Social media plays a substantial role in content distribution, but it can be misleading to use social stats as your primary content marketing metrics.
To be effective at content marketing, you need to cut through the noise and keep prospects moving closer to your brand. Social channels provide a powerful medium for blasting out content in a passive way, allowing your audience to discover your content via platforms they’re already engaging with.
But social media is a crowded space that’s only becoming more populated over time. People do more than 4 million Google searches and share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content on Facebook every minute, so getting in the door is a major challenge. Relying solely on follower numbers as benchmarks for success will only lead your content marketing efforts astray.
Think of it this way: Would you rather have 100,000 disinterested Twitter followers or a smaller pool of followers who actively follow, click, and engage with the content you’re tweeting?
Marketers can easily fall into the numbers trap because social metrics are sometimes the only numerical representation of results. And when it comes to justifying this investment to the C-suite, you need to pull out impressive figures. Accumulating followers is also much easier than creating and delivering valuable content, but this mentality falls short where it matters most: building meaningful relationships with prospects.
Set Your Sights on Authentic Engagement
You need to focus on delivering relevant and engaging content so you provide enough value to keep your brand within reach.
As Copyblogger CEO Brian Clark wrote, “The smart way to practice effective online marketing is to treat social media and search engine results as aspects of a holistic strategy that centers around compelling content.”
Here are a few key ways to streamline content creation and develop truly engaging content:
- House your company’s knowledge in a central location.Stay organized by creating a bank of topics, published content, and lessons learned for each company leader who’s publishing content.
At my company, between our company blog and external publications, we publish more than 35 articles by various team members every month. That number might seem like a lot—and it is—but we wouldn’t have the time (or energy) to pump out that much content without a company knowledge bank. This is our tried-and-true method for housing our leaders’ knowledge and making sure their articles are insightful and true to our brand messaging.
- Record customer pain points.If your sales and marketing teams aren’t actively writing down common pain points and creating content around those objections, you’re missing out on profitable opportunities. Content that addresses, solves, or helps alleviate customer pain points will resonate best with your audience (and social followers) and aid in the sales process. Use our knowledge management template, or create a spreadsheet where everyone on your team can access and add sales objections they frequently hear.
- Deploy targeted campaigns.By developing content around targeted campaigns, you’ll have a guide that will inspire valuable article topics. Our marketing team creates new campaigns every quarter and crafts content that addresses insights, questions, or sales objections around that strategy. As you track and see what content your audience is responding to, you can make more informed decisions moving forward.
- Contribute to relevant publications.Without the right people reading your content, you’re basically yelling in an empty field. Target niche publications that are relevant to your industry, and send these publication editors your articles to get in front of your ideal customers.
For example, our leaders have regular columns in publications that reach our target market. These readers are exponentially more valuable than a list of 100,000 followers who are completely disengaged. The audience reading our content is knowledgeable about content marketing and thought leadership and actually cares about what we have to say.
- Distribute using the right channels.Social media channels are cluttered, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. By digging deep into your ideal customers and uncovering where they spend time online, you can narrow your social media efforts to a few platforms. While it might make sense for one company to create an elaborate campaign on Pinterest, it might not reach the audience you’re speaking to.
Once you’ve determined the most viable platforms, create a social media distribution plan using a content promotion template, and tailor your messaging for each channel. By spending time analyzing your audience and zeroing in on a few key platforms, you can save your company a tremendous amount of time and money.
If growing your social media following is your No. 1 marketing goal in 2015, take a second to rethink what that means. Reaching interested readers through original content will organically grow your following and garner much better results. Build trust with those prospects, and you’ll turn them into valued clients and partners, not just numbers on your social pages.
Don Broekelmann is executive vice president of Influence & Co..
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