As with any online marketing campaign, one of the most important components in driving ROI is the amount of high quality content that you create for your target audience. By mixing content with social media, you have the perfect recipe for building brand and be recognized as a thought leader.
Why content marketing can work with social media
With more choices in accessing media and related content, your target audience are more selective on what content they consume and how they view it. They are seeking out information, and asking their friends for referrals. They are also less trusting of information coming directly from the brands themselves.
With this in mind, more and more companies are creating content as part of their inbound marketing strategy to attract the attention of their clients, avoiding the use of interruption marketing and advertising. By putting content as central to their marketing strategy, they are creating a funnel that pulls prospects in.
Content is more effective online when you add social media and online marketing. You get a powerful combination which:
· Can be used to provide content for all your social media channels and drive interaction.
· Can be used for the soft sell – grabbing the readers’ attention without using a sales pitch because what you provide is relevant and meets their information needs.
· Allows for closed-loop tracking, where you can draw people into your website from social media channels and determine whether your ROI has improved. A good way to lure your customers is through great content that they want to view.
As you are well aware, social media sites and networks have access to an incredible amount of data on the type of content and interests that people like to share with their friends – in real-time. With about billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook and Twitter, it’s no wonder that search engines are starting to take notice. Google has started tracking, in their Panda update, the amount of shares that people do for a particular web page or content.
They’ve also added Twitter feeds and Google+ feeds in search results. Metrics such as retweets, shares, likes and others are being tracked in determining whether a piece of content is quality or not worth sharing. As people are expecting more from Google, Bing and Yahoo to provide quality results, these search engines are taking advantage of the real-time data from social media to provide relevant results.
The end result? Marketing managers and business owners have to create content that their customers will love and share.
