The importance of social media content marketing
Academics and professionals all around the world have been fascinated by the effect social media content marketing has on a business’s brand. In a paper delivered to the International Conference on Marketing and Retailing last year, a group of academics from Malaysia explored how social media content marketing (SMCM) can increase brand health.
Social media is an important tool to connect people around the globe. Individuals use social media to connect and share via the internet. Social media content is a self-generated, authentic conversation between people. This content comes from the thoughts and experiences of those participants. Social media provides a space where information is collaborative, and users can interact and participate collectively.
But now, thanks to an evolving business world, social media is also a vital tool in the marketing strategist’s tool belt.
In the world of Web 1.0, it was hard for business practitioners to measure their brand health through engagement with an audience. But with the emergences of Web 2.0, marketing has changed, and business can more easily measure their brand health through the social media platforms. Web 2.0 has created more interaction between business and consumer. There is more user participation and openness. Thanks to Web 2.0, companies can monitor their customers’ awareness about and preference for brands by measuring their involvement in social media.
However, social media marketing cannot function well without content. Content is what is shared and posted to customers, and valuable content can help increase social media engagement. Valuable content is vital for the social media marketing campaign.
What is content marketing?
There are still many contradictions related to the definition of content marketing itself. These definitions come from business practitioners who have done much research and created the content marketing for their business. According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience to gain profit.
Content marketing aims to engage consumers without asking anything from them in return. However, good content marketing will get the consumer to take action – to share and participate in the media space. This, in turn, attracts others to take part in purchasing activities and creates a relationship between the consumer and the company. At the same time, good content marketing can increase good brand health.
So, what do we mean by brand health?
A brand is a company’s identity and image. Brand health affects a company’s sales and consumer demand. Brand health is linked to current and future value with consumers. Brand health is a fairly new business achievement measurement, and not all companies are aware of it. But they should be, as brand health is an important indicator for a company to measure its brand awareness among consumers.
Brand health is measured by the interaction and response from consumers. Some business practitioners measure it through the resilience and responsiveness of the consumer. Some experts believe a brand audit is the key to measuring brand health. This audit could encompass internal and external stakeholders, competitors, brand positioning, brand identity, brand equities, brand architecture, communication, and budgeting. A thorough brand audit will often reveal new growth opportunities for brands. An audit creates new ways to make the brand resonate with a new generation of target customers.
Unfortunately there is no one-size-fits-all way to measure brand health. The individual company must do a lot of research and experimentation to discover how to measure its own brand health.
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