Difference between social media marketing and content marketing

Many beginners to Internet marketing tend to confuse social media marketing with content marketing and my goal with this post is to help you understand the difference between the two and how you can use them for your benefit.

As you can see in the image below, both social media marketing and content marketing are under the umbrella of Internet Marketing which is one of the most important components of digital marketing.

So, the first difference between the two is that they are not the same thing. They are two distinct tools online marketers can use to promote their brand, products or services online.

social media vs content marketing

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What is Social media marketing?

In its simplest form social media marketing is the marketing process for promoting products or services in the different social networks either in the form of ads or in the form of content. The goals of a social media marketing campaign can be the same as any other marketing campaign i.e. to increase sales or can be more specific to social networks i.e. to increase Facebook followers or to get more tweets etc.

Who needs social media marketing?

Social media marketing is for everyone working either online or offline. By everyone I mean:

Bloggers or webmasters running blogs or websites

Small businesses owners who run online businesses

Business owners who run offline businesses

The impact social networks have on our lives is so huge that you just cannot ignore it. In the case that you do ignore it and stay out, your competitors will take advantage of it and the impact on your businesses will be greater.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

In a nutshell the benefits of social media marketing are:

Increase brand awareness

Find more customers

Stay in front of the competition

Stay in synch with the latest marketing trends

Engage with your customers

Provide another way for potential customers to contact you

Inform your customers of changes to your products or services

Gradually build a tribe of loyal followers

How do you create a social media marketing campaign?

You can read my previous post, social media marketing tips for beginners for a more in-depth analysis but for the purpose of this post, let’s examine the basic components of a social media marketing campaign.

Decide on your goals – what are your goals from running a social media marketing campaign, what do you want to achieve? Hint: If you’re goals are increase in sales make sure that you track leads coming from social media so that you know if they convert or not.

Decide on the duration – A campaign cannot run forever so it’s important to decide the period you will run your campaign. Hint: Run your campaign for at least a week since not all days are the same in terms of traffic and social media usage.

Set your budget – How much money you want to spend on social media advertising? Hint: You don’t always have to pay for advertising but as we will see below you can run your social media campaigns using the content you have created.

Choose your social media networks – There are so many social networks available and if you try to run campaigns on all at the same time you will get lost in the process. It is better to concentrate on one social network at a time and at the end you can evaluate the results and see which networks converts better. Hint: If you don’t know which is the best network for your niche then why not take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they are spending time and money on a particular network maybe they are getting good results.

Evaluate the results – Everything on the web is measurable so at the end of your social media marketing campaign check the results and calculate the ROI. If the return is not what you expected may you should run the campaign on a different social network or assign the task to professionals to optimize your campaign and produce better results.

Make sure that you also avoid these 15 social media mistakes.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating the right type of content to fit for the particular purpose. Have a look at the examples below to understand how content marketing can be used in different situations:

Type of Business Type of content

Service company (lawyers, accounts etc) Text content: (description of the services offered, articles related to the niche)Images: map to the company offices, organizational structure

Retail business selling products online or offline Text content (product descriptions)Images (product images)Videos (product videos)

Web site owners Text content: articles, how-to posts etcImagesVideos

Infographics

What is quality content?

In order for content marketing to be successful you first need to have quality content. Many marketers talk about the importance of quality content but a few people understand what this means. In my view quality content has the following characteristics:

It is detail – provides all the info about the particular subject

It is un-biased – provides for both sides of a story and it’s not one-sided

It is shareable – people like it and want to share it in their social networks

People read it / watch it / hear it – statistics show that people spend time with the content

People engage with it – they write comments, add to their favorites etc.

What are the benefits from content marketing?

The benefits gained from content marketing are the same with social media marketing. Your ultimate goal with content marketing is to provide top quality content to your users or potential customers so that you increase sales, increase brand awareness, get to know your users better and stay in front of the competition.

Is content marketing the new SEO?

A popular phrase in the SEO industry the last couple of months is whether content marketing is the new SEO. The reason that made many people believe this statement is the fact that with the latest changes Google made to their ranking algorithms they gave more importance to high quality content websites and it was a clear signal that content is once more a very important ranking factor.

I would say that content is not the new SEO but high quality content with social media marketing is the new SEO. As I mentioned above content alone will do any good but high quality content can bring success especially if combined with a well-defined social media marketing campaign.

Content marketing and social media marketing – The winning partnership

Anyone should have clear in their minds the difference between social media marketing and content marketing. Social media marketing is about promotion and content marketing is about creation.

The two can work together in harmony and can generate fantastic results in today’s competitive market. Companies or websites who can create top quality content and have a proper social media presence are more likely to succeed and expand than companies who failed in this area.

Some real life examples from different industries:

Web / Content producers: Sparkpeople.com – They create content on a daily basis about healthy living and they promote their content on social media. Visit their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/SparkPeople

Manufacturing / Retailers: Nike.com – They create content to promote their products and they engage with their customers on social media. https://www.facebook.com/nike

Manufacturing / Retailers: Coca-Cola – They use content marketing and social media to promote their ‘change the world’ campaigns. https://www.facebook.com/cocacola

Service / Software: Firefox.com – content marketing and social media for creating a community of users. https://www.facebook.com/Firefox

Blogging: Read our case study on how to build a successful blog with content marketing and social media.

Conclusion

Content marketing is the starting point of all your internet marketing campaigns. Whether you are a small business looking for more customers or a webmaster looking for more visitors to your website you need to start with content marketing.

Your next step is social media marketing. In many areas social media marketing has replaced traditional link building and is the number one way to promote your website or brand online.

If you can do both well, then you just found the secret for marketing online in the 21 century.

