Content marketing and social media are a match made in heaven. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship – while each one is strong individually, they can create a powerhouse together.
Toby Murdock clearly explains the two different marketing styles in an article for the Content Marketing Institute. He points out that social media marketing focuses on brand awareness and engagement, enabling brands to connect with their target audiences. Social media has been around for some time, and businesses are finally learning how to use it to interact with customers – both current and potential – and strengthen their brands.
Content marketing, in contrast, produces the resources and materials that ideally attract customers. It also plays a key role in nurturing leads and guiding them through the sales funnel. For years, brands have been creating content for customers and promoting it – they just never called it anything specific. The term content marketing itself is, however, fairly recent.
As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute says, content marketing gets businesses thinking like publishers. This means creating valuable and high-quality website content that will attract potential customers and clients.
While social media is important, it’s a much weaker link without content marketing. Social is the way you disseminate the information you have and the content you create. It’s the way you enter into a dialogue with current and potential customers and care for your community.
So how do you bring it together?
When you’re creating a content strategy, social media should absolutely be a top factor. After all, how will you share your content? How will others share it?
C.C. Chapman, co-author of Content Rules, says in an interview with Social Media Examiner‘s Michael Stelzner that the neat thing about social media is that you can build a relationship with somebody even if you’re a massive company. When someone interacts with your content, they feel like they have a little bit of a relationship with you, so leverage that and use social to amplify your content marketing. As C.C. says, “That little bit of relationship goes a long way to actually get that person to go from thinking about buying your product to actually buying it.”
In short, without content marketing, social media would just be noise. Without social media, content silos would form and so much good information would never be shared.
As Jeff Bullas notes, content marketing is the foundation of social because good content begs to be shared. Social provides that medium.
Though each is great separately, together they are a powerhouse for your marketing strategy.
How do you balance the relationship between content and social? What brands do you think do this the best? Let us know in the comments!