Social media is a great place to market and promote your company. Check out this WriteForMe strategy guide for leveraging social media content marketing.

Your social media content marketing strategy forms an integral part of your overall marketing strategy and should not be overlooked. Social media content marketing is a great way for any entrepreneur, business owner, or marketing executive to amplify brand awareness. Social media allows you to directly interact with your potential customers, create an engaged community with loyal brand promoters and build trusting relationships with your customer base.

Perceptions of content marketing may differ from person to person. Some may see content marketing as simply a detailed and insightful collection of blog posts. Others may think of e-books, whitepapers, podcasts, and Youtube videos. There are, however, few who consider the critical role social media plays in promoting content and attracting new customers.

The importance of a social media campaign cannot be understated and companies interested in converting consumers into paying customers must ensure their content marketing plan aligns with their social media marketing strategy. It is this part of your strategy that will define how successfully you reach your target audience.

It is essential to understand that most businesses, regardless of size or industry are using social media to reach their target audience. For this reason, you need to ensure the social media campaign you develop ticks all the correct boxes. Social media content marketing isn’t about publishing a few blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the like.

Social media content marketing is about striking a chord with your target audience, creating messages that resonate with them, and building a loyal community.

In this article, we discuss awesome social media content marketing strategy ideas to help you define a well-rounded and robust social media content marketing strategy that defines the type of content to publish on various platforms.

The Importance of Social Media Content Marketing

Like most people, you probably start your day by checking in on one or more of your own social media profiles.

Over the years, social media has ingratiated itself completely into our lives. We use these pages to keep in touch with what is happening in the world around us and, for many, their social media platforms are where they first hear about current affairs and breaking news. Migrating our thought patterns to the context of business, this behavior is no different for your potential customers.

Users are turning to social media pages and peer reviews more often when it comes to making decisions for their own lives. Social media is not something specific to a particular demographic anymore. The reality is that, regardless of the demographic you want to target, your audience likely already uses more than one social media platform.

There are more than 3.6 billion social media users across the globe, translating into nearly one in every two people across the globe using social media. This movement is not slowing and it is predicted that, by 2025, the number of social media users worldwide will reach 4.41 billion users.

Social media has fast proven to be one of the best ways to leverage content for businesses today. Here are a few reasons why:

Increased Brand Awareness

Reach is one of the best reasons to consider a social media content marketing strategy for your business. These platforms provide an ideal tool for businesses looking to amplify brand awareness.

The type of business you are in makes no difference as to whether or not to go this route. If you’re selling vegan meat substitutes or offering SEO consultation services, your potential customers are already using social media. They are already there! Your job is not to get them there, but to rather put in place the right social media content marketing strategy to reach them and engage with them.

Social media trends and hashtags make this easier, and leveraging these helps skyrocket brand awareness to even higher levels. But, even the best trends and hashtags are pointless for your long-term strategy if they are not supported by content that resonates well with your audience. This needs to be content they will share on their own social media profiles.

Valuable and relevant content, shared across multiple social platforms, helps you connect with an audience segment that wasn’t even aware of your brand and product before.

Enhanced Audience Interaction

One of the best by-products of marketing through social media has been the ability to interact and engage with your customers and potential customers. This engagement forms an integral part of your social media content marketing strategy and should be a key consideration when planning your social media content structure.

Social media platforms provide the perfect channel for direct communication and, if used correctly and consistently, will help build a reputation of being a company that cares. From responding to comments and messages to hosting audience polls and AMAs (ask-me-anything)—there are various ways to communicate with your audience.

Constant and effective communication with your customer base goes a long way to making your audience feel special and positioning your brand as one that cares for its customers. An added benefit of the ability to communicate so easily with your customer base is that it provides excellent insight into your audience’s thought patterns and helps you better understand their needs, aspirations, and pain points.

When you engage regularly with your audience, it builds the relationship foundations that are strong and sustainable. This, in turn, creates a devoted and engaged audience community around your brand.

Amplified Website Traffic

While the importance of a social media following cannot be understated, it also needs to be supported by your other platforms.

Attracting a plethora of social media followers is of no use unless they are directed to your website for further information and to learn more about your brand. Using the right mix of social media and content marketing can assist you in driving increased organic traffic to your website. For instance, when you regularly share links to your blog posts on your Facebook page, it’ll encourage your fans to explore your blog.

