5 Elements to Maximize the Synergy Between Social Media and Content Marketing

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Mashable Social Media Day hosted by Slice Communications in Philadelphia.

Since most of the attendees are social media managers, I customized my presentation and discussed how to maximize the synergy between social media and content marketing.

Here is the reality: whenever I discuss content and social media marketing with my clients, they immediately dive into what content we should produce for social media channels or how to creatively repurpose content for various channels. This is good and all, but I always ask my client to sit back (physically) and elevate themselves (mentally). I ask them to take a moment look past the trees (their daily tasks) and focus on viewing the forest (social media, from content planning’s perspective).

The types of content we should produce or the creative ways of repurposing content will come naturally when we take care of “4 + 1” at a strategic level.

So, what is 4 + 1?

4+1 is about honing and aligning 4 elements with the central marketing team through 1 collaboration process.

Once you are able to align these 4 elements through a regular communications process, everything related to execution and copy writing will come naturally.

4 Elements for Alignment

1: Objectives

Social media managers tend to focus of the numbers of retweets, shares or likes. We should certainly pay attention to those metrics, however, the key from the start is to make sure that social media objectives are aligned with the overall business objectives.

Here is the good example of converting business objective to the social media level:

Business: 

Increase <x>% of <Product> revenue <$xM> by

expanding to <Segment>.

Marketing:

Establish <Product> as the preferred choice

for <Whom> in the <Segment> by building

awareness & driving demand.

Content Marketing: 

Build awareness and drive demand for <Product> as the preferred choice for <Whom> in the <Segment> by creating and promoting relevant content to relevant channels.

Social Media Marketing: 

Build awareness and drive demand for <Product> as the preferred choice for <Whom> in the <Segment> by creating and promoting content to relevant social media channels

Action for social media manager: Can you identify your company’s business objectives and translate them to your team’s objective?

2: Personas

We create our products or services either to solve certain problems or entertain our customers. As a marketer, it’s important to clearly identify who they are and understand as much about them as we can. In order to rally the internal team and external agencies, it’s essential to create a fictional representation of our ideal customers. That’s called the Buyer’s Persona. They are based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

The benefits of buyer’s personas:

• Make your audience real
• Rally the internal and external teams
• Share a common understanding
• Drive messaging development
• Guide content creation

Below is what a persona typically looks like:

Social media marketing manager needs to determine if they would like to use the corporate team developed personas or create their own. This should only be done if the specialized personas also support the overall business objectives and are approved by the corporate team. Either way, social media managers should evaluate the company’s buyers’ personas and customize them for social media outreach.

Below is the example of customizing the corporate persona for social media communications.

Action for social media manager: Does your company have buyer personas? If it does, do you need to customize the personas for social media marketing? If it doesn’t, can you create one for your social media outreach and rally your internal stakeholders and agencies?

3: Value propositions and messaging

In most companies, value propositions and messaging are product-specific. That’s not enough for daily and hourly social media outreach.  For social media marketing, messaging and value propositions need to come in the following categories:

For each category, ask yourself the following questions or fill in the blanks. To write solid social media copy, you need at least 3 benefits.

• Product-specific: what 3 benefits will the reader receive if they use _______________?
• Event-specific: 3 reasons they need to attend ________?
• Discount-specific: Save ______ if you act quickly.
• Editorial-topic specific: They want to learn or be educated about __________ so they can ____________, _______, _________, ________.
• Solution specific: Help them solve _________ so they can _______________, _________, _________

 Action for social media managers: Can you create value propositions and messaging for the categories?

Alignment 4: Editorial plan

Social media managers usually have hourly, daily and weekly social media editorial. In order to see the forest, you need to have a good understanding of your company’s content. Understand what content is available now and is planned in the near horizon. Know who the subject matter experts are that can create content. Determine if there are editorial themes to guide content creation.

Action for social media manager: Can you identify existing and future content pieces?  Can you determine how to leverage content for different social media channels?  Can you take the content pieces you want to use and create a monthly and quarterly editorial plan?

A communication process

Over-communication is better than under-communication. Do you have a timely social media meeting with key internal stakeholders? The purpose of the meeting is to provide them updates and ask for their help.  In my book, Global Content Marketing, I discussed the possible agenda items for collaboration meetings.  You can refer to this blog post: How to build a collaborative relationship between headquarters and geographies.

Action for social media managers: Do you have a regular meeting to keep your stakeholders close and management closer?

In summary…

Before I do any tactical deep-dive, I work with my clients to complete the 4 elements with standard templates I’ve developed. Some clients already have all the information, it’s a matter of finding and refining it for social media communications. For some clients, we need to create everything from scratch. It’s usually a fun and frustrating journey. There is also an aspect of self-reflection and self-discovery which leads to re-evaluate overall social media objectives, messaging framework or even budget allocation.

Do you have these 4 elements in-place for your social media and content marketing efforts?  If not, it’s time to sit back and take in the forest.

Are you interested in creating a global marketing process to guide a company’s content marketing efforts and achieve business results? Contact me and let’s talk about how can I help you, or connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. In the meantime you can download my FREE course: How To Build A Global Content Marketing Team.