Content marketing and social media are two of the main pillars that all brands use in digital marketing to create a successful integrated marketing strategy.
Whether your goal is generating brand awareness, increasing sales or positioning your brand, creating content and communicating it to your audience is crucial. That’s where the marriage of social media and content marketing comes in.
The differences between both activities
While both disciplines work wonders together, they are two completely different things.
Content marketing focuses on generating leads. It’s a marketing strategy where brands produce and distribute relevant and valuable content in order to generate prospective users and drive sales.
It involves a great deal of creativity, but also strategic thinking in order to create interesting and eye-catching content for the audience, attracting them to your site and transforming them into potential clients of your brand.
Clearly, it’s a fundamental part of any digital marketing strategy. If you want to learn how to create the perfect content marketing strategy, see our related article!
Social media marketing, on the other hand, is used to create brand awareness and interact with people. It’s a strategy that uses different channels and allows marketers to deliver their messages to their audience, receive feedback, reach potential customers and improve brand engagement.
Using social media is highly beneficial for your brand as it can make content more relatable and approachable. It helps to nurture customer relationships specifically because it is so customer-centric. It also works best in combination with other marketing strategies.
It’s not about which strategy is better or which is more suitable for your business. Both are totally complementary and create synergies that are extremely effective in a multichannel or omnichannel strategy.
Pairing social media and content marketing
Social media and content marketing can be easily paired. Here’s how:
Promote your content
You can use social media to promote the content brands produce regularly such as videos, articles, podcasts, blog posts, ebooks, etc.
Since your followers are probably already consuming your content and interacting with you, the main goal of social media is to reach new audiences and encourage potential customers to engage with your brand.
Define your image
Promoting content via social media channels is also useful for brands to position themselves, build an image and develop a reputation.
Whether you want to be perceived a certain way in your sector or to highlight specific attributes of your brand, combining both social media and content marketing can be part of your branding and positioning strategy. It is important to be consistent with the rest of your marketing channels and your brand’s personality and image.
Get feedback and recommendations
Having a good relationship with your audience has multiple benefits, such as increasing engagement and curating your brand image.
The trick is to leverage such existing relationships and use your followers to get direct feedback on your content and improve the things you may be lacking in or that you can improve.
Your followers can also be a source of ideas for future content pieces. Asking your audience for recommendations about certain topics or things they want to see can be extremely helpful for your brand because your audience will feel heard and embraced and their engagement will improve as well.
Other tips for a seamless marketing strategy
More tips you can use to make the most of your social media and content marketing strategy are:
- Only post content that relates to your brand and avoid content that doesn’t’t align with your editorial and graphic line.
- Keep track of what content is more popular and check the stats regularly to optimize and improve your content.
- Don’t forget to add social media buttons in your content pieces so your audience can share them with others.
- The content publishing must be consistent and add value for your consumers.
- Leverage user-generated content that your audience creates.
- The marketing world is constantly changing so you need to adapt to the times and trends to stay relevant
- Integrate your content and social media approach with the rest of your marketing strategy
Content marketing and social media don’t need to be separate strategies. In fact, it’s more beneficial if they combine in order to have a seamless, omnichannel marketing strategy.
What’s the difference between content and social media marketing?
Content marketing focuses on increasing your audience and generating leads while social media focuses on communicating with your customers and generating brand awareness.
How can brands combine social media and content marketing?
Brands can use both disciplines to promote the brands’ content, work on their brand image and obtain direct feedback and new ideas for their future content.
