What’s the difference between content marketing and posting on social media?
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that results in brand awareness, trust, and customer growth. Blogging helps you to create catchy content for your audience on various topics which can result in quick lead generation or sales growth depending upon your blogging approach.
Content marketing grows customers vs blogging creates leads:
Some businesses feel that content marketing and creating appealing blog posts are the same thing. They not only differ but complement each other as well. Blogging is an effective way to build a relationship with your target audience, and also a means to share information about your company/brand/service/product (promoting) through creative pieces of writing (content). This all helps in growing your audience and in turn results in more leads.
Content marketing is the process of creating/sharing content that builds brand awareness, trust and represents a company’s products or services as well as establishes thought leadership. Growing your own audience with blogging (viral) after which you can use it for adding email addresses or just visiting again on other posts to get more followers.
Content marketing tools & strategies
The Optimal network: Run by Moz founder Rand Fishkin, this tool helps you track mentions of relevant terms across social media platforms – Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, etc. It also provides an opportunity to publish content created elsewhere, including blog posts onto all three networks at once. According to Rand ” I’ve found that it ‘s a great way to publish content and tell my followers on three networks at once”. Prior to the creation of Optimal, Rand produced multiple posts per day with one tool. Now this task has become easy for him as he can do it in two minutes through using this tool.
Content marketing tips:
Create exceptional content: Well researched and unique things from you will attract your audience towards your brand/company. This eventually results in more leads generated (50%-70% conversion rate).
Don’t create just about products or services but be authentic and creative by sharing interesting facts relating to it instead of hard-selling all the time. The right mix of product promotion and creativity together is what works best for attracting new customers.
Set a clear goal: Decide which kind of content your business needs to create before you start creating it. Is it customer case studies, use cases, white papers, or customer testimonials? Give an outline to your work and bring more focus and depth to your content marketing efforts:
- ( High-level) What is the overall objective of this project/campaign?
- ( Mid-level) What specifically are we trying to achieve with this content initiative?
- ( Detailed) How will we measure success for this initiative and make tweaks as needed in future efforts?
With these three levels of detail, you’ll be able to assess what you need to do first before you start the actual process of content creation. This will help to make your campaigns more successful and resource-efficient.
Proofread: Always proofread content before you publish it on the blog or anywhere for that matter. Use spelling and grammar checkers, change typos, grammatical errors, etc. once there is a chance of creating mistakes in a hurry during the content creation process which can affect your brand reputation if left ignored.
Conclusion: Content marketing is not just about creating interesting content but also sharing those contents to as many people as possible with concepts and promoting ideas behind them adding value in their lives at all times with active participation instead of just one-way traffic like traditional or digital advertising (push approach – mainly sending ads) where people are passive/receiving end (leads) unlike content marketing where people are active/contributing end (leads) of that content.
