Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is social media content marketing?
Social media content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation, sharing, and publishing of creative assets, with the aim of engaging and acquiring customers on social channels.
It can also be understood as any piece of content that you can use to convince a potential audience and convert them into fully-fledged customers. To do this successfully, you need to consider a number of factors, including your content personas, the channels that you’re using, and what your intended business aims are.
Benefits of content marketing
In terms of the benefits of content marketing, content marketing:
- Helps you grow your brand or increase business awareness.
- Helps you recruit new customers and brand advocates.
- Educates potential customers to the benefits of your business, product, or service, enhancing understanding of exactly what it is that your business has to offer and its unique sales perspective.
- Drives exposure of your content to help acquire backlinks, and helps increase your search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic to your website.
- Assists in generating leads, sales, revenue, and new business.
- Enhances understanding of exactly what it is that your business has to offer and its unique sales perspective.
- Helps you generate new business leads and recruit new business interests.
Delivering value
Content marketing is not simply about promoting a business ‘at’ people. The essential quality of content marketing is that it is of inherent value to the specific people that we want to develop a relationship with, and ultimately turn into customers.
Content types
Social marketers can choose from a variety of content types and formats, including eBooks, blogs, infographics, videos, images, and so on. It’s important to be aware of what content types audiences are consuming most across the different social channels. For example, Instagram users mostly view photos, whereas YouTube users watch videos.
Various social media channels differ in relation to:
- Audience content expectations
- Audience mindset
- Content tone
As a result, social media content types need to be aligned to these elements to be most impactful.
Bear in mind, however, that formats and channels don't have to be rigidly aligned. Marketers can look at ways for podcasts to live on Instagram, blogs to thrive on Facebook, and so on. Repurposing and recycling content appropriately across channels helps to draw people into your various formats.
The same piece of content might be available in different versions in places like Instagram Stories, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Edited or articulated differently in some way, it could be right for that platform and audience.
Back to TopWill Francis
Will Francis is a recognized authority in digital and social media, who has worked with some of the world’s most loved brands. He is the host and technical producer of the DMI podcast, Ahead of the Game and a lecturer and subject matter expert with the DMI. He appears in the media and at conferences whilst offering his own expert-led digital marketing courses where he shares his experience gained working within a social network, a global ad agency, and more recently his own digital agency.
Alison Battisby
Alison is a Social Media Consultant with Avocado Social, she is a Facebook and Instagram accredited social media expert and founded Avocado Social in 2014 having worked in the social media industry since 2008. Alison has worked with a wide range of brands including Estee Lauder, Tesco, and Pringles. Alison has traveled the world training companies including the BBC, Etsy, Canon, and Cambridge University Press. She offers social media strategy, training, and consultancy at Avocado Social across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok.
