Social media plays an undeniably big part in successful digital marketing. It allows marketers to improve brand awareness and improve sales. Social media content marketing allows brands to grow meaningful relationships with customers. With that said, there are many ways to go about executing this kind of marketing. We will discuss here the benefits of social media content marketing and how you can make the most of it.
The Benefits of Social Media Content Marketing
There are many reasons why brands and companies are making use of social media content marketing. One good motivator is the fact that this kind of marketing is so effective that 91% of US companies make use of it.
Brand Recognition
With a good social media content marketing strategy, your brand can grow and achieve important marketing goals. People will support brands that they are familiar with. As such, if you want a successful company, you need to be known.
Social media is a fantastic way to introduce your brand to the world. Millions of people use social platforms, giving you a huge market to dive into.
With more people looking at your brand, your brand recognition will grow and eventually, brand loyalty will be boosted and sales improved.
Connect With Audience
By using social listening, you can get to know your audience much better. This involves monitoring the conversations of social media users. Of course, you’ll only keep an eye on conversations that matter to your brand.
You can identify and react to new trends and desires. Later, you can use the information learned to connect with your audience.
You will know people’s needs and wants and can react to them. In addition, you’ll be able to learn the tone and language your audience uses. Working this into your brand’s own language will increase your popularity.
Share Your Brand’s Story
Social platforms give your brand the opportunity to share its unique story. As a result, more people will be able to relate to your brand if your story is interesting. Your brand can have a simple or very intriguing story, but it depends on your target market.
Improve Your Customer Service
Using your social media platforms will improve your relationship with your customers. It has become the norm for people to reach out to brands on social media. If they have complaints, they can directly approach the brand in question.
This also allows you to respond to problems that customers have. Because your reply is faster than with normal complaint methods, customers will be happier. Furthermore, they will likely share their good experiences and improve your brand’s reputation.
Better customer service will also create better brand loyalty. As you can see, using social media content marketing will greatly benefit your brand.
Using SocialPlanner To Enhance Your Social Media Content Marketing
SocialPlanner is a social media scheduling tool that helps users to find, plan and publish engaging content. This makes it easier to grow your brand, drive targeted traffic and make more sales. Using this tool is a great way to have an advantage over competitors.
With SocialPlanner, you can discover trending and top-performing content. You will be able to streamline your marketing plan, saving time and money.
For more information, head over to SocialPlanner’s official site and learn about this affordable and useful marketing tool.
How To Successfully Pull Off Social Media Content Marketing
Once you know the basics of social media marketing, it is tempting to get started immediately. However, you need to take the right approach and plan things properly. Our guide will show you how to get started. After that, you can use what you learn here and create a brilliant social media marketing campaign.
Your Social Media Content Marketing Strategy
You have to review your strategy to make sure your content marketing and your social media marketing align. Make sure that all the key elements of your strategy are evaluated. These elements will all play a part in your marketing and serve as the backbone so has to be done right.
Here are some suggestions of what to review to ensure everything is aligned:
Objectives
Be sure that your marketing goals are clearly determined. They must be geared towards optimum success.
Target Audience
The content and social media marketing must be aimed at the same people. Your strategy has to be focused correctly.
Mission Statement
This must be the same across all your marketing approaches. What do you want people to think of your brand? What image do you want to create of your company? These are questions that need to have the same answers no matter where people learn about you.
Distribution
You need to determine the channels that you will use and how you will use them.
Measurement
This is how you will analyse the data gained from the channels that you use.
Use KPIs To Measure Success
Content marketers need to be focused on meeting certain goals that ensure the success of a marketing strategy. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help to determine the efficiency of plans and actions.
To make the most of your social media content marketing, you need to use KPIs that will show if what you’re doing is working. For this, you should use a sales funnel.
These funnels show every step that is taken to get people to become customers. For a physical store, a sales funnel would look a bit like this:
- The top of the funnel – the biggest part – is made up of people that pass the store. Some of them enter the store, and they make up the next stage of the funnel. When a customer sees something they like and takes a closer look, they are part of the next stage in the funnel.
- The customer selects a number of items and buys them. That would be the last stage of the funnel. This was a simplified explanation of how sales funnels look but it will be different for every company.
Use the data that you are collecting from the sales funnel results to determine how well your marketing strategy is working. Add to that the information gained from social media research to get an even better picture of your marketing success.
