Content Marketing Or Social Media Marketing?

Content Marketing and Social media marketing can be two of the best ways to drive customers to your business if done properly. To start with, let's look at the definition of content marketing:

According to the Content Marketing Institute:
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 "Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action".

Social media marketing (for the sake of this post) includes organic only marketing, and not ads.

If business and marketing people would read and understand the definition of content marketing better, their marketing content would be alive and driving in more sales than they can handle. The general population simply doesn't have the time to read long articles and comprehend them.

Here at Handshakin' we believe the content marketing is more powerful for one main reason: You're creating original content that is on YOUR website that you always own.  When you market on social networks, it's content that they own and remain in control of.  

Here's an example.  Ask a friend the last time they got an email sign-up from the mailling list pop-up on their Facebook Page. They didn't.  And that's because Facebook has the users emails and only gives you a call to action button.  They want users to stay on Facebook, and not to leave to your website.  They also have no reason to share their users emails with you.  

Sure, social media marketing is part of the equation -- it is often for your short-term goals and is only to get them on to your website.   

If I've convinced you to consider creating content on your own website to try to show up in more search results, and work with that web traffic, here's some tips how to create valuable content.

1.  Develop a strategic content marketing plan

The use of content marketing requires that you make sure to target the right people. Target potential website visitors by doing keyword research.  

Repost your content on your social profiles one day after you publish it on your site, and then make sure to use bit.ly links and look at your analytics in order to learn what social networks are helping you out and stop wasting your time on the ones that don't.  

2.  Create valuable content

​Creating valuable content should be based on the premise of what is in it for the reader and potential customer. Writing long articles may cause them to leave and give up, so make sure you it contains in-depth information that is concise and to the point. The articles should be relevant to your industry like free guides and educating your readers.

Don't forget to use the keywords in your posts multiple times that you researched in step 1.  Just don't let those get in the way of it being a great experience for the reader.

3.  Create something unique

Creating unique and consistent articles, which are valuable to your loyal audience will keep them engaged. Making sure the articles are interesting and not long rambles will keep them coming back for more. Get straight to the pont, and put your main ideas in bold so the article is easy to navigate if they're skimming it. 

If you need help writing consistent blog posts, learn how we can help you.

​Try writing about relevant trends and new products in your industry to turn them into customers. Using images, videos and infographics are a few ways to create effective marketing content. If content marketing is done right, your visitors will become customers.   

Comment below what content marketing strategies you've been successful with and maybe we can interview you about that!