It's Time to Celebrate the Marriage of Content and Social
It’s time for us to stop viewing content marketing and social marketing as disparate entities. Can they function separately? Sure, but that’s all they’ll be doing; just functioning, never excelling.
In order for your content and social efforts to excel, they have to intersect and support each other. Simply writing blog posts about keywords and sharing the posts on Facebook isn’t going to cut it if you want to attract qualified leads.
Getting the Most out of Content and Social
Make Sure Content Is Shareable
Unless you already have a pretty well-established social audience, social will start out largely as a method of sharing content in order to attract fans and followers. In order to accomplish this, content must be crafted to be extremely shareable.
Headlines and images should be eye-catching and appropriate for the intended social platform — keep character limits and image size limitations in mind. Create content that combines usefulness with interest. If your headline promises something, deliver on it. Click-bait doesn’t get you qualified leads.
Celebrate the Customer
One of the more common content mistakes companies make is focusing too much on how great the company thinks their products and services are rather than focusing on what kind of experience they want their customers to have with their products and services. The things you think customers love most about what you offer may not actually be what they love.
You want your content to tell potential customers what current customers love about you and why. The best way to find out what your customers really love about you? Use your social channels to ask them.
Say your company offers tax preparation services: You may think that your customers love how accurate your tax preparation experts are, but a little social research reveals that what they really love is how stress-free tax time is when they use your services.
The customer’s lack of stress may be directly related to how accurate your experts are, but what the customer is focusing on is how your services make them feel rather than why. When creating content, you want it to represent the ways your company makes the lives of its customers better and social interaction is the best way to get that information.
Don’t Assume Anything
Social media moves quickly and though social trends often spread fast, they often die off with equal speed. A lot of companies try to capitalize on that by incorporating as many trending things as possible into their social content. This comes across as insincere and spammy.
Instead, look for content cues in the things your customers post. Do they frequently mention the same hobbies, shows, books or sports teams? If something is important among your current customers, there’s a good chance that it is also important to your potential customers.
Content and Social: A Perfect Match
I’ve heard some recent lamenting about how social is phasing out content, but I don’t see why that should be the case. Yes, social is a more important part of marketing now than it has ever been before, but it needs content to succeed.
The secret to this perfect union is simple: Let your audience’s social behavior mold your content strategy, remember to celebrate the experiences of your customers and watch your company thrive.
