More than half of B2B marketers silo their social media and content marketing strategies, with 37% producing unique content for each social channel and 17% pushing the same content across platforms. What makes this wasted opportunity even worse is that not only can the two strategies be used synergistically to increase each other’s impact, but integrating them also saves time and effort, further increasing ROI.
Content marketing consists of planning, producing, and distributing content to help your business achieve its objectives. Social media is an excellent way to get eyes on that content, but you need to present in the right way to the right channel at the right time to maximize reach and engagement and achieve ROI-raising results.
It’s no surprise social media and content marketing work so well together, since they’re closely related. Most people have an idea of the flow from content marketing to social media as a distribution channel, but they often miss the nuance that makes this a successful strategy.
It’s not enough to just link social media posts and content marketing. Instead, you need to follow best practices for each platform and deliver engaging posts to users when they’re most receptive in the manner that most appeals to them.
There’s another flow to consider. Social media can feed ideas upward to content marketing, too. As you get to know your audience, you can use social listening to find out what kind of content they’re most interested in and create it for them. You can even go one step further and ask them directly through polls and thought-provoking posts.
Getting your audience to offer insights that you use to produce content also gives them a sense of ownership in your content and makes them more invested in your brand.
Antunes, a leading manufacturer of countertop cooking equipment for the foodservice industry, wanted to build awareness among its target audiences and drive action. VantagePoint constructed a strategic content marketing and social media plan, ultimately adding the “Insights” section to the Antunes website and relaunching LinkedIn and Twitter platforms.
Before you can figure out how to plan, create, publish, and manage your content, you need to do your research, starting with defining your own company’s goals.
Many companies skip this crucial step, thinking they don’t need to write their goals because they already know what they are. Unfortunately, if you don’t write down your goals, your other team members may have a very different idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, and unwritten goals tend to be too vague to be actionable.
The best goals for social media and content marketing are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART). A vague goal may be to “increase conversions.” A SMART goal might be to “increase social media click-through conversions by 10% in Q2 this year.”
Without setting SMART goals for your social media and content marketing, whether you have achieved your goals may be open to interpretation. Specifically defining what you are setting out to achieve makes it possible to measure success or failure of specific points, so you can continue to hone your social media content strategy for maximum results.
Some common social media and content marketing goals include brand awareness, boosting engagement, generating leads, and driving website traffic.
79% of top performing B2B marketers put high value on knowing their audience, according to CMI. And once you know your own goals, you can turn your attention to learning more about your audience.
Use social listening, tools for finding “lookalike” customers, surveys, and analytics to learn basic demographic information about your target audience, such as their age and location. Find out how your ideal customers talk about your brand and products or services, what they care about, their biggest challenges, and when and where they’re most active on social media. You can also get insights by asking your customer service teams what questions and problems current customers need help with.
Take the time to create buyer personas from information you discover about ideal customers in your target audience. And make sure you keep them in mind when you create content.
This valuable information can save you a lot of time, effort, and expense that would otherwise be lost experimenting with poorly resonating content. You can start off closer to creating the kinds of posts that align with your target audience’s interests and needs — and distributing it on the platforms when and where they’re most receptive.
Why reinvent the wheel? You can give your social media and content marketing a big boost by learning from what your competitors are already doing. There are a variety of tools available that you can use to take a peek at what’s working, what’s not working, and where there may be opportunities your company can take advantage of.
84% of B2B marketers named LinkedIn as the social media platform that delivers the best value in 2024 — with Meta (Instagram and Facebook) trailing as a distant second. X (formerly known as Twitter), which used to have a large market share, has dropped to an unimpressive 8%.
LinkedIn has more than 830 million users, 40% of whom use it every day. And 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions, which makes LinkedIn a much higher priority platform for B2B marketers.
Audit your current social content to look for trends. You may be surprised to see posts you expect to be your highest performers fail to get much attention or vice versa. If you notice a big discrepancy between what you expect and what you end up with, try to see what made the difference. Was it tone? Message? Medium? Try making slight adjustments to see if you can isolate variables.
If you’re creating a content calendar without integrating your social strategy — or maybe even creating content as you go without a calendar at all — you’re missing opportunities to improve your results and spending more time and effort than you need to.
48% of marketers say failing to efficiently repurpose content is the biggest problem they have scaling content production. 29% say their editorial calendar doesn’t state clear deadlines.
It can also be challenging to get a clear picture of how well your overall marketing efforts are performing when they’re spread out. When everything is laid out in the same place, it’s much easier to get an overview and identify where and how specific content or campaigns might fit in.
Content that can advance your brand generally falls into one of four categories: promote, educate, entertain, and inspire/engage. As you lay out your social media and content marketing calendar, determine how you can repurpose content across your social channels and other outlets, planning what type of content you will post on which channel and when you will post it for maximum exposure.
Relationships are two-way streets, and — just as in life — you need to put in care and effort to get your audience to engage. Post polls and contests. Ask thought-provoking questions, and encourage opinions and discussions.
Open-ended questions, such as, “Was everything about your experience just as you expected?” or “What was your favorite thing about it?” tell customers you care about their opinions. Use their input to continue to hone your strategy, and if they bring up a concern, be sure to address it as soon as possible.
Once you know who your target audience is, what their pain points are, what they enjoy, and when, where, and how they engage, you’ve built your content calendar and determined how it will integrate with your social media channels, creating your content is much easier. You can plan to create multiple pieces simultaneously, saving on studio or talent costs and removing stress by working in advance of need.
You can batch-build distribution, too, easily creating a balance between content types and scheduling them to post at optimal times.
Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to preschedule tweets and status updates as far in advance as you want. Want to add something new? Just decide when and where you want to share it, and it will be posted on time, every time.
You know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish and when you plan to accomplish it. Now it’s time to see whether you were able to meet your goals.
Determine and monitor which metrics best demonstrate how well you’re meeting your objectives, such as reach, clicks, engagement, and engagement rates. Check out our guide to measuring B2B social media ROI for more details.
If creating an integrated social media and content marketing plan sounds like a full-time job, that’s because successfully orchestrating all those moving parts takes dedicated time and expertise to implement. If you’re looking for a faster and easier way to success, VantagePoint can help. Our senior-level employees with years of experience in their fields gives us the perspective to help you hit the ground running and take your marketing to the next level.
Learn more about our social media services.
