Content marketing is undisputedly the most effective marketing strategy in this digital era. The videos you create, the articles, and the social media posts have the potential to generate massive leads for your business. But there is a condition — you have to do it right to see its potential. Most businesses like yours struggle with this part. They create lowball content with no defined strategies and wonder why they aren’t getting results.
If you have been in this situation, there are many things you could be doing wrong. Where some of them are minor, we have observed one general and huge blunder businesses like yours are making — attempting to be everywhere. To you, it might seem harmless, but it is hurting your business.
Consumer behavior experts argue that you should focus on one platform as a primary channel to share content. This article looks at why these matter and how you can find your primary channel and connect with your customers.
Why Social Platforms Are Great for Content Marketing
Social media platforms are created with underlying interactive technologies that facilitate the sharing of information that strikes engagement. Owing to the huge adoption of these platforms, digital marketers capitalized on the engagement.
Social media works because it’s an inexpensive and fast way to reach your customers directly. On top of that, you receive near-instant feedback from your audience and get to interact with them.
On social media, you can easily create short posts, link to resources like your blog or landing pages, promote content, share news — The possibilities are limitless. The intention of all this is to build rapport with your prospects, a goal of the first phase of every marketing funnel.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) – How to Do It Right
This “how to do it right” could easily be a whole topic by itself, so we will barely scratch the surface here. Therefore, consider this a short version. Key things you need to do to win with SMM are:
- Be consistent. It sounds simple, but it’s actually demanding in practice. There are days when you have nothing to post. Keep in mind that inconsistency kills engagement.
- Have a content strategy. A strategy helps you plan what and when to post, where to post, and for how long.
- Set goals. Where marketing is the ultimate goal, setting smaller milestones helps you evaluate your progress.
- Don’t ignore the metrics. The performance of your content across social media provides insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Atop all these guiding principles, there is something else you should do — focus on a particular social media platform. A popular analogy goes something like “cast too wide a net, and valuable fish will slip through.”
The way to actualize your social media marketing goals is by reaching your target audience and compelling them enough to engage with you. As such, you need to find that platform before going in.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platform
Every customer or a group of them has demographics that specify their age group, interests, location, income level, and so much more valuable data that is relevant to marketers. The overview creates what is called a buyer persona. Using this information, content marketers define target audiences and use it to address them directly.
These demographics are effective at predicting several things with high accuracy. For instance, from a buyer persona, you can tell on which social media platform your ideal customer spends the most time and what language they speak. With this information, you can tailor your content to get their attention.
Ideally, you want to be present where there is a high likelihood of finding your potential customers. Several businesses justify posting on multiple platforms with the argument that most customers are found on multiple platforms. However, this perspective overlooks the fact that content type and industry matter when deciding where to share content.
The platform you use is also influenced by the content format you plan on sharing. Where most of these platforms support multiple content formats, most of them have a particular format that works best. Then again, that does not mean you create content exclusively in one format. It’s all about balance. More so, the kind of message in the content guides the format. Use these guidelines to narrow down to a primary platform.
Conclusion
Let’s wrap up by restating what we opened with. You have to do it right to win on social media. It won’t pay to just wake up and fire up a Facebook post or a quick YouTube tutorial to see results. Conversely, it takes time to learn, experiment, fail, and retry to get it right. To reiterate, define your target audience, develop your content roadmap, pick a platform, and stick to it. Lastly, be flexible enough to adapt to the ever-changing world of technology and marketing trends.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, video, and podcasts, to attract their customers’ ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
You are also invited to attend a free weekly presentation providing you the tools and strategy to roll out your own content marketing program for your company, or see exactly what SwingPointMedia does for its clients to achieve success. It can be viewed live on SwingPointMedia’s YouTube channel, Wednesdays at 11 am pst.