As any digital marketer will tell you, content marketing and social media are among the best ways to grow your business. Content drives organic traffic to your site, while social media builds your customer base.
To truly take advantage of both initiatives and optimize your outreach, you’ve got to align these two critical approaches. For some, this task is easier said than done.
Creating fresh, relevant content helps you reach wider audiences, sets you up as an industry leader, and provides value to your customers, all while driving traffic to your sales funnel with the goal of increasing conversions. Social media keeps your branding front and center while distributing content and providing a space where customers can interact with your business. Here’s how to best align social media and content outreach.
Build Links Through Quality Content
First, let’s talk about link building. Not only does it help establish your authority and increase customer trust, but link building also drives traffic, improves your visibility, and enables you to reach new audiences. When combined with other elements, such as content optimization, backlinks are an essential piece of the algorithms search engines use to determine your site’s rankings.
To build authoritative backlinks naturally, you must align your social media and your content efforts by strategically promoting high-quality content that helps you engage with your target audience. Your audience may include potential customers, certain influencers, other websites, or industry publications, so develop content with these specific groups in mind.
Start with Research
If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for relevant, quality content, turn to research. Across industries and target groups, users value research, especially when it’s presented clearly, is easy to understand, and solves a problem.
Start by considering common questions asked by customers. Use research to come up with answers and write a post that offers solutions based on these common queries.
You’ll be providing valuable information and solving a problem, which makes your content outreach natural, thanks to its organic shareability on social media.
Partner with Influencers
If you want to get picked up by an industry influencer, a little flattery can go a long way: Craft content with a focus on sharing insights from the influencers you want to woo. You may want to interview an influencer, use their quotes, or write an article about their latest predictions.
What if you don’t have any credible influencers in mind? Start by taking a dive into analytics to find link-building targets. Search for bios that reference your topic, then look at elements like Followers or Social Authority to see which influencers have the most… well, influence.
Once you’ve created your content, be sure to credit the influencer’s insights. Then ask the influencer to share with their own network – further increasing your outreach.
Provide Tools and Resources
When it comes to aligning content outreach and social media, it’s all about giving back to your audiences. Providing resources and tools within your content makes it valuable to your audience, thus shareable.
When creating content, ask yourself which tools would be most helpful to your target audience. Once you’ve determined what resources your audience will value, take it a step further. Consider developing content that differentiates between specific types of tools or resources, that offers how-to guides, that provides expert insight… you get the picture. Including screenshots, videos, and other helpful resources further elevates your content.
Remember: If your audience finds your content helpful and valuable, they’ll share it. If they don’t, they probably won’t.
Promote Content Strategically
Developing high-quality content was just part one – now it’s time to promote it. Keep thinking strategically when using social media for content outreach.
Given the high volume of messaging that hits everyone on social media, it’s vital you stand out; this means creating customized, relevant, and engaging messages. Using individual names (rather than tagging every user in a single tweet) and creating custom graphics helps achieve a personalized approach. If you’re doing direct outreach, avoid automated messaging. Whenever possible, use direct messaging or emails to reach out to targets.
To ensure all the hard work you put into developing high-quality, linkable content gets in front of the right eyes, you may want to consider utilizing paid advertising. Creating audiences based on your link-building targets is a fantastic place to start.
Aligning your content marketing and social media efforts can help you build links that drive organic traffic and grow your customer base. Take the time to create high-quality content and then to strategically promote it on social media. Using these two essential tools in tandem can increase your exposure, help you engage with your audience, and improve conversions. When your content objectives and your social media strategy are aligned, you’ll see your brand’s reach skyrocket!
