Like us here at DAE & Company, you probably want to drive more traffic and engagement to your website through the social channels you manage. But, with the amount and quality of content continually on the rise, accomplishing your content marketing goals is growing more challenging and complex, particularly when it comes to aligning content marketing and social media.

Haphazardly publishing and sharing a bunch of content (regardless of how great that content might be) will never suffice. To be sure you don’t fall into the trap of blind shooting, check out the following five pitfalls to avoid when it comes to aligning your content marketing with social media.

Pitfall 1. Sharing Your Content with Just Anyone

Because content marketing is so hyped these days, it’s easy to assume that writing and sharing a large body of high quality content is all it takes. But, the truth is, if you’re not getting that high quality content in front of the right people, you’re wasting your time.

The first and most important step in planning and developing your content is researching audience personas; that is, identifying who you’d like to be consuming your content, then targeting those audiences.

Ask yourself:

• What are my consumers’ emotional triggers? What do they like and dislike?
• What are some questions to which my consumers are looking for answers?
• When and where are my consumers actually consuming content?

Once you’ve figured out who you’re talking to and where they are, the next step is to gain their trust. Your goal is to convince your audience to like, share, and engage with your content, but they’ll only come through if they believe you’re an authority on the topics outlined in your content. This is where patience and persistence come into play. It takes time to develop that trusting relationship with your consumers, and the best way to accomplish the goal is to produce consistent, high quality content.

Pitfall 2. Making your content tough to share

We all know how frustrating it is to come across a piece of really useful content, only to find you have to cut and paste a clunky, long URL in order to share it. That’s why share buttons within your blog posts should be highly visible. Not only that, but there are all kinds of plugins out there that allow users to share highlighted text directly from within a post, making highly specific sharing easier.

In addition to share buttons and applications, be sure to always include a call-to-action in your blog posts. After all, when you’ve got a great piece of content, there’s no shame in encouraging readers to share and promote it.

Pitfall 3. Creating messages lacking consistency

This trap can become particularly easy to fall into when content teams are disconnected. For example, in many situations there’s one social content team and another blog content team, and communicating between the two is virtually nonexistent.

The best way to remedy the problem is to have one person from each group review both the social posts and the blog content for consistency in messaging (keywords, tone, hashtags, calls to action, etc.) to ensure the appropriate (and consistent) message is getting through.

Pitfall 4. Failing to change the messaging per channel

Along with the rise of social media marketing has come a rise in distribution tools to help marketers share across multiple social channels at one time. While these services are great for collecting metrics, scheduling posts and getting ahead on things, there is a downside. Many marketers rely on these services to share across channels using the same messaging for each. But, when it comes to building trust with your audience, that’s a bad idea.

Every social network delivers content in unique ways to attract different customers who digest content differently. For example, Instagram is image and video driven but also includes hashtag, text, link and call-to-action opportunities that could be missed with a cookie cutter, automated post. Ultimately, you want to use messaging that is tailored to the channel on which you’re sharing your content.

Pitfall 5. Not using data to optimize

One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is the access it provides to real time audience engagement data. Thanks to these real-time analytics, smart marketers can and should seek to understand and react appropriately to content performance. By including unique links in content, marketers have the opportunity to measure message engagement and campaign ROI like never before. Failure to take advantage of this benefit is like throwing money to the wind.

The Takeaway

Granted, all of the above can seem overwhelming to the business owner seeking to cash in on content marketing. But that’s where hiring a good digital marketing agency comes into play. Agencies who specialize in content management and optimization take the guesswork out of things and allow you to focus on the nuts and bolts of doing business. To learn more about how we do digital here at DAE & Company, feel free to get in touch.