You can use some of the following points to review your strategy’s effectiveness:
Impressions
This is the number of people who see your content and shows how good you are at exposing your brand to your audience.
Reach
The number of unique accounts that view your content will reflect your reach. If you can achieve high numbers here, it means your content is tailoring to your audience. Reach is important because it is what leads to people getting to know your brand.
Traffic
The traffic and engagement that you get will vary depending on the network in question. But in general, you’ll want to look out for the following:
Likes
The number of likes influences how people see your brand but do not actually indicate your marketing success. It does, however, play a role in creating trust and brand loyalty.
Website Clicks
This number indicates how many times someone has interacted with your website. The information goes towards learning what people do on your site.
Shares
A good number of shares of social media content increases your reach. The more people who see your brand, the better.
Comments
You’ll be able to tell by comments whether or not people are satisfied with your brand. Of course, there are trolls who aim to displease, but comments are important. You have to react to most comments to keep your target audience happy.
Pageviews
This reflects the number of times your pages have been viewed during a certain time. Knowing this will help understand if your content is engaging enough.
Mentions
Brand mentions will let you know how much people are talking about you. You want as much as possible, of course.
Followers
The number of people who follow you builds your brand awareness and brand loyalty.
Many social media platforms offer users social analytics. As a result, they can track and measure the success of their pages. Twitter Audience Insights, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and LinkedIn Analytics are all very useful.
Many social media platforms offer users social analytics that will help them track and measure the success of their pages. Twitter Audience Insights, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and LinkedIn Analytics are all very useful.
Inspect and Scrutinize Existing Social Media Channels
An important step in building social media content marketing strategies that work is taking a look at what you already have. Such an audit will show you all your weak and strong points. Keep in mind that all strategies can be built upon and nothing is ever truly perfect.
If you have secondary accounts, make sure they are posting often and performing well. If not, delete them. Examine how often they share and publish new content. A good social media content marketing campaign is active and has new content being shared regularly. Find ways of generating fresh content and make use of user-generated content.
Establish Your Brand’s Target Audience
You need to know exactly who you’re targeting in order for your content to achieve its goals. To have content that will be engaging and relatable, you need to know your audience. If you already have a proper marketing strategy in place, make sure it’s focused on the right personas. If you don’t have a persona yet, create one. Research what age, social standing, gender, job title etc your target audience is. Build a strategy around this information.
Use the information at your disposal that was gained from social listening. Cater to the needs of your target market by being aware of exactly what they want from your industry. Find out what your audience values and try to align your brand to that. People are more likely to support a brand or company that they can truly relate to.
Learn about the habits, preferences, interests, emotions and concerns of your target market. If you have this information, you can adjust your marketing to zoom in on what your audience wants. Use all your research to determine which social media platforms will work best with your brand and audience.
Determine Brand Voice and Personality
Now that you have established your audience and persona, you have to learn to connect with them. By determining your brand voice, tone and personality, you’ll be able to create a meaningful relationship with users.
Certainly, you should create clear guidelines that need to be upheld all across your social media accounts. As a result, you will have consistency – something that people appreciate and enjoy.
It has to be clear what kind of language and tone will be used, the kind of lingo or slang that will be incorporated. Will your brand be playful and funny or authoritative and serious? Will you make use of graphs or memes when sharing visuals? Which words are prohibited?
You should determine what colours and fonts will be used and how it reflects your brand. The look and feel of your brand have to be consistent. Having the same rules across the board for your social media content marketing strategy is important.
Research And Monitor Your Competition
It is always a good idea to know what your competitors are up to. You will be able to learn from what they do, and what they don’t do. However, do not go out and steal ideas. Take what you can from what your competition does and build on it. Improve on what they’ve done and make it your own.
Take note of what social media users think of your competition and their marketing strategies. If you notice a dislike for some of their approaches, avoid doing the same. If users seem to like certain marketing strategies, incorporate the same ideas into your campaigns. Remember that social media users can be fickle.
As such, don’t rehash old ideas unless you can breathe new life into them. Be creative and original – stand out from the crowd.
Final Thoughts on Social Media Content Marketing
Once you’ve learned all you can from our guide to social media content marketing you can build a strong marketing campaign. Just remember that good marketing takes time and dedication. Don’t expect to have a perfect strategy overnight. Dedicate many hours to honing your ideas and plans until you know they are as good as they can be. Then come back to them later to learn how successful they are and start again. Good luck!