Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing
Are you interested in knowing the difference between content marketing vs. social media marketing in order to provide these services for small businesses and entrepreneurs? In order to start and run a profitable content and social media management business, it’s important to understand how content marketing and social media marketing work together as well as how they are different. The best way to understand this is to look at the content marketing cycle.
Content Marketing Cycle
If you do a search on the net for “content marketing cycle” you’ll likely get several definitions about what it is. But essentially, it’s the entire cycle from start to finish involving content from its reason for existing to the results you get. Each part of this cycle gives you as the content and social media manager different options for earning a profit in your business while creating a profitable business for your clients, too.
Research
A lot of research needs to happen for each business that you work with. You’ll need to understand their audience, who their customers are, what customers they want to attract, and how to create useful and relevant content for that audience. This will take knowledge of how keywords work, and how search engines work to help drive traffic.
Many content and social media managers start with creating audience personas for their customers based on the research. They use that information along with product knowledge to create a publication and marketing plan for their clients. This plan will include titles of articles, and plans for videos and more for the client, depending on what type of content the client wants to go with. A mixture is best.
Create
Once they have the information garnered through research and a plan of action, the content and social media manager may create the content themselves or they may outsource it. Once you have a good plan and a content calendar created, it’s easy to outsource. You’ll provide the writer or other creative person, such as audio, video and graphic designers with the information and a deadline, and then you’ll get back the end product that you’ll then use for your client.
As a manager, consider outsourcing a lot of this, because you’ll be able to take on more clients if you outsource the creative parts of the work. Otherwise, you will need to ensure that you have enough time to create the amount of content each business owner needs you to create. Price yourself accordingly.
Optimize
It used to be that content optimization was all about keywords. Today, it’s much more focused on ensuring that the content is created for a specific audience because you want to ensure that trust is built between the audience and the business. That means that you’ll want to ensure that titles have keywords but aren’t clickbait. In other words, every headline you create should not trick the audience into clicking. Understating the intent of the audience helps.
In addition, you want all the content created to be well-made, using proper grammar, spelling, formatting and so forth. You want it to be easily digestible so that the consumer can stay focused and understand the information you’re trying to relay while establishing authority for your client, the business owner you’re working for, all the while ensuring that you create a call to action for every piece of content whether that’s read more, sign up now, buy now or something else entirely. Finally, today a highly optimized piece of content also includes important visual elements such as images that help explain your story.
Publish
Once the content is created, you’ll need to have a plan for publishing it. Most of the content that you create for your client should be published on your client’s online real-estate. The owned assets are most important, such as their blog and website. But, some content will also be published in other places such as Amazon Kindle, or YouTube, Slideshare.net, LinkedIn and as guest blog posts on other people’s sites.
You will also want to establish a good mixture with the most important pieces always being published first on the client’s blog or website that they own. Outside of the blog you’ll need informational pages on the website, newsworthy pieces, sharable social media content, video content, infographics, eBooks, and more that all start with being promoted on your client’s website or blog.
Promote
In some ways, this part of the content marketing cycle should be all in bold because it is one, if not the most, important aspect of being a content and social media manager for another business. This is what is going to get you the most bangs for your buck. Every single piece of content that is ever created and published on behalf of your client must be promoted. The days of just publishing and sitting back to wait for traffic are over.
The way in which you promote content starts with creating content that is specifically made for your client’s audience, is optimized with appropriate keywords, images, and titles, but then is also made available for them to read by promoting across all online channels using social media marketing. If a blog post goes up on the blog, it should then be shared on every social network with a blurb and an image to go along with it to make the audience want to click through it to consume the content.
Measure
One job of a content and social media manager is to keep tabs on the metrics. You’ll use various products to do this, but it usually starts with Google Analytics and native analytics in your social networks. Each time you publish anything, check at least quarterly for the results. You’ll start seeing a pattern after time with content that is getting better results than the others. Promote the content that gets higher results more.
For example, if you discover that your audience engages more with video, start doing more videos. This is the perfect time to understand the 80/20 rule, which states that 20 percent of the work you do gets 80 percent of the results. When you identify that 20 percent that’s getting the results, you will want to do more of that and less of the other things to improve your statistics even more.
Reuse/ Repurpose / Repeat
All this content creation can become overwhelming at times. But the more you learn about content marketing and social media marketing, the more you will realize that you can reuse and repurpose content across all channels. For example, if you have a blog post that is getting a lot of attention why not repurpose it into a YouTube video and vice versa?
When you remember to reuse content in a new format, and repeat what is working, you’ll find that you will become invaluable to your clients because of the results you’re going to get with the work you do.
If you work this hard to create the right type of content, and market it for your clients, you’ll soon become very sought after because you’re going to be getting huge results for your clients. Not only will you feel good about what you’re doing, but your clients are going to come to depend on you for your skills. Understand the similarities and differences with content marketing vs. social media marketing can be a key to building a rewarding and lucrative home business. Learn more about my Really Simple Content Marketing training course.
Connie Ragen Green is an online marketing strategist. Connect with her at ConnieRagenGreen.com
