Social Marketing Is Powered By Content

Posted on | September 25, 2009 | Comments

We talk about our approach to social marketing being “rooted in brand, and powered by content.” We’ll cover the front half in an upcoming post. The back half is our take on The Great Truism of social marketing… that today, you are what you publish.

Content Strategy

We believe success in social marketing starts with a content strategy, which boils down to a clear-eyed definition of exactly what kind of content is at the intersection of:

• what your target audience is looking for online, and
• what you are uniquely willing and/or able to provide.

What does that mean? It means if you’re magic marker brand, don’t blog about the 10 Reasons Your Marker Is Better than Brand X. Create a showcase for people who use your product to make cool things. If you make plastic stuff in every conceivable configuration, don’t tweet your press releases. Create a blog about how people can take control of household chaos and get organized. If you’re a late-night taco truck, don’t do a YouTube series on Korean cooking. Tell hungry, drunk people where you’re at through a medium they can access easily.

It ain’t rocket surgery people.

Feeding The Beast

The real challenge with this approach is that when you commit to a content strategy like the above, you actually need to produce content aligned with that strategy. Knowing that once you start, you have to “feed the beast” – day-in-and-day-out – actually keeps some smart marketing folks out of social media altogether.

That’s a shame, because once you get into the rhythm of it, contributing something worthwhile to the conversation about a problem your product solves (which in the vast majority of cases is ground zero of the intersection defined above) rarely turns out to be anywhere near as hard as you think it’s going to be.

Three simple strategies can ease the burden dramatically… (next)

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