Tested ways to boost content marketing in social media 

We put together a series of five blogs to help businesses plan their social media marketing. This article shares tested ways to boost content marketing in social media. 

• 5 mistakes you make in social marketing
• The impact of video on marketing
• How to use engaging content in social media advertising
• Does social media work for your business?
• Tested ways to boost content marketing in social media

Is social media a channel for your business content? Short answer: yes, it is. I’ll tell you how to take advantage of the unique distribution opportunities and how social media offers unique testing tools to polish your content to diamond-clear clarity.

Let’s get to it!

Why is content marketing important for your business?

If you’re already doing content marketing, you can skip to the next chapter. 

But for those who are still wondering whether it makes sense to start producing their own content for their customer base, here’s a quick summary of the reasons to start your own social media campaign.

What is content marketing: a marketing strategy that persuades customers to buy the company’s product/service by producing and targeting relevant & valuable content.

So, content marketing is not about producing ads.

I recommend thinking of it this way: Every business offers something different to its customers than its competitors. This is something worth telling - proudly and loudly. Or at least loudly if you are modest in your action.

Whether your content takes the form of text, images, or video, the most important thing is that it’s authentic and gives your target audience the information they need.

Unfortunately, many people forget that you also have to take care of its proper distribution in addition to content production: the media and channels through which the text, images, and video you produce reach your target audience.

Pushing content out without a plan for how it will reach the right people is a wasted effort. As SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said perfectly, “Launch cost should be the equal of the satellite cost.” To illustrate this, the cost of the content you produce should be equal to the cost of delivering it.

Why bother producing content if you don’t want to get it in front of the public? So don’t fall for the “Spray & Pray” strategy!

In the next section, we’ll answer the inevitable question.

How to properly target the content on social media?

The best way to target is to start with the customers you know. Consider what interests and other characteristics (and quirks) they have and then dive into the targeting opportunities of the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter advertising platform.

These social platforms are a treasury of great ideas and creative solutions for every target segment for almost any business. For example, what do 25-30 years old fathers of young children or cross-dressing Florida residents sound like? Or are pensioners in your area interested in dating? Or, well-educated women in rural areas interested in finance?

From these examples, you could certainly get a whiff of the potential for targeted content production. 

You can offer very informative and helpful content promoting your products and services for young fathers and retirees with a spending spree. This promotion approach is often more effective than generic ads without any solid information on how this will solve their problems.

Targeting is, therefore, more about finding the audience-message mix than a technical measure on a chosen advertising platform. By creating a unique value proposition for your product or service, you can market your message and outsmart your competitors.

You can add more depth to your content by considering the purchase path, i.e., buyer journey. Next.

Three audience types along the purchase path

Three different audience types at various stages of the buying journey make content marketing design commercially attractive. How to create content that serves the information needs of different kinds of online visitors:

• Information seekers -> are only beginning to identify their own needs
• Shortlist access -> preparing to make a purchase decision
• Buyers -> want confirmation of their purchase decision

An excellent way to understand what kind of information your customers are looking for at different stages of the information-gathering process is to conduct keyword research and group searches by the various stages of the purchase path. In the process, we can discover hidden needs that we didn’t know existed before.

Creating customer profiles as a content creation tool

Customer profiles are certainly familiar to many content creators. But did you know that you can use digital marketing to test the attractiveness of your content for a specific customer segment?

Here’s how to measure the relevance of your content:

• Review your company’s customer profiles
• Compare the profile specifications with those available on digital channels and create audiences based on them (including other means that are more data-driven)
• Target content created for this audience in advertising and compare the results with the metrics obtained from generic content.

What do you know about your readers and how digital tools can help you serve them better? Here’s a small checklist to get you started:

• What information do you have in your CRM, and how could you complete your user profiles?
• What content is consumed most by visitors from different segments?
• What articles have readers been researching & can you create different types of content packages targeted at a specific segment of your readership -> this will help you make data-driven audiences that can be - you guessed it correctly- targeted with advertising for this content

Three ways to get visitors to your site

Owned, paid, and earned media - these are three different ways to get your message seen.

The three ways of content marketing

The heavier your newsletter list, the lighter your media budget will be. And, the more attractive you can make your products/services, the less you have to pay to leverage their visibility. 

I often talk about the virality rate: how much more visibility your post gets with free likes, comments & shares after you’ve first set the snowball in motion by paying for your message to appear.

Boring costs more: you succeed on social media by being attention-grabbing.

Content creation also supports search engine optimization (SEO), but we’ll leave that for another blog post.

What metrics should a content marketer use?

Use different metrics to measure different types of content

How to get a boost in content marketing performance from analytics: at least know these Google Analytics and Facebook metrics:

Brand awareness: visitor numbers, page views, video views, ad recall lift rate (FB metrics)

Engagement: blog comments, likes, shares.

Link acquisition: form sign-ups and response rate, email subscriptions

Sales: Online sales, offline sales, sales through reference (affiliate)

Customer loyalty: percentage of current customers who read the blog/subscribe to the newsletter

At the same time, you help content creators to create more engaging content through digital metrics.

I hope you are inspired to take your company’s content production and content marketing forward. 

I also want you to be brave enough to test the boundaries of what’s new. Testing is a systematic learning process that will take your business one step forward at a time in the world of social media marketing.

What channels have you tested in your company’s content distribution, or what will you try next?

Contact us