Content marketing vs. social media marketing are two of the most powerful tools in a business owner’s digital marketing arsenal. Content marketing allows you to create high-quality, long-form content that can be used to build trust with your audience, while social media is all about short bursts of engagement and brand awareness. Both have their advantages and disadvantages when used alone, but when combined together, they can create an integrated strategy that will help you reach more potential customers.
After all, content marketing brings in around 3x more leads for small businesses than traditional outbound marketing strategies. It just makes sense.
We will discuss how small businesses can leverage these two types of digital marketing strategies for maximum results. After all, we want you to be successful no matter what you do.
Understanding content marketing and social media marketing.
As a small business owner, you’ve probably heard of both content marketing and social media marketing, but do you truly understand what each type of marketing entails?
Content marketing is all about creating useful, informative content on a consistent basis to build trust with your target audience. This could include blog posts, articles, videos, or other forms of long-form content.
Social media marketing focuses on shorter bursts of engagement and sharing content on various social networks. It’s more about creating a presence, building relationships with followers, and driving traffic to your website with targeted posts.
They’re very similar, but one way to look at these two is that content marketing is the overall strategy, whereas social media marketing is a component of content marketing. It’s a type. It’s still content, it’s still publishing images, videos, and text, but the goal is to connect with your audience and build relationships.
Benefits and drawbacks of a content marketing strategy.
Overall, every small business should invest in content marketing because of the numerous benefits it offers to businesses.
When your deciding to allocate your budget toward a campaign, here are a few things to think about—
- Trust and loyalty with customers. A huge benefit to content marketing is that you’ll build trust with your target audience by providing them with useful and interesting content. This can help build loyalty and encourage customers to come back to your business again and again.
- Long-term ROI. Content marketing is often seen as a long-term investment since it takes time for the content you create to be indexed in search engines and start appearing organically.
- Driving more traffic. When you create content that is well-written, informative, and relevant to your target audience, you’re likely to see an increase in traffic to your website.
- Boosts SEO. Content marketing also helps boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by helping you build a library of long-form content that ranks highly in the SERPs.
Disadvantages of content marketing.
These are all great benefits. However, content marketing does have its drawbacks. Here are some of the biggest drawbacks or disadvantages of content marketing—
- Long-term efforts. If you want to see immediate results, content marketing isn’t the right choice. You need to invest both time and effort into creating quality content, so it could take months before you start to see any benefits.
- Expensive and costly. Content creation can be expensive and requires a lot of resources (time, people, etc.). In addition, tracking and analyzing your performance may also require additional software and tools. If you don’t have the capital or resources to invest in content marketing, it may not be the right choice for your business.
No matter how you cut it, content marketing is a great choice for almost any sized business. Of course, smaller businesses will have more trouble getting going with content marketing because of their budget constraints, but if you use it in conjunction with other forms of marketing, like social media marketing, you’ll be able to maximize your results.
Benefits and drawbacks of a social media marketing strategy.
As a small business owner, you probably already have your social media accounts set up, and you might be posting content regularly, but is this the best way to use social media marketing?
The benefits of social media are numerous. Here are a few you should consider—
- Quick and easy engagement with customers. With social media, businesses can quickly communicate with their customers and build relationships. This is because most people already spend a lot of time on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
- Cheap advertising. Social media can also be a great way to get more eyes on your product or service with sponsored posts or ads. It’s much cheaper than traditional advertising, and you can target the exact demographic that you’re trying to reach.
- Ability to reach a larger audience quickly. When you post content on social media, you have the potential to reach millions of people quickly. This is especially useful if you’re promoting or announcing a new product launch.
Disadvantages of social media marketing.
Of course, just like all digital marketing campaigns, social media also has its drawbacks—
- Short-term engagement. Since most posts on social media are short and fleeting, it can be difficult to get long-term engagement from your target audience. It’s also hard to measure its effectiveness in the long term.