10 content marketing tips for beginners

Content marketing is at the center of every digital marketing campaign. A website with good content is bound to succeed even without any SEO or social media promotion but the combination of top quality content and Internet marketing will bring faster and better results.

Before getting into the 10 content marketing tips, it is better to provide a few quick definitions about basic terms related to content marketing so that we are all in sync.

What is content?

In our context I would say that content is everything that can be published on the web. For example text, videos, images, infographics, graphs, audio, pdf, podcasts, slideshows etc. It is in other words information that can be made available in digital format.

What is content marketing?

There are many sophisticated definitions of Content marketing but my own simplified version is the following:  Content marketing is the process of creating content for the purpose of increasing your web traffic, getting new customers, making more sales or simply increasing brand awareness.

What are the advantages of content marketing?

Content marketing has many things to offer to an online business as content is the start and ending point of any online campaign. In particular the benefits of content marketing are:

More targeted visits from Search Engines – the more content you publish the greater is the number of organic visits you can get

More visits from Social Media – Good content will be shared on social media which in turn will bring more visits to your website

User engagement – User can engage with your content by providing comments, reviews, ratings, answering to other user questions etc.

It’s good for SEO – Good quality content is the heart of SEO. Websites that combine good content with proven copywriting tips are better off than websites who fail in any of these aspects.

Increase brand awareness – Content can help users spread the word about a brand and this word of mouth affect will eventually lead to better brand awareness.

More sales – Content can generate more leads and increase sales

10 Content marketing tips

1. Publish related content

When you start publishing content on your website or blog make sure that it is related to your niche and area of expertise. For many this maybe obvious but some people still get it wrong. If you are running a tech blog for example you cannot publish a post about cooking just because you liked it. Nobody will punish you for doing so but the chances of getting any benefits from that post are minimized.

The best approach is to publish related content that is aligned with the overall goals of your website. For example if you are selling coffee makers online then besides providing all the technical information about your products (specs, photos, reviews, videos) you should also provide a blog with articles related to coffee (making, drinking, recipes, advice etc). This is related content and studies show that more than 50% of consumers enjoy reading related content from brands.

2. Publish lengthy content

When it comes to text content like blog posts, various studies identified that lengthy content (above 1500 words) ranks higher in search engines and it is more likeable in social media.

The lesson we can learn from these studies is that it is better to publish a long detail post that covers all aspects of a topic rather than publish 2-3 smaller articles. Since lengthy content is more share-able in social media this means that by proving for that type of content you are not only fetching food to search engines but you also give users what they want.

3. Publish shareable content

You need to search social networks and find what type of content people like when it comes to your niche. If you are promoting fashion items maybe they like more images and videos, if you are promoting gadgets may be they like more reviews. You need to find that they want and provide them with that content. By doing so you are also increasing the chances your content to go rival on social media and benefit from the extra visibility.

Some ideas for shareable content that are suitable for all niches are:

Top 10 lists…

Best of lists…

How to …

10 ways to…

Most popular ways…

Best tips for…

4. Publish good content that looks good too

Good content provides for original, well researched and unbiased information about a certain topic. Even if your content meets the above criteria, it still needs to look good as well. By good looking content I mean text that is beautified by the use of paragraphs, bold, italics, headings, good font size etc.

Taking care about the formatting of your content is also good for SEO and a sign that you are trying to create a high quality website. In general if you can try to combine different content types together (i.e. text, images, videos) then this makes the user experience better which will generate a number of other benefits.

5. Publish content on a steady basis

Besides proving for up-to date and accurate content another tip you can use is to ensure that you publish content on a regular basis and if possible on fixed dates and times. Having a pre-defined publishing calendar will help you organize your time better and will also help you build a list of loyal fans.

Do not forget that new content is also an incentive for:

Search engines to visit your website

Get more visits from your newsletter and RSS feed

Get more visits from social media

6. Publish content under a good title

The title you give to your content is very important for many reasons. This is SEO 101 but it is worth mentioning that a good title will:

Help search engines understand what the content is about

Help social media sites understand what you are sharing

Attract or not users attention and encourage more clicks to visit the particular page

So, before hitting the publish button make sure that your content has a suitable title that will help you take advantage for all the above benefits. This is where the Google keyword tool can assist you in choosing effective content titles.

7. Publish better content than competitors

Content marketing sounds nice and a great way to increase sales etc but that’s only the good news. The not so good news are that you are not alone and if you want your content to perform good it has to be better than the competition.

Before starting creating your content search Google, Facebook, twitter (or the network that is closer to your target audience) and see what type of content comes in the top positions. Notice things like length, quality and format and try to make your content better in all aspects.

Content that is not better than competitors cannot generate the buzz you expect in search engines or social media so better spend more time and make the content better than rushing into hitting the publish button and lose your time.

8. Bring your content in front of customers

Don’t expect that your potential customers will search to find your website, make a visit and buy your products. When you produce a piece of content you need to go out and promote it so that it gets the attention it deserves.

There are many ways to promote your content without exaggerations and without taking any risks so the next immediate step after hitting the publish button is to do a good promotion. Your best bet is social media because results are extremely fast and immediate but never underestimate the power of email and RSS.

9. Organize your content

When you do content marketing consistently for a number of months (or even years) you will end up with lots of content and if it is not organized correctly then you will get lost. The best strategy is to organize your content into relevant categories and use tags, keywords and descriptions for searching purposes.

10. Create content that converts

Last but not least, don’t forget that the main reason you create content is to increase conversions. Depending on your case, conversions can be different things from more email subscribers, to more banner ad clicks to more product sales.

If your content does not produce good results then you need to change your content strategy and think of alternative ways to produce and promote content. Hiring a professional company is always one of your best options not only for getting better results but also to give you more time to concentrate on what you are doing best.