If you’re new to marketing, you might be a little unclear on the difference between content marketing and social media marketing. They’re very similar strategies, and there’s some overlap between them.
However, there are some key differences between content and social media, and they play different roles in helping you to reach and engage with your target audience.
In this comprehensive blog post, we'll delve into the depths of content marketing and social media marketing, explore their unique benefits, the differences between the two, and how you can combine them into a cohesive digital marketing strategy.
Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, consistent content to attract and engage with your target audience.
The content can take various forms, including:
Most companies use content marketing to build brand awareness, authority, and trust with their target audience. Content marketing aims to provide your target audience with valuable information that answers their questions and addresses their pain points. By consistently delivering valuable content, businesses can attract and retain customers, increase online visibility, and achieve marketing objectives.
You can increase your brand visibility and recognition by consistently producing high-quality content. Valuable content that resonates with your audience encourages them to share it, which amplifies your brand's reach and attracts new potential customers.
Content can allow your brand to build a following of loyal advocates who engage with your content and amplify your key messages to others.
Creating well-written and well-optimised content can help your website rank higher in the search engine results pages. You can increase your organic visibility by targeting keywords that your ideal customer is likely to be searching for. This helps drive high-quality, targeted traffic to your website that will be more likely to convert.
If you want to learn more about search engine optimisation (SEO), check out our blog, ‘What is SEO and why do you need it for your business?’.
Sharing informative and insightful content allows you to showcase your expertise in your industry. This encourages your target audience to trust you as an industry expert, which makes them more likely to convert.
Google rewards websites with Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-A-T). By addressing industry trends, offering solutions, and providing valuable insights, you can position your brand as a trusted thought leader and increase your site’s ranking in search engine results.
According to Hubspot, marketers who prioritise content are 13x more likely to see a positive return on investment than those who don’t. Content marketing can be an incredibly cost-effective strategy. Creating valuable and helpful evergreen content can continue driving traffic to your site for years to come.
Social media marketing involves distributing content through social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. This content might include text posts, videos, images, and infographics, depending on which platform you’re using. An effective social media strategy usually involves a social media content calendar. Social media marketing aims to promote your brand, drive website traffic, and engage with your target audience.
Although each social media platform has its own distinct tone and audience, they are all designed to encourage engagement (through likes, shares, saves, follows, etc.). Companies can use these platforms to encourage customer engagement and brand-to-customer interactions. By fostering new and existing customer relationships, brands can improve customer loyalty and expand their customer base.
People spend an average of 2 hours and 28 minutes per day on social media. For the vast majority of businesses, not utilising social media is a huge missed opportunity.
Here are five more reasons why social media marketing should be integral to your overall marketing strategy.
Successful companies use social media to connect, engage and build relationships with their target audience. For example, social media can be used to directly interact with existing or potential customers who have questions or concerns.
By responding to comments and offering assistance, companies can demonstrate that they are caring and committed to their customer base. If done effectively, companies can use social media to build powerful, lasting relationships and foster customer loyalty.
Social media platforms are home to an estimated 4.74 billion users, which offers businesses a valuable opportunity to reach a large audience. Companies can improve their visibility and reach by creating and sharing valuable content on relevant platforms.
When choosing which platforms to use, it’s essential to research which your target audience is most active on. Focusing on a handful of key social media platforms is generally better than trying to stretch your resources and content across all of them.
Gaining brand recognition and awareness is an important marketing goal for many businesses, and social media can be a useful tool to help achieve this. Social media marketing allows you to get your brand in front of a large audience, and by tailoring your content, you can ensure that it reaches your customer base.
Social media platforms serve as powerful amplifiers for new and existing content. For example, you can use social media platforms to share snippets of blogs or long-form video content to increase visibility and reach a wider audience. If this content is relevant, helpful, and valuable, followers may even share this content which further amplifies your content and brand.
Social media advertising allows you to target specific audiences and demographics based on interests and behaviours. This allows you to promote valuable or high-performing content to highly relevant audiences and drive them to your website.
For more information on social media marketing, check out our blog, ‘Top 12 best practices for your paid social media campaigns’.
Content marketing and social media marketing are closely intertwined. Content marketing focuses on creating valuable content, while social media marketing involves sharing and distributing content through social media platforms. For many businesses, social media forms part of their wider content marketing strategy. However, some aspects of social media are separate from content marketing, such as responding to comments and messages and interacting with other users.
Social media can also be used to provide insights into your target audience. By listening to your audience on social media, you can better understand relevant topics, interests, and pain points. You can use this information to inform your content creation strategy and create highly relevant content that will resonate with your target audience.
Although social media and content marketing are similar, they have distinct differences. The key difference is that content marketing is a tactic marketers can use, while social media is a channel marketers can use.
We’ve outlined some other significant differences below.
Content marketing is used to share helpful content to relevant channels to drive traffic to your website and increase leads or sales. However, social media is mainly concerned with increasing engagement, building relationships, and fostering brand awareness and recognition.
Content marketing involves different types of content, such as blog articles, videos, ebooks, podcasts, and more. This is primarily long-form content. In contrast, social media consists of mostly short-form content.
Content marketing aims to reach your target audience through various channels, including search engines, email marketing, social media platforms, and website content. However, social media is itself a channel.
An effective marketing strategy will use social media as a channel to distribute and promote content. By leveraging the strengths of both approaches, you can create a cohesive digital marketing strategy that maximises your brand's online presence.
To harness the power of content marketing within social media, consider the following strategies:
Marketers can effectively integrate content and social media marketing by breaking down long-form content into smaller pieces of short-form to share on social media. For example, a long and comprehensive blog post might be broken down into several infographics. These can easily be shared on social media platforms and linked back to the original blog post.
Visual content is generally more engaging on social media. Creating visually appealing images, videos, and infographics summarising or highlighting key information can increase the likelihood of the content performing well on social media.
Content tailored for social media needs to be designed to encourage engagement. This sets social media content apart from other content, like blog posts. This means you might need to tailor existing content or write new content for social media posts that pose questions, seek opinions, and encourage users to share their experiences or stories related to the topic. Prompting conversations can be an effective way to increase reach and interactions.
Creating an effective and cohesive marketing strategy can be a challenge. If you’re struggling with your content or social media marketing, an experienced digital marketing agency can help.
At Logica Digital, we have over 15 years of experience in social media and content marketing. To unlock the full potential of content marketing and social media marketing for your business, consider requesting a free marketing audit from our experienced team. Our experts will analyse your current strategies, identify opportunities for growth, and develop a personalised plan tailored to your specific goals.
Take the first step towards digital marketing success today by requesting your free marketing audit. Or contact the team today to learn more about what we do and how we can help perfect your content strategy!
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