Let’s take a look at the power of social media marketing and content marketing – and how these two marketing avenues can combine to drive traffic to your website, and dramatically boost conversions.

Social Media And Content Marketing – The Perfect Match

The numbers behind social media marketing are astonishing. Over 70% of all U.S. adults have at least one social media profile, and up to 30% of all time spent online is spent on social media channels.

Social media is a powerful tool to “warm up” potential customers before they arrive at your website. Using social media wisely to share value-added content can help you build up a highly reputable brand, and add value to your customer’s buying journey – without making them feel like they’re being “sold” on your products.

Partly, this is because of the power of social capital. Word-of-mouth (WoM) recommendations from individual buyers are still incredibly powerful in the marketing world – and the power of social media has turbocharged the benefits of WoM marketing. An enhanced form of this is influencer marketing – where a recognized thought leader provides a boost via recommendation.

However, just having a social media presence is not enough to guarantee your success. If it’s hard for users to share information about your website, products, or content, they simply won’t do it – and if you share poor quality, lazy content, they’re likely to lose faith in your brand.

So what can we say today about leveraging social media and doing content marketing correctly?

Social Links And Referrals – Focus On Usability And Ease-Of-Use 

Customers should want to share information and products from your pages that are enabled with social links – and if they don’t, these links are just useless, sitting on your page, and increasing loading times.

Not only that, it must be easy to share content and information from your website on social pages. Focus on making this customer journey as short as possible – if you can allow consumers to share content from your company with just 1 or 2 clicks, your social strategy will be much more effective.

Even the best content is ineffective if it’s just sitting on your website, unshared. But if you focus on usability and simple social sharing methods, your content will reach a much larger audience – maximizing ROI, and providing potential buyers with value-added content that’s relevant to their interests.

When sharing content, make sure there is appropriate imagery to drive engagement. Depending on the social platform, content will be presented differently – so test and make sure items like featured images and Open Graph are configured correctly.

Content Strategy – Quality Is Key

Having a great content strategy is critical to the success of your social strategy. Just having a large volume of content isn’t enough. Even though a large archive of content can help your SEO rankings, customers will likely be turned off if it’s useless, hard to read, or irrelevant.

So when creating a content strategy, focus on the following 3 aspects of content creation.

●    Have A Goal – First, have a goal. Your goal doesn’t have to be to sell your products or drive conversions – it can be as simple as “help a customer learn more about our products”. The important thing is to have a goal for each piece of content you create. Doing so allows you to focus on what you’re trying to achieve – which will make your content strategy much more effective.

●    Add Value – Every time a potential customer reads your content, they should feel as if they’ve gained something from it – regardless of if they made a purchase.

If you don’t add value to your content, your customers may feel like they’ve wasted their time – which decreases the likelihood that they’ll continue reading your content in the future.

●    Don’t Overdo Your SEO Keywords – We know that it’s tempting to cram as many SEO-optimized keywords as possible into each piece of content. But you should resist this temptation. This leads to poorly written, awkward content that’s no fun to read, and may turn potential customers away from you.

Instead, focus on just a few SEO keywords in each piece. Don’t overuse them, and make sure they’re integrated naturally. This will make your content easier to read, help you reach customers in a more organic way, and avoid penalties from Google algorithms.

Social Media And Content Marketing – A True Dynamic Duo

Don’t miss out on the benefits of social media and content marketing. These two marketing channels were made for each other – your social media channels can help you boost the performance of your content, and vice versa.

So focus on a smart social and content strategy – as well as proper technical configurations on your website – and you’ll achieve greater social reach and effectiveness.

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