Content strategy is all about planning, creation, delivery and governance of content. Any organization content strategy has to align with its strategic goals. Content provides active consumer experience, hence delivering the right content to the right audience at right time is important to achieve organization’s goals.
Business have been creating content such as blogs, articles, whitepapers, case studies, videos and infographics and investing in SEO, PPC, email marketing and advertising to drive traffic and generate leads. Though these are still part of the marketing mix, today social media drives more major portion of web interactions.
With growing use of Internet, now businesses have started using social media for content promotion, building customer relations and to influence buyers. B2B and B2C marketers are using Social Media tactic to market their business. 92% of marketers reported increased exposure for their businesses using social media.
A content strategy needs to ensure that their users can find what they need and when they want. Thereby content has to be current and consistent which can be used across multiple channels to target consumers. Today it is important to get the right content in the hands of right audience and content amplification tactics are the solution. Hence, content strategy comprises of both strategy and requires the tactical aspect to execute it.
Marketers are reporting that social media has increased their site traffic. When people come to know about a brands through social networks, they appreciate it – with ‘Likes’ on Facebook or other such methods. It gives business the opportunity to turn those liked into leads. Social is more of peer-to-peer influence marketing. So peer-to-peer communication has become the most credible source of advertising these days.
Social media is not just a medium to distribute content it is also a way how you attract potential buyers to your network via advertising. How do you know that your content is reaching the potential customers? When you start generating leads through the campaign, and they convert into potential customers that is when you have a sound strategy. To amplify your content strategy in the social media, you would require certain advertising ingredients to be added to make it swell and be visible to the audience.
We need to understand a few things before we deploy our content strategy and push the content in the market.
• Whom are we making the content available to or who is our audience?
• What do they want to know/learn?
• What structure do they want their data in?
• What platform do they want their data on?
• What should be the data publishing frequency?
• What value does your content add to the already existing data?
Once you are through these steps of defining where your interests lie you are left with the following set of functions to perform to get the content to target audience.
• Construct a theme of valuable content such as blogs, articles, eBooks, whitepapers and infographics.
• Distribute or publicize the content on various social media channels.
• Establish that the content is popular with the audience with reference to the likes, retweets, shares, etc. it gets in a given time frame.
• Endorse the content that turns out to be most widespread with mediums such as sponsored ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and promoted tweets on Twitter.
• Seize the new followers or visitors and leads that have been charmed by your content on social media channels.
Social media world is a space where you can see the results instantaneously once you have published the data. If the campaign was successful can be seen and measured on Facebook by sheer number of people who have either shared or like your content and your official pages. In the same manner the retweets and followers indicate how far-reaching the effect is on Twitter and all other social networks. You can amplify the leads generated and engage your followers further by putting paid efforts. Ads provide targeted opportunities to reach potential customers.
Never miss including CTA for followers. Ever since the rise of social media the geographical boundaries are not a barrier for reaching potential customers worldwide. Ads can be based on various demographic criteria.
As Social media has become an integral part of content strategy, tracking the ROI is also a main part of these initiatives. Analytics application enables marketers to gain easy insights on the campaign success. One can easily track the post clicks, post likes, page likes, paid reach per post, comments and shares. Hence, ROI measurement enables businesses to revisit and redefine their content strategy for Social Media. Thereby adding elements of social to your campaigns empower customers, prospects, and fans to be your brand advoca
