Content Marketing vs. Social Media Strategy: Do you Need Both?

Content marketing vs. social media strategy – what are they and do you need both?

Social media and content marketing are two distinct but complementary marketing strategies. Companies can generate mindblowing results from a robust content marketing or social media strategy. However, only top marketers understand the benefits of integrating both strategies.

A robust content marketing strategy provides detailed information that can be repurposed into social media content. Similarly, the insights from social media content provide valuable ideas for a robust content marketing strategy.

Only B2B companies that effectively integrate the two strategies gain optimal results from their marketing efforts. I’ll explain why.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy refers to a company’s plan to create, manage, and distribute content. The main goal is to build a solid relationship with prospects by sharing relevant and valuable content that addresses their needs, interests, and pain points.

Content can be created in many forms – blog posts, infographics, emails, white papers, videos, podcasts, etc., to capture various audience interests.

Top B2B companies understand that content is a valuable marketing tool for earning customer trust and establishing industry authority. To achieve their content marketing goals, they focus on being the go-to resource for helpful industry information, helping their prospects and customers make valuable business decisions.

A comprehensive content marketing strategy involves:

  • Audience identification
  • Defining content goals
  • Content creation
  • Content distribution
  • Lead generation, etc.

What Is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a plan on how a company intends to use social media platforms to educate, inform, and engage with its target audience, drive traffic to its websites or sales pages, build brand, product, and service awareness, and ultimately meet other business objectives.

It’s one of the most popular marketing channels, and smart B2B companies understand the many opportunities it presents to build trust and authority while increasing their margins.

A comprehensive social media strategy involves:

  • Audience identification
  • Goal setting
  • Platform selection
  • Content creation and distribution
  • Engagement strategy, etc.

Content Marketing vs. Social Media Strategy: How They Differ

Content marketing and social media marketing differ in many ways, from their focus to objectives, content types, and many more.

Focus

Content marketing uses different content types, like blog posts, infographics, videos, etc., to educate, inform, and address audience pain points while building a valuable relationship with them. Forward-thinking companies understand that by creating relevant and informative content, they establish their place as a reliable figure in the industry, giving them industry authority status.

However, social media marketing uses relevant and visually appealing content to attract engagement and interact with an audience in real-time. Customer-centric B2B companies leverage social media platforms to interact with their audience and understand their needs and interests.

Objectives

Content marketing’s objective is to use relevant and informative content to build brand awareness, establish authority and expertise, and generate and nurture leads into customers. It aims to capture customers at the different stages of their buyer’s journey, from awareness to consideration to decision-making.

On the other hand, the objectives of social media marketing are slightly different. It aims to use relevant and engaging content to increase brand awareness, foster direct communication with the target audience, drive traffic to specific content or offers, and enhance customer service and support. Companies build strong communities on different social media platforms by engaging their customers consistently, making it easy to convert them into loyal customers.

Content Types

Content marketing comprises various forms of content, from blog posts to infographics, eBooks, white papers, videos, etc. These content are usually long-form, as they’re more in-depth and informative. Companies create detailed content and later break them into smaller pieces to repurpose them on many channels, including social media.

On the other hand, social media marketing is known for short-form content, such as posts, images, infographics, short videos, etc., created to fit into a platform’s content specifications.

Social media platforms have different content length limits. Twitter, for instance, has a maximum of 280 characters. Even when platforms like Facebook allow long-form content with a character limit of 63,206, smart companies make their posts short and crispy to capture their audience’s wavering attention and maintain engagement.

There are many other differences between content marketing and social media marketing, such as content distribution mode, measuring metrics, content lifespan, etc.

Why Content Marketing and Social Media Work Together

Some B2B managers ask, “What is the link between content marketing and social media strategy?” “Does content strategy include social media?”

While content marketing and social media marketing are two distinct online marketing strategies, they complement each other in many ways. Top B2B companies understand that they need both to achieve optimal marketing results.

Amplified Content Reach

Content amplification is one of the vital ways social media and content marketing work together to enhance B2B marketing efforts. Social media is one of the major distribution channels for content. When a company publishes well-written, relevant content on its website, the next step is to share it on different social media platforms.

By sharing valuable content with their social media followers, B2B companies also reach their follower’s networks. How? Most social media users will not hesitate to comment, share, and retweet vital information that would benefit their networks. The wider the content reach, the more significant the visibility boost.

Profitable Engagement and Interaction

Social media helps B2B companies interact with their audience in real time, allowing them to address inquiries and customer complaints.

But beyond that, this social media engagement and interaction provide companies with valuable insights that could inform their content marketing efforts. They get new content ideas to keep their content marketing efforts going. And with more content published on their websites, companies have multiple excerpts to post on social media to increase engagement. It’s like a positive feedback loop.

One of the key benefits of this for B2B companies is that it proves their expertise to their customers and shows them they listen to their complaints across these social channels. This allows the customers to speak up more and helps the companies to keep improving their products, services, and marketing efforts.

Quality Lead Generation

Social media is one of the primary traffic sources for B2B companies. With over 4.2 billion social media users worldwide, innovative B2B companies see social media’s untapped potential and try to share their content consistently on these platforms to leverage them.

By sharing valuable, relevant content on social media, these companies direct their social media audience to their websites or sales funnels. Then, they receive in-depth information about their products and services.

After getting high-quality products and experiencing good customer service, these customers return to social media to discuss their experiences, generating more quality leads for the companies.

Integrate Content Marketing and Social Media Strategy for Optimal Marketing Results

While companies can implement separate content and social media marketing strategies, integrating both promises better returns. Companies repurpose their most valuable content on social media to drive engagement and traffic. Therefore, content marketing serves as a feeder source for social media content.Social media serves as an amplification tool for web content.

By integrating both marketing channels, B2B companies build valuable relationships. They also establish their expertise and authority, and generate high-quality leads that turn into loyal customers.