- Risk of negative feedback. Social media can be a great place for customers to voice their opinions, both good and bad. This means that there could be a potential risk of your business receiving negative feedback, damaging your reputation. It can happen when you give the megaphone to your customers.
- Social media networks have control. At any given time, your social media campaigns can be derailed by a social media platform changing its algorithm or rules. This means that you need to be constantly adapting your strategies and keeping up with the latest changes.
Overall, social media marketing is great for businesses that are just starting out. It’s cheap, fast, and easy to use. However, it’s important to remember that successful social media marketing should not be used in isolation.
It’s best when you combine content marketing with social media to build trust with your audience through long-form content while also boosting engagement on social networks with short-term bursts of activity.
By combining the two together, you can achieve your short-term and long-term goals by creating valuable content for your followers.
How to leverage content marketing and social media marketing for maximum results.
Now that you’re armed with a full understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of both content marketing and social media marketing, it’s time to discuss how you can maximize their combination.
Create an integrated marketing strategy.
I know this sounds complex, but it’s actually easy to develop a campaign plan for these two marketing strategies.
You’ll want to put together a calendar that includes content creation, social media posting, and advertising. This will help you plan out your content marketing campaigns in advance and ensure that your social media strategy is always running at peak efficiency. Creating content is easy, but creating consistent content that continually speaks to prospective customers is a bit more challenging and requires a plan.
Make sure each platform has its own purpose.
When it comes to combining content marketing and social media, it’s important to make sure each platform has its own purpose.
For example, you can use content marketing to create valuable and informative blog posts that will help establish your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. Then, you can use social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram to promote these posts and increase engagement with your target audience.
Remember to keep things interesting.
One of the best ways to make the most of your social media and content marketing efforts is by keeping things fresh and interesting.
You can do this by varying up the types of content you post on social media and creating new, exciting content for your blog or website. This will help keep your audience engaged and interested in what you have to offer.
For the most part, business owners like to sell, sell, sell. That’s great, but keep in mind that not every potential customer is at the same point in the sales funnel. Some aren’t exactly looking to pull the trigger on your services or products right now. So change up your posts with how-tos, tips, tricks, or even some personal photos. If you and your team go out to lunch, take a photo and post it. This is a great way to increase brand awareness as well.
Measure and analyze your marketing strategy results.
In order to measure the success of your marketing campaigns, it’s important to keep track of your data and analytics. There are countless tools, from Metricool to Google Analytics, that can help you measure everything from social platforms and brand engagement to web pages.
You’ll be able to use this data to analyze what content and social media posts are performing well and which ones need improvement. You can also use the data to optimize your strategies to get maximum results from both types of marketing.
For example, if you’re constantly posting about your business’s ongoing sales but the engagement is extremely low on those, you might be wasting efforts. Try a different approach.
Assessing areas that need improvement is something we see small business owners lack the most. Of course, we want to keep generating content (it takes a lot of our time, even as social media marketers), but it’s not about quantity; it’s about quality. Spend some time to make the right content, not just content, for the sake of making content.
Get more clients and customers with these digital marketing strategies.
You’re probably ready to get out there and start using content marketing and social media to get new customers and raising brand awareness.
The good news is that these strategies really do work if you’re using them correctly. So don’t look at them as content marketing versus social media marketing; approach them as content marketing AND social media marketing.
Content marketing allows you to create valuable and informative content that will help build trust with your audience and establish your brand as an authority in the industry. Meanwhile, social media allows you to boost engagement and increase brand awareness.
Using these strategies together, you can create an integrated marketing strategy that will help you reach more potential customers and get them to take action.
We’re a small business like yours, and we want to see you succeed. If you’re looking to enhance brand awareness or just want to discuss the best marketing strategy for your business, let’s talk. You can call or text us anytime. We’ve been operating social media campaigns for years on multiple social media platforms. We’ll help you define your target audiences and create an online marketing plan that speaks to both your existing and potential customers.