How to Create Great Content for your Business: An Introduction to our Content Marketing Strategy
How do you attract visitors to your website?
Emails, Referrals, Paid Advertisements, Social Media? Let's consider a Content Marketing Strategy that will help you to drive traffic to your website.
Content Marketing
If you own or operate a business that is reliant on web traffic in order to drive sales, much of your marketing efforts should be focused on attracting visitors to your website and converting them from prospects to clients or customers. One way to gain targeted web traffic though social media is to implement a content marketing strategy. Content Marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage your target audience which will help you to build credibility, increase brand awareness, establish relationships and provide value. Our Symmetrical B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy is fueled by Content Marketing on social media. We have found these tactics to drive highly targeted traffic (especially when it relates to a variety of Business-to-Business industries) which is more likely to enhance conversions and sales. In addition, our strategy has a significant impact on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as it uniformly promotes relevant content through high-authority sites on a regular basis which helps the website at which the content resides to gain more credibility and expand upon the content to be found on the social media pages at which it has been shared. This is also relevant since Google and other search engines are taking cues from social media sites regarding the amount of activity/engagement to provide more appropriate rankings for websites during searches. Ideally the strategy involves sharing the content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ routinely in a symmetrical manner.
Reach the Decision Maker
The reason why this is effective is because it develops a pattern in which followers can expect useful industry-relevant content which will help your company to develop a brand in addition to the fact that the message being shared symmetrically increases its chances of being seen by the decision maker. The primary difference between this strategy being successful for Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) is that the B2B decision maker remains in the same business-oriented mindset regardless of which of the 4 social media sites they are using whereas a message would likely preform better with consumers if it were tailored to the nature of the site that they are viewing. This is why the strategy would likely perform better for the static decision maker in a business as opposed to a dynamic consumer. For instance, even though each social media post should include either a photo, video or web link, the text on a post and inclusion of hashtags may differ from Twitter and Facebook due to the nature of the sites.
Share Unique Content
One thing that we have noticed when consulting with our clients is the lack of awareness regarding the inclusion of unique content in a content marketing strategy. Besides developing a brand and interacting with customers or clients, the objective of social media marketing is to drive traffic to your website to either attain email addresses, sales or prompt the visitor to contact you. If you are not sharing content on social media that is not inbound to your website, it simply isn't going to result in web traffic. Use your content as a magnet. When you share content from other websites you will be providing value by sharing useful industry-related tips or entertaining your followers. When you share content from your own website you are trying to attract visitors to it where you will be able to encourage the desired transaction. It is often recommended to share a mix of outside and unique content. This will decrease the amount of content that you will be required to create and still allow for you to share useful content that will help you to enhance your digital brand. Consider the following content tips from our Symmetrical B2B Social Media Strategy:
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Connect with us for more information regarding content marketing and social media tips. Contact us for a social media strategy development consultation to learn how to manage your social media accounts for your business or to outsource your social media marketing efforts.
Written by: Andrew C. Belton
LinkedIn: Company Page
Twitter: @Symmetricalmm
