media profile and making posts isn’t going to drive traffic to your business website. A digital content marketing strategy is needed.
In the following guide, we will go over how you can begin crafting a content marketing strategy that will fit well into your social media marketing.
Let’s dig in!
Research Your Target Audience
This is a very important part of your content marketing strategy. There are different ways you can research your target audience and what content would best suit them.
For instance, you can head over to your social media account and search for conversations regarding your industry. See what questions your audience is asking and what concerns they have. Are they having issues with completing tasks that your business knowledge can help with?
Which form of content do they consume the most – videos or blogs? You can even create a poll or survey on social media for your followers to take. Make it shareable so they can share it with their friends and followers as well.
Once you have the pet peeves, concerns and questions they commonly have, you can generate video and blog content around these topics. Then share them on social media to drive traffic to your business website. Make sure to use the right internet etiquette when you do.
And you can help grow more followers for your social media pages. The more active and relevant your social media pages are, the more likely people will follow them.
Publish Blog Content Filled with Value
One way you can go about drawing attention to your website is to create a blog. Social media is the ideal platform for promoting your blog content for one reason – it puts your content right in front of your audience.
Social media is where people go to socialize with friends, family, and co-workers. Plus, it’s where they connect with and follow their favorite brands. If you have a Facebook business page, consumers can like it and follow all the posts you make.
User engagement is high on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when it comes to blog content. Just make sure the content you create is valuable to your audience by answering their questions, educating them or shocking them with information.
And if you can do it all the while entertaining them, even better! We’ll go a little deeper into what to look for in great digital content later.
Create Video Content that Engages
There are different forms of digital content you can add to your content marketing strategy. This includes video content. Did you know that 55% of people watch online video daily? Facebook receives roughly 8 billion video views daily.
And by 2019, it’s expected that around 80% of all consumer traffic will come from video traffic. So not only should you invest in video ads, but video production itself.
Ads don’t compare to video content because this is what people click on to view. No one wants to see advertisements. The trick is to create valuable video content and then leave links to your website throughout the video and at the end.
When making video content, it should consist of topics that your audience finds important. You can even repurpose popular blog content for your videos.
Next, let’s talk about how you can generate ideas for your video and blog content.
Add Email Marketing to the Mix
Social media and email marketing go hand-in-hand. Both can help drive traffic to one another, making your social and email marketing campaigns a success.
If you’ve yet to add email marketing to your content marketing strategy, then now is a great time. You can use social media to boost your subscriber list by promoting it on your page.
Then you can also promote your social media pages inside of your emails. Simply add your social media profile links and social share buttons to help build awareness of your brand and newsletter.
Now, the content you use in your emails should be relevant and valuable, of course. This means giving your audience exclusive deals and insights to make signing up worthwhile.
Use Ebooks to Entice Email Subscriptions
Another form of content you can use to help your social media marketing is e-books. The way to benefit from them is to offer them up as freebies. Offer a free e-book in exchange for their email. This will help grow your email subscription list and at the same time boost your social media visibility.
Remember to promote your social media pages in your email newsletters. Plus, you can include links inside your e-books to your social media profiles and pages.
When choosing the topic for your e-book, use the research you conducted. Make a comprehensive guide to getting through an issue, performing a task or understanding a method, product or service that can improve their life or business.
Some will even repurpose a series of blog posts into e-book format.
Now we have an idea of how you can add a content marketing strategy to your social media marketing. Let’s look at how you can improve your content. The key to making your content marketing strategy excel is to ensure the content is highly engaging to your audience.
What Destroys Your Content Marketing Strategy
We touched on some of the key elements that make a content marketing strategy good. You can further improve your content by avoiding the following mistakes.
1. Your Content is Low-Quality
Have you ever been to a blog or website with poorly written content? The writing may be sub-par, contains too many keywords or is simply irrelevant. Pushing out content just to do it for SEO isn’t going to help build trust and loyalty with your audience.
Remember, you’re writing for people first, search engines second.
2. Your Audience Doesn’t Find Your Content Useful
What makes people click on the content you share on your social media page? The headline should be eye-catching and engaging, and so should the content. If people click on your links thinking they’re going to find content that will help them and find the complete opposite, your bounce rate will soar.
It’s essential to organize your posts in an easy to digest way with subheadings, resource links and internal links to other helpful content on your site.
At the end of your content, users should be able to take actionable steps to resolve the problem you talk about in your content.
3. You’re Promoting Instead of Teaching
As we mentioned earlier, users don’t like advertisements. So if your content is consistently promoting your products and services, then you’re going to turn visitors off and away from your site.
Just like you should write for humans first, you should write to educate first and sell second. The great thing about content marketing is that you can promote your brand subtly through your content.
For instance, you’re demonstrating your trustworthiness to your audience by offering insider tips and advice. And then at the end of the post, you include a link to your products, services or contact page. You don’t need to boldly talk about your new products and how great they are.
The key is to help your audience by educating them on whatever it is your brand has the authority to teach about.
4. You Don’t Come Off as an Expert
When people do research online, they’re looking for content on topics that are expertly written on. This includes the content users find on social media. It’s essential for your content to showcase your knowledge and expertise on the subject. Not to boost your own ego, but to build confidence and trust in your viewers.
This will also help to drive more readers to follow you on social media, especially if you’re consistently posting valuable content.
Through your content marketing strategy, you should be positioning your brand as an authority in your industry. Do this by publishing content that’s high-quality, valuable and expertly written or developed. This goes for both written and visual content.
5. You Don’t Use Visuals
Remember, social media is a highly visual place, which is why video and memes do so well. You can make the most of this by adding image marketing to your strategy.
Create an infographic that is informative and visually appealing. Use this method for displaying tips or data that are easily displayed in a visual format, such as the steps for a how-to topic. Charts or graphs are also ideal for showcasing data and metrics.
Build Your Content Marketing Strategy
It’s time to amp up your social media marketing with content production. With the above tips, you can craft visual and text content that your audience will read, like and share.
If you need additional help with putting together your strategy, feel free to check out the tips we have here at Status Wish. You can also contact us for support and advice!
