SMM or Social Media Marketing has now become a business must-have. With billions of people on social media, this is the perfect way to establish awareness, build your brand, and generate leads. To support businesses, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tiktok have created ways for companies to track their progress, launch ads and target specific audiences. However, the success of social media marketing depends on your content. Content is the backbone of the social strategy. If you have content that stands out and speaks about your brand boosts conversion, you have social media marketing as a strategy working for you. There are several things that social media, through the power of content, can do for you.
Extend your Reach
Whether sponsored or organic, content can help you extend your reach. Once you have chosen the right platform for your target audience, generating content that they find interesting will get your brand noticed and potentially drive your sales up. Content allows you to open up conversations with your digital market and eventually build relationships with customers. In marketing and business nowadays, you always hear the word SEO; Search Engine Optimization. SEO aims to increase your online visibility through keywords that people use to search on the web. However, to successfully do this, you need a spot-on content strategy. The words you have on your content will determine to whom your blogs and other materials appear. Your reach is not limited to your efforts in targeting the right keywords for SEO. In marketing, there is a saying that “Eventually, your customers become the best marketers.” Similar to content, people who relate and find it to be interesting tend to engage and interact. Likes, comments, and shares contribute to your reach.
Deepen Engagement
As mentioned in this article, your content opens up conversations and encourages interactions. You want your customer and the rest of your digital audience to see your brand as valuable and credible. Here’s an example:
When you encounter someone new or someone you do not know, after learning their name, the next thing is to make conversation. To do this, you have to figure out what you have in common and hope you can keep the conversation going. Next, you figure out what the person likes, interests, and dislikes, and habits. If all works out, eventually, you have a relationship, and you become friends.
It is the same way when you do content marketing for your social media strategy. Having the capability to put content out there is a huge advantage. With one great piece of content, you can interact with hundreds, even thousands of people. Out of this single content, you can expand it to various forms like infographics, videos, Instagram posts, and everything else that you can think of. All it takes is the right content.
Build Loyalty
There is what you call the 80:20 rule in social media marketing, or some call it the 80:20 ratio. This means that 80% of your content has to educate and offer value to your digital audience, while the remaining 20% is to help promote your products, services, and brand. In addition, that 80% must be content that pushes your customers to become loyal ones. These are people who label you their “go-to” brand. So, again, content is key! Having content that stands out offers the value that your target market needs. Here is another example:
If your brand offers cooking ingredients such as milk, oil, or cheese, the best content to publish are recipes. Not only does this promote the use of your product, offering recipes that show your digital audience how it can be used makes it all the more interesting. Take it from the perspective of a mum who would often search for things like “chicken recipes” or “Christmas dinner recipes,” having content connected to this will drive traffic to your website and convert more readers into paying customers.
Drive Sales
The objective of everything is that your doing in the business will always be to drive sales. This is the reason why you want to build your brand and promote your products. In the past, brands were limited to expensive ways of promotion, such as TV commercials, billboards, and magazine publishings. If you take a close look, you can see how much cheaper marketing and advertising are now. If you do it correctly, one article can lead you to hundreds of products sales and inquiries. Just remember that when you push out content, it has to be supplementary to your brand. You want to make sure that the material has something to do with your business; otherwise, it would be pointless and counterproductive. Here is one final example:
If your business is all about skincare products, you will not publish articles about the “Must Try Christmas Dinner Recipes.” Instead, you will write about “Skincare Trends 2021” or articles that talk about the benefits of the specific ingredients in your products.
Just remember that when developing content, keep your objectives in mind. You do not want to spend time and money on strategies that do not benefit your business.
Final Thoughts
Developing content requires skill and a lot of time. Usually, you should have a team to build your strategy based on your business, plan out content, write and post. However, if you do not have an internal team to do this, it would be best to hire a professional to ensure that your investment does not go to waste.