You can also switch this approach around. Once you have completed a blog, create short animations or infographics to summarize a blog post and share these to your various social media platforms. Include a link to the blog in the caption to increase organic traffic.

Likewise, you can share snippets of blog posts, e-books, guides, etc. on Twitter to attract more website visitors. You can also use various social advertising techniques such as Facebook Ads to drive traffic to key landing pages and product pages.

Improved Lead Generation and Conversions

Many novice marketers tend to use social media marketing to accomplish top-of-the-funnel goals only. What they tend to ignore is the immense potential social media offers for generating qualified leads and driving conversions.

Social media marketing and social advertising are great ways to promote lead magnets such as e-books, checklists, whitepapers, etc. As you build your relationships with followers who engage with your page you will find opportunities to keep the conversation going. This is how you build a trust relationship and once that trust relationship is established, they will be more willing to share their contact information or subscribe to your newsletter.

Moreover, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram also offer various e-commerce features to help you sell your products. For instance, you can set up your Facebook shop to showcase and sell your products directly on the platform. This, in turn, will help increase conversions and ultimately boost your revenue.

Social Media Content Marketing and Social Media Strategy: Understanding the Link

Today, everything is relational. Nothing can be achieved in isolation and this is exactly the same for your social media content marketing strategy. It is not practical or feasible to rely completely on social media content marketing. This is only one cog in the wheel.

It takes the integration of high-quality and result-oriented content to breathe life into your social media marketing campaigns. The absence of engaging content will detract from your ability to attract and retain a loyal audience. A good content strategy helps you publish relevant, attractive, and interesting social media posts that’ll immediately resonate with your audience.

On the flip side, publishing outstanding blog posts and podcast episodes is also not enough. You need to ensure that every content asset garners maximum traction. A simple and effective way of doing this is to distribute and promote your content on the right social media channels. Using social media generally gives faster results than relying only on other organic techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO).

Content marketing is also more cost-effective than paid advertising channels such as paid search or paid social media. The right use of content marketing on social media has the potential to drive engagement, increase reach and boost awareness. It is often instrumental in strengthening your brand image and online reputation.

Social Media Content Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide

While social media content marketing is a great way to promote your products and brand, this isn’t all you should be focusing on.

It also involves more than just publishing well-researched and valuable blog posts on your website. A clearly defined content marketing strategy is necessary for you to achieve your marketing business goals.

Here’s a simple step-by-step framework to help you develop and implement a social media content marketing strategy that will help deliver your desired results.

Step 1. Set Clear Goals

The ‘why’ is your most important starting point. You cannot sustain any marketing campaign without a clear understanding of exactly why you’re doing it and what it is you want to achieve.

When it comes to your social media content marketing strategy, you need to start by identifying what you want your end goals to be. Why are you creating messages and sending them out? What is it that you want to gain from this process?

While this may seem easy at the onset, the reality is that it can prove challenging to define these goals. You may have an idea of where you want to go, but documenting these and finding the right starting point can be quite difficult.

The SMART model of goal-setting is a great starting point and can assist you in refining your strategy for your social media content marketing starting point. Using this method will assist you in creating goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

Make sure you don’t set vague goals such as “increase reach”, “improve loyalty,” “strengthen your online presence.” Here are some examples of SMART goals you can set instead:

• 4x Instagram followers in the next year
• 2x NPS (Net Promoter Score) in the next six months
• 100,000 Facebook Page likes in the next quarter
• Increase social media conversions by 25% in the next quarter

You cannot stop here though. These goals need to be supported with a solid metrics measurement strategy you can track and measure. These metrics are important because they will help you track the performance of your goals and then evaluate the overall performance of your social media campaign.

Here’s a useful guide to select the right metrics based on your end goals:

Step 2. Create Buyer Personas

It’s difficult to create and publish relevant and engaging content without knowing who you are creating it for. For this reason, you need to have a deep understanding of your target audience, their needs, likes, preferences, and pain points.

If your brand already has an active social media presence, you can use the following tools to get an insight into your audience:

• Facebook Analytics
• Instagram Insights
• Twitter Analytics

Likewise, other social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. offer useful audience analytics.

Examine the analytics section of your social media profile to identify audience demographic parameters such as age group, gender, and location. This section will also provide insight into how your followers are engaging with your content on various platforms and, even, when they’re most likely to be active.

Also, it’s important to identify the questions they want to ask as well as their pain points and aspirations. Audience polls, AMAs, and live Q & A might come in handy at this stage.

