Chances are that you may be running social media and content marketing campaigns separately as part of your marketing scheme. But have you considered combining them?
Combining your content marketing and social media campaigns increases the number of people you can reach, while enabling you to connect with people across multiple touchpoints. This can increase brand awareness significantly, boost your search engine rankings, and increase leads.
But how exactly do you seamlessly combine your social media and content marketing campaigns? Consider the following tips:
1. Establish a common tone and identity
Does your business already have a solid and consistent brand identity? If the answer is yes, you need to ensure you merge that with your social media and content marketing campaigns. Both of these domains need to have a common ground in terms of your brand voice.
However, if you do not have a cohesive business identity, to begin with, you need to develop it before you combine your social media and content marketing strategies. A customer or audience persona can help you with this. The following image demonstrates what it should look like ideally:
Your customer persona is the perfect representation of your ideal customer.
Your customer persona will help you understand the type of content you should be creating, and is an important reference point for branding. If your target audience consists of a younger age group, for instance, you might need to have a casual, pop-culture-influenced brand voice.
Social media proposals can help your customer loyalty and make the relationship more personal. You see, people are more likely to buy from you if they like what you're selling and browsing through social channels gives them that opportunity for discovery.
Nike is a perfect example of a brand whose brand identity shows across its content marketing and social media campaigns. The brand’s content focuses on regular people, athletes and sports teams.
The Instagram channel is filled with interesting content. Often, this content is about regular people who are physically active - that aligns with their core demographic. They often reshare images from their audience.
The content is often a bit unusual, for example this photo of Bolivian women climbing.
They also share content featuring well known sports stars.
The content on the Nike blog covers similar topics. That, alongside content featuring their products, of course.
The content they share through their social and content channels nicely overlaps. They also run cross channel marketing campaigns. They do this to get engaged users to jump between marketing channels according to their digital marketing funnel. It’s an effective way to engage a core audience.
Additionally, you can find a fractional CMO to help you with your social media and content marketing strategies. These professionals can provide strategic guidance and oversee the implementation of your marketing campaigns on a part-time or project basis. They can help align your brand identity, develop customer personas, and create effective social media and content marketing strategies tailored to your target audience.
2. Make use of cross-promotion
Cross-promotion doesn't necessarily have to mean delivering the exact same message across all your social media and content marketing domains. As long as your brand message is the same, the rest will follow.
Speak to your team and get your employees on board with your brand messaging goals. Use scheduling software to divide the work once that’s done. There are ways you can promote content across your content marketing and social media platforms.
If you have new blog posts, share a link on your Facebook or Twitter page so that people can view them easily. You may even post screenshots of your social media posts in relevant blogs and articles.
You can also incorporate your social media posts onto your website.
Your viewers can help you in cross-promotion, too. Just make sure you make it easy for them to do that. For example, you can include social media sharing icons on your blog posts like the one in the screenshot above so viewers can share the content with their network.
3. Repurpose content across channels
Repurposing content simply means recycling your current content. It allows you to customize your existing content and helps save you time.
But don’t just use the same content and republish it as is.
If you have a Youtube video you want to repurpose on Instagram, for instance, you’d have to consider the various specificities of that specific social media platform. Sprout Social has a great list of Instagram features you might want to take a look at. So, based on what you know about Instagram, then you’d use the same Youtube video content in a format that relies heavily on images.
Or, you might want to repurpose the video for your email marketing campaigns. There are newsletter templates you can use if you want to send out newsletters for this purpose.
When looking to repurpose your content, just consider using the high intent keywords across all your channels repeatedly. Just make sure you do rank tracking to determine which keywords you should aim for in the first place. Doing this will significantly boost your SEO as it will enhance your company's visibility online. In addition, your content will be read by your target audience.
Some other types of content you might want to prioritize repurposing include case studies, how-to blogs, videos, product guides, etc. You can also repurpose your best content by using it as a quote. Consider the image below:
In this image, Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman of VaynerX, a media and communications company, successfully uses his quote from one of his YouTube videos to drive social media engagement.
Bottom Line
Combining your social media and content marketing strategies wisely can help your business reach its potential. So many people globally access both social media and content marketing platforms. When you connect them, it's only a win-win situation, not just for you but also for your target audience.
In this article, I shared with you tips on how to do that. Establish a common tone and identity, cross-promote, repurpose your content across channels, and link your social media account to your website.
Follow these tips, and you’ll optimize the use of your content marketing and social media platforms. The result? You’ll reach your marketing goals (or even exceed them) and, by extension, your business goals.