In recent years social media has proven to be an excellent channel for inbound marketing. In fact, inbound marketers who have managed to leverage social media have had a reason to smile. In other words, social media makes it possible to share and promote widely content created by inbound marketers.
Considering inbound marketers must attract, convert, close, and delight in order to obtain visitors, leads, customers, and promoters, social media comes handy in all the stages of inbound marketing. Simply, social media is an excellent way of attracting new visitors and retaining existing ones. See the illustration below by HubSpot to see how inbound marketing works.
Why social media is vital to inbound marketing
Without further ado, let’s see how social media go hand in hand with inbound marketing.
1. Helps inbound marketing with content promotion
Social media creates a channel for you to attract new readers and returning visitors with your great content. With a sound promotion plan, achieving your inbound marketing strategy goals becomes a breeze. A good promotion plan should include the following:
- Owned media: This is the content you create yourself such as podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, etc. You have full control over your content.
- Paid media: This is the content for which you pay to reach target customers, such as ads and sponsored posts.
- Earned media: Your audiences are the key players. The content they create (such as reviews, social shares, or any other user activity) will help promote you.
2. Help in finding content ideas
No doubt, you can use social media to gather content ideas. For example, you can use Reddit and Quora to learn more about the kind of content people are talking about and sharing. You can also read online reviews, visit discussion forums, and so on. Don’t just limit yourself to one or a few types of social media. The sky is the limit!
The graphic below shows the different types of social media that you can leverage to gather content ideas.
Social media monitoring tools
These tools come in handy before and after creating your content. You can use them before creating your content to search for targeted keywords and to listen to what is being shared the most. Once your content is ready, shared, and promoted, you can use them to monitor how your content is performing. For example, to capture powerful insights that can help you influence your online presence.
3. Provides a greater understanding of your audience
The amount of significant data social media holds today can go a long way in helping you understand your audience better. You just need to use the right analytical tools to get a deeper understanding of who is actually your target audience before creating content. Once you do that, it will be not only possible to create content your audience will engage with but also content search engine loves. For example, Google loves content that answers audience search queries.
4. Social media helps with SEO
Want to create more search engine optimized content? Social media comes in handy, and we can attest to this. We have seen websites rank higher on SERPs (search engine results pages) after leveraging social media. Why not you? All you need to do is to use social media data to learn more about your audience so that you can craft more search engine optimized content. Is that not simple? Of course, it is!
Basically, social media helps in:
- Build an audience
- Potential for links
- Helps promotion
- Branded searches
5. You can find new opportunities through social media
How is this possible? We shall use an example to help you understand how this works. We use Hootsuite to create a listening tab that has search streams of blog content URLs we have published. By doing this, we are able to see who is sharing the content we have published.
If we see the shareability of a piece of content or hashtag by a specific segment is rising, we take that as growth signal and move fast to leverage the opportunity before our competitors do. That way, we are able to get insights into groups or territories of people who are likely interested in our products and services—this further helps in creating unique inbound content that help us outshine our rivals.
Things to consider in social media
- A deeper understanding of which social channels your buyer personas actively use
- The ROI and lead generation potential of your social channels
- The kind of content to share
Social media channels you can use
- Low marketing expenses
- Massive exposure on a global scale
- Ability to target potential customers
- Increasing your web traffic
- Developing brand loyalty
- Useful information – competitor information and Facebook insights
- Start with the end product first
- Focus on one funnel at a time
- Follow up
- Rise, repeat and optimize
- Break the distanced corporate image
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Generate traffic to your website
- Communicate more effectively
- Follow the trends in your industry
- Strengthen your connection with your local community
- Increased engagement
- High conversion rate
- Multichannel connection
- Reach target market
- Lower CPC
- Increased visibility
- It is a way to target your company updates
- It optimizes your website for SEO ranking
- It’s pretty much another website
- It’s a lead generator
- Ideal for showcasing your products or services
- Generates traffic to your site
- Great for brand visibility
- Build your corporate identity
Examples of inbound marketing
- Social media campaigns (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest)
- Ebooks
- Topical blogs
- SEO website text
- Webinars
- Viral videos
Wrap up
Social media can boost your business in many ways. In inbound marketing, you can use the various social media in all the stages of inbound marketing to give your business a competitive edge. So, if still yet to incorporate social media in your inbound marketing strategies, we enjoin you to consider doing that now. All the best!
