8 Reasons Content Marketing And Social Media Are Important For Your Business

This is a guest blog by Dhrishni Thakuria, giving an insight into how content marketing and social media are contributing to the success and growth of enterprises, irrespective of industry domain. She is currently managing Content Marketing and Social Media at TurboHire.

The old saying that content is king might be one of the most overused phrases ever to grace the world of digital marketing; however, it’s fair to say that it’s hung around so long because it’s actually true. Good content with a user-biased social media marketing plan is what sets your website apart from the masses and delivers the right message into the hearts and minds of your customers.

4 Reasons Content Marketing Is Important

Writing content seems like it’s going to be easy. You just write a few blog posts or add more pages to your site, right? But when you sit down to really think about it, it’s a lot more complicated than you originally thought. First, you need a strong keyword research plan. Buyer personas. Bags of creativity. A no-holds-barred approach to writer’s block. A top-notch grammar game. And ideas by the bucket load. Then there’s the competition.

The success of your website is determined primarily by this. Ultimately, content wins the wallets of your customers. If you have effective taglines, great design will only enhance their effectiveness. The design itself does not sell. The content of your website should always begin with proper market research.

1. Content Is Used Everywhere And For Everything

For a good investment of your money, there’s no better long-term strategy than content marketing. There are various reasons for it but what is most compelling is the point that content is used everywhere and influences every other type of marketing strategy:

• Your email content fuels opens and click-throughs.
• Your web content fuels rankings and encourages conversions.
• It’s essential for social media campaigns.
• Content is necessary for blog posts.
• Content is useful for creating trust, authority and establishing relationships with other brands and businesses

2. Great Content Inspires Trust

Content is one way to demonstrate your brand’s integrity and, in turn, help your audience trust you. With this power, it’s easy to see how content marketing drives sales. Simply by reassuring consumers, a well-placed piece of content can set your brand apart in a crowded marketplace.

Building this into a content marketing strategy can be done in a number of ways:

• Work with an influencer or blogger to endorse your product.
• Create authority branded content.
• Invite a respected person in your field or industry to contribute their own content to your blog or website.
• Secure a guest post or column of your own on a respected website, blog site, or forum.
• Ask happy customers to leave reviews on your site or other review sites.

3. Quality Content Builds A Community Of Loyal Customers

Giving good free information out can build a tightly connected community of customers who are loyal to your brand which they have chosen to follow. By giving your customer community valued content for following you, they have a reason to invest time in your brand. If you publish content at regular intervals, followers effectively ‘check-in’ with your brand.

4. Content Marketing Matters To Search Engines

Consumers turn to search engines for solutions to their problems. Sometimes your best opportunity to win new customers is to be there when they Google it. In fact, you may have already established a search engine optimization (SEO) plan. You may also know that search engines frequently update the algorithms they use to crawl the web, so they can continuously improve the quality of results that we see when we do a search.

Google’s updates in recent years increasingly reward quality and punish low quality. And what does quality mean for Google? For one thing, up-to-date content is rewarded. So publishing fresh articles, and updating your existing content, will help you maintain a strong showing on search engine results pages (SERPs) and keep people coming back to your site.

Second, Google increasingly punishes what it considers to be “spammy” or overly optimized pages. One example of this is “keyword stuffing,” which generally means using the same keyword too many times when it adds no value to a passage.

A good rule of thumb here is that if it’s awkward for you to read, it’s probably a red flag for Google.

Always write for the reader first and research long-tail keywords to use as synonyms. That way your content will be both user-friendly and SEO-friendly.

4 Reasons Social Media Is Important

Did you know that social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing? Or that 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form?

No matter what you sell and who you sell it to, using social media as a marketing tool can help you grow your brand and pad your wallet.

At this point in the game, not having an active social media presence is kind of like pulling out a flip phone at a business meeting and then not understanding why your boss keeps giving your colleague all the new accounts.

1. If You Are Doing It Right, Social Media Will Lead To Real Relationship Building

Part of what makes things like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram marketing so cool is the interaction you get to have with your customer base — you can read their status updates or even tweets to get insights into their daily lives (and maybe adjust your marketing strategy as a result). What products are they buying and why? What are they doing on the weekend? What kind of posts do they love to share, and from what websites?

You can also use social media as a tool for connecting with complementary, non-competing businesses, thought leaders, and tastemakers in your space, as well as journalists who cover your industry. Sometimes, becoming besties starts with a simple retweet.

2. Improve Customer Service And Retention

Because social media functions best in real-time, it gives you instant access to feedback from your customers. This insight is invaluable, as it can help everything from new product growth to customer retention.

Social media has become more and more important to our organization as a source of customer service over the past few years.

With 24/7 monitoring over our social media channels by three times in three geographically distinct offices, we’ve improved our speed of response to under 60 minutes regardless of the time of day.

3. A Strong Social Media Presence Builds Brand Loyalty

Brands with active social media profiles have more loyal customers. It’s easy to imagine why:

When you’re engaging and interacting on social media (not just tossing your posts out onto the web hoping someone will stumble upon them) you become less like a corporation and more like what you truly are — a unified group of people who share a vision.

4. Social Media Marketing Is A (Fairly) Level Playing Field

Some brands may have bigger ad budgets than others, but all companies start off on pretty equal footing when it comes to social media marketing. The people and brands who thrive and go viral are those with the most clever, attention-grabbing tactics (and the most ridiculous gifs) and the most useful, link-worthy content. In short, they’re providing value to their target audience while also showing personality and being entertaining.

If you want to get lots of traffic and really increase your sales online, you’re going to have to outwit, outnetwork, and outwrite your competition while offering superior products and customer service.

Isn’t that what business is all about, anyway?

What Are Your Thoughts?

When building your content and social media strategy for your business, it helps to learn from what other people in your industry are saying and doing.

When it comes to these plans, there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel. Instead, take advice from businesses that have found success when using social as well as the content. Whether it’s gaining more followers or increasing customer engagement, businesses around the world are discovering ways to how content marketing and social media are contributing to success and growth. And clearly, by the increasing demand of it, it is core to the business.

Here’s an article by Shoan Shinde, Marketing Director at TurboHire, talking about the adoption of a design thinking approach to develop a user-centered marketing strategy.