It is important to always closely monitor the comments section of your social media posts to identify your audience’s queries and problems. Make sure you leverage social listening to understand how your target consumers perceive your brand and what they expect from you.

If you’re just getting started with social media marketing, and don’t have an established following as yet, it’s a good idea to send an online survey to your mailing list. Make sure you include simple, specific, and relevant questions that’ll help you delve deeper into your audience’s mind.

The final step is to divide your audience into various segments and create distinct buyer personas for each segment. In this way, you can publish a variety of content that caters to individual segments. it will also act as a handy reference guide and one that you can use to ensure your content aligns with your audience’s preferences.

3. Define Your Brand Voice

Consistency is key and when it comes to your social media content marketing strategy, this is especially true. You want to ensure you are maintaining a consistent brand image.

The tone you use is crucial. You can’t be friendly one day, sarcastic the next and then become formal the day after. This methodology extends beyond just communication. From the color palette of your social media posts to the tone and language of your captions—the brand persona needs to factor every aspect in.

This is a good time to develop a content marketing playbook where you can make sure it includes your brand persona. This can be instrumental in maintaining a consistent brand image across various social media platforms and will also ensure that all team members are aware of your social media content marketing goals, values, and vision.

If you don’t have the resources or skills to create one from scratch, you can get a FREE content marketing playbook from WriteForMe.

4. Select the Right Channels

A good social media content marketing strategy has an active presence on those social media channels where your audience is present.

Publishing on Facebook is of no use when most of your target consumers are on Twitter. If you’ve performed thorough audience research, you already have a clear idea of their preferred social media platforms.

While most brands include Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in their social media marketing strategy, you also consider using platforms such as:

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Snapchat
• TikTok
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Nextdoor
• Meetup

By now you will have seen that quality and consistency are the most important factors for effective social media content marketing. That’s why a social media content calendar outlining the following assets is so important:

• Content publishing and distribution schedule across different platforms
• Topics and themes for content creation
• Content formats for each topic and platform
• Team members responsible for creating, publishing, and distributing various posts
• Content repurposing strategy

To get started, create a list of ideas, themes, subjects, and questions that’ll resonate with your audience. Next, analyze whether these ideas address their pain points and resonate with your end goals. Brainstorm more content ideas with your team before preparing a list of potential topics.

You can then identify the right content formats for each platform.

For instance, high-quality product images and short videos work well on Instagram whereas witty one-liners, breaking news, humorous quotes, and trending memes drive traction on Twitter. You can also leverage useful features of various platforms such as IGTV and reels on Instagram and polls on Twitter.

Lastly, always leave room for accommodating popular and relevant trends along with interactive formats such as live sessions, polls, Q & As, and AMAs in your content strategy.

5. Distribute – Publish and Measure

We highly recommend using a social media content calendar template to bring your content creation and distribution plan to life.

Now that you’re ready with a plan for your social media marketing and content creation, it’s time to start creating your social media posts. Use a project management tool like Trello or Asana to facilitate coordination and communication among your team members at this stage.

It’s also a good idea to use social media management tools to automatically publish and monitor scheduled posts on various platforms. Here are a few tools you can use:

1. Sprout Social
2. HubSpot
3. Buffer
4. ContentCal
5. Hootsuite

These tools provide a systematic approach and will help you stay organized. They come in handy when you need to look at tracking the performance of various content assets across various content platforms. You can check the analytics section of your social media profiles for this purpose.

Identify your best-performing content assets and repurpose them on other platforms to maximize traction.

Choose Your Social Media Content Marketing Strategy Confidently

Social media marketing and content marketing can’t exist in isolation. You need to outline a well-rounded and robust social media content marketing strategy that defines what content you’ll publish on various platforms.

Start by setting your goals and identifying your target audience. From there, create a content calendar to define your content creation and distribution plan. Finally, publish your content and monitor and optimize it for better results.

Always remember that consistency, brand voice, communication, and engagement are all key components of your social media content marketing strategy and that all of these need to be present and accounted for.

While it is possible to effectively manage your strategy internally, the depth involved in achieving the desired results may seem more than you can cope with.

Partner with WriteForMe

If this is the case, and if you simply want some assistance in taking your brand to the level it needs to be present at, take a look at what we do and reach out to WriteForMe for assistance in creating awesome content for social media.

Contact WriteForMe to kickstart your social media campaign today.