Social Media’s Role in Content Marketing
Due to social changes in culture and technological advancements the way companies attempt to market themselves never stays the same. One of the most recent forms of marketing to arise is the strategy of content marketing. Content marketing is the result of the current social climate and the influence technology has in people’s day-to-day lives.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is exactly what it sounds like, marketing through the production of content. The term content is rather broad and can include articles, videos, photos, etc. This content is used by companies to communicate with customers rather than traditional advertising. The difference between content marketing and traditional advertising; is that the aim of content marketing is to produce something that will provide value to the customer, rather than try to persuade or promote.
Provide Value and Build Loyalty
The idea behind content marketing is to produce content that will be valuable to your potential customers and create a feeling of loyalty. The more valuable content your business produces, the more loyalty you will build. If done correctly, that loyalty will eventually translate into business. This can be a very cost effective way to build brand awareness as well as establish relationships with potential and existing customers. If you are able to produce really great and useful content, then it is likely that your customers will want to share that content with others. This is where social media comes into play and each free social share your content receives only increases its value.
Social Media’s Role
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, social media plays a major role in all successful content marketing plans. This is because social media connects millions of people every day offering marketers a virtually limitless audience for their content.
The key here is to provoke those social shares. Even if just one person re-tweets your content or shares it on Facebook, you are gaining free exposure to every single person that follows that person or reads their news feed. This adds extra value to your content and you can imagine how powerful this can be if you are able to create something that goes “viral” (i.e. many social shares). This is why social media plays such an important part in content marketing as it can really make or break your campaign.
How to Get Those Social Shares
Since these social shares can be so crucial to the success of your content marketing plan it is important to know how to elicit them. The answer is simple, create quality content. You must produce content that not only engages your audience but provides such tremendous value to them that they believe it will do the same for others. If your content is so interesting and helpful to one person, then they will want to share it with their friends and the easiest way for them to do this is through social media.
It is obvious that social media plays a huge role in regards to effective content marketing. Through social sharing your content can reach a vast audience at very little cost. If you can create appealing and useful content that encourages social sharing, content marketing can provide marketing value that can rarely be matched.
