How to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts with Content Marketing Tools
The following article will discuss an important topic that is “How to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts with Content Marketing Tools” and we will talk about it in more details within the article:
Social media marketing has throughout history been an island of its own: We seldom/rarely see it integrated into other digital marketing channels, for example, SEO or content.
This is quite unfortunate because your social media strategy can benefit/gain a lot from data and insights that you’re other teams and tools can contribute. After all, there is only one single goal behind all of your digital marketing channels: You only want to better understand and better serve all your target customers/audience to turn one-time visitors and one-time buyers into brand advocates.
The more data you collect about your target customer’s struggles, interests, and preferences, the more better you can serve them, regardless of the channel. And collecting data from non-social media channels makes quite a lot of sense – it can actually help you or even your social media manager to better relate to and cater to your audience or customers.
Content Marketing Tools to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
Here are a few content marketing tools that can give valuable insight to inform and direct your social media strategy:
1. Find the Topics to Cover on Social Media Using the Keyword Research Tools
There is one thing about old-school or traditional keyword research: it is really terribly under-utilized by marketing teams outside of a purely SEO department. And that’s a huge shame because the keyword research provides a goldmine of insight into the interests as well as struggles of your target audience.
What most of the individuals fail to grasp is that there’s a real breathing human being behind each search query. If you humanize keywords, they become many times more useful, giving you many ideas on how to better engage and serve your target customers.
The logic is quite simple: If enough people type a search query into the search box for keyword research tools to make a record of it, this topic is much likely to resonate on social media, too. When it comes to actually crafting social media updates, encourage or inspire your team to use keyword research to:
- Usually learn which topics to cover in social media updates (for e.g. – creating mini tutorials, posting “tip of the day” updates, etc.)
- Come up with popular and trending hashtags to increase or boost your social media reach on Instagram as well as Twitter and other social media platforms.
The best part in all of this is that keyword research doesn’t have to be paid. You can always use a free tool and find lots of content ideas to implement on both your website as well as social media.
One such example is, Kparser which is a freemium keyword research tool that generates huge keyword lists for free without even requiring a login unlike other tools. In order to use Kparser:
- Type in your most basic core term
- Play with filters on the left to narrow keyword results based on a chosen or selected angle
The sole/only real problem behind keyword lists is that they are very messy to the point that they are unusable. Even the narrow-niche company keyword lists are thousands of lines long because there are a lot of ways to put the same query into a search box.
This is where keyword clustering/grouping comes into play. Kparser does some type of clustering, which allows you to group keywords by a common word inside the phrase. But this is a quite basic clustering technique that doesn’t give you a good overview of the topic. This type of technique would group hiking shoes and hiking boots into two different categories, while essentially they actually belong to one category.
2. Use Question Research to Discover What to Ask Your Social Media Audience/Customers
While keyword research has been around for a long time, the recent voice-search-driven trend toward optimizing for natural language has created quite a demand for new tools, i.e. those that can be used to research niche questions.
And this is a quite a fortunate trend for social media marketing because asking questions is one of the best ways to improve social media engagement, including getting many more comments. Questions actually trigger the natural human instinct called “instinctive elaboration”. This instinct forces individuals to pause and start looking for or formulate an answer.
Adding all sorts of questions to your social media calendar thus makes a lot of sense and with new types of SEO and content marketing tools, question research has become much simpler, easier and more effective.
There are various powerful tools and platforms that make it easy to discover niche questions to include in your marketing editorial calendar. These include:
- Ask Me Anything
- Quora and other forums for discussion
- Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes
One of the of latest or newer tools that allows you to identify and research questions on any topic is Text Optimizer, which uses semantic analysis to extract related as well as popular questions right from Google’s search snippets. You can export the whole list and hand it to your social media manager to incorporate them in your social media calendar.
To find the most popular questions using Text Optimizer:
- Head to their content ideas section and then enter your seed term
- The tool will use semantic analysis to identify the most popular questions on the topic and show you a huge list that would be sorted by popularity
There are a lot of or several ways to include the most popular questions into your social media marketing, such as:
- Simply just ask your audience a question in a new post
- Create a poll and encourage your users to select their answers
- Invite an active social media follower or a niche influencer to host a mini-AMA (Ask Me Anything) event on your page to answer a few of those questions
Diversifying your social media content is key to our the main point in engaging your audience, and including niche, questions will make your strategy even more effective.
3. Use On-Page Analytics to Identify the Best Calls-to-Action
Finally, we want few of our social media updates to convert, not just engage. While social media analytics provides or gives the most basic insight into how different calls-to-actions perform across different social media updates, we have much more testing and analytics flexibility when dealing with our own web-site.
On-site analytics gives much deeper insight into what triggers conversions and what drives people away, so it makes perfect sense to use such insight when crafting CTA wording for social media updates. Google Analytics offers in-depth goals tracking, but it is in fact a high-level tool, which makes it less useful for social media marketers who are basically looking for very specific and to the point answers.
Finteza is a free analytics software that is actually designed to be straightforward enough for even a non-analytics person to understand. Once you have installed Finteza’s tracking code on your site (the same way you install Google analytics code), you can even use Finteza’s WordPress plugin to add on-page links for event tracking.
Finteza is one of the most marketing-friendly analytics suits because it’s incredibly easy and simple to set up.
4. How to Put It All Together and Keep Your Team Updated
Finally, with so many data points and remote teams working together for a specific common goal, what’s the best way to keep everyone updated?
ContentCal is a collaborating social media management tool which offers a “Campaigns” feature that allows you to schedule content marketing campaigns and create content briefs which are quite detailed and can be accessed as well as edited by other team members.
ContentCal allows you to schedule content + social media marketing campaigns so that your whole company knows what is coming and actually when, and lets them contribute their own data from their managed tools.
It is a great idea to record all the keywords, questions and best-working content magnets for your social media marketing managers to implement or execute in their strategy.
Each brief can be as concise or as detailed as you choose it to be and your other team members can add or incorporate their data, too. The end result is that your social media manager actually knows everything, from lead generation assets to the users across ads to hashtags and most popular questions to incorporate in social media updates for better organic reach.
