The coronavirus pandemic has compelled businesses to rethink their strategies now that most people stay at home. Both seasoned marketers and beginners in content creation assume they know almost everything there is to content creation, distribution, and outreach until the health crisis came.
With the various trends emerging now, marketers must always watch out to improve their skills and strategies. For instance, the lockdown resulted in a spike in social media content consumption. And so social media marketing must be pared down to purely the types of content that are maximized on social channels.
What does content marketing mean to businesses at the time of lockdown?
If you’re a small business, you can hire someone to oversee these things for you. However, large companies and established brands need more than the usual marketing techniques. They must have a team to monitor each social channel’s performance, particularly the engagement levels at the post or update level, and the community’s engagement.
In reality, lots of businesses aren’t aware of how the social content marketing process works. The lack of knowledge leaves behind a wealth of opportunities to tap into new market segments while also nurturing already established ones.
What if this is the first time for the brands to consider content marketing? Content marketing is a part of both social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). So don’t be surprised if an SEO company approaches you to offer its content marketing services.
Whether you are about to enter social media marketing, here are the things to know about content marketing.
1) How social content marketing works
Content marketing is both a marketing strategy and a business process. It focuses on content research, creation, distribution, and engagement management. In the case of social marketing, it involves creating content for the consumption of social users.
Content is essential to attract and retain a set of audience and influence them to engage in profitable actions. Thus, content marketing is the art of communicating with prospects and customers without directly selling to them.
Successful content marketing strategies don’t only result in profit. It can also lead to relationships with audiences as content consistency and services result in trust. Engaging social content turns users into loyal followers. Feel-good material brings delight to customers, which can make audiences into promoters of your brand.
Content marketing is highly useful as it helps businesses accomplish several goals at once.
2) Which social content works best
Content can be in long-form, images, videos, audios, motion graphics, infographics, etc. It can be any type of content as long as it provides value, relevance, and consistency.
Nonetheless, in social media platforms, there are distinct content types to use. These are:
- Images
- Short and long videos
- Infographics
- Video stories
- Live videos
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- Contests
- Polls
- Announcements
Considering the health crisis, social content also evolved. Nowadays, we see more of:
- Community content
- Educational content
- Uplifting content
- Entertaining content
- Omnichannel content
Purely commercialized content is no longer the norm. Instead, more and more people would want to see content that empathizes with their experiences. With the consumers’ changing priorities, they want to see less of their favorite brands’ product offerings. Instead, they want to learn what they do to make a difference throughout the pandemic.
Because of stay home guidelines, people also have more free time for continued education. This is the reason why the users are ever-keen on detecting fake news. If at all, they want to share content that amuses, inspires, and entertains others more so if it means lessening their burden. Based on the content research conducted by Channel Factor, about 69% of the respondents are actively looking for and consuming uplifting content.
Then again, while social media is the primary channel to consume content, users always want an omnichannel approach. Omnichannel simply means synergism among the brand’s owned digital assets: what you see in one channel must also be available in other media.
The perfect example is the connection between Facebook and YouTube.
3) Brand-related importance of social content marketing
An essential aspect of social content marketing is creating audience-centric content. It is vital to publish content for the brand’s target market and the existing audience who has a presence on a social platform.
For a brand to thrive socially, it must identify its audience to produce useful and relevant content. This will keep it from struggling to find readers who resonate with the output. If you are a brand and lag behind your competitors’ social performance, then social content marketing is a worthwhile investment.
While at it, please remember that it is essential to come up with an audience persona during the initial stages of your social content marketing strategy. The personas ensure that you end up with useful and relevant content to your target audience.
To have an audience persona, you must research your market with the social media marketing team’s help. Know its characteristics, aspirations, and needs. The information you and the team will gather helps you figure out what type of content you should present and discuss.
4) Relationship of social content marketing with other digital assets
Some brands thought that social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO are different entities. While they implement different strategies, they come hand in hand.
Content would not be able to reach target audiences without optimization. On the other hand, it is useless to apply SEO practices if you don’t have valuable content you can use and publish on social channels.
Also, optimization works in two ways here: 1) content optimization and 2) social page optimization. A fundamental part of a successful social content marketing strategy is identifying high-value keywords. Keywords like “2BR condo in Pasig” or “affordable house and lot in Quezon City” are highly targeted. These types of keywords can transform your social presence through raking in the traffic and leads that are already in the middle or deep into the sales funnel. Thus, you need to use them to your advantage.
You can find them through in-depth keyword research. Once you have the keywords, the next best thing is to craft content around those search terms. Only then can you understand the relationship between these aspects of social content marketing.
These three are the basics of social content marketing. You must first understand them and dig deep to have an effective social content marketing strategy. Knowing these and fully understanding them leads you to an audience-centric social content and profitable social channels.
