Social media can be highly effective for driving significant traffic to your website, building credibility through social validation and managing your brand's reputation online. And for your inbound marketing campaign, it's a central component of promoting your offer, blog posts and other content in order to gain visibility and attract the right kinds of prospects.
Working as one facet of a holistic inbound strategy, social media helps you accomplish many of the goals set out for your marketing campaign. Properly leveraging social media allows you to:
- Create awareness for your content
- Build your authority as a content publisher
- Build trust and engage customers
- Generate high quality leads
- Increase web traffic and brand awareness
Implemented correctly, social media can be an element of your inbound marketing campaign that can amplify your reach and significantly improve your marketing effectiveness. Below are four opportunities that social media affords you to beef up your inbound strategy.
1) Content Distribution
The opportunities that social media presents for distributing your content are plentiful. Whether blog posts, eBooks, webinars or whitepapers, social media channels can help you get your content to the right people.
2) Relationship Building
A crucial way to promote your content online is through building relationships. Identifying and engaging with key players and social influencers in your and your target buyers' industries can help you build trust and credibility. It also ensures that the content you produce is being put into the right hands by leveraging not only your network, but also the networks of those you've established relationships with. It's a great way to maximize your reach and broaden the impact of your content.
3) Engaging Leads
As its name suggests, social media is, in effect, a social tool. Social platforms present you with the opportunity to talk, listen, engage and respond to feedback. It gives you the means to have direct conversations with prospective buyers. While it's not feasible to engage with every prospect or respond to every tweet or Facebook message, you can efficiently engage with fans and followers by making a check-in schedule.
4) Monitoring And Scheduling
Much like your content calendar or the deadlines set for your overall inbound campaign, your social media activity should be scheduled and monitored. Scheduling allows you to roll out content from your repertoire at critical times, and monitoring allows you to listen to social conversations and if needed, adjust your schedule accordingly. For example, if you have a variety of content pieces on search algorithms and it's a hot topic over social channels, but you've scheduled your social media accounts to release unrelated content, it's probably a good idea to adjust your updates and incorporate topical pieces.
When it comes down to it, social media is a highly effective way to promote your content offers and broaden the impact that your content has. It can help generate leads, drive targeted traffic to your website and build brand awareness. It's an aspect of inbound marketing that you can't afford to ignore.
How are you using social media to beef up your inbound strategy? Let us know your success stories in the comments section.
This is part 8 of 9 in our blog series, The Key Elements of an Inbound Marketing Campaign.
Great article – thanks.
“Much like your content calendar or the deadlines set for your overall inbound campaign, your social media activity should be scheduled and monitored.”
I think this is exactly right. There is a tendency for day-to-day social media activity to be thought of in less structured and goal-oriented ways than other forms of marketing. But there is no good reason for this. Set deadlines, schedule and monitor.
Nice tips for inbound marketing but I would like to add some more about inbound marketing techniques.
The new inbound marketing definition: Be found through the recommendation of others and delight everyone that finds you.
As inbound marketing evolves, the components also need to change. Traditionally, inbound marketing has been functionally defined as the combination of search, social and content. However, these components are not enough for inbound marketers to excel in today’s environment.
Hope this should more help full.