Why Your Social Media Campaign is Performing at 1/7th of Its Potential

There are two types of social media consultants/companies out there in the netherworld of marketing – Social media professionals that know and love content marketing and social media practitioners that either don’t know or don’t care about content marketing.  Social media campaigns with a robust content marketing strategy provide approximately seven times the number of leads/conversions as a social media campaign without.  Obviously there are other factors that could affect that number, but with all other things being equal expect around a seven fold increase in conversions when a content marketing strategy is deployed in conjunction with a social media campaign.

Why a Seven Fold Increase?

After nearly six months of tracking multiple integrated inbound marketing campaigns the data is clear.  Increasing blog post deployments from two per week to five per week and growing the advanced content assets available for download from 3 pieces to 20 pieces have resulted in a seven fold increase in actionable leads (30 leads/month to over 200 leads/month).

Since social media is the distribution channel for this content it is possible that the increase in actionable leads is due to an increase in social media activity and social media driven visits.  However, the above chart actually shows a decline in the number of social media visits from the beginning of the campaign.  In contrast, the conversion rate of these visitors shows an increase of 1600%.

Why is Content Marketing the Reason?

There are other metrics that have increased in the campaign other than social media conversion rates and leads, such as organic search, referral traffic, email open rates, etc.  The reason content marketing is the cause of these huge growth rates is because its affect can be felt on all aspects of inbound marketing.  For example, the advanced content is the foundation of the quid pro quo lead generation transaction.  Leads could not be generated without advanced content.  

Also, publishing a new blog post everyday helps a website’s SEO.  The website will be indexed more frequently by Google, each post represents a new opportunity to rank for new keywords, and the valuable fresh content is link bait to other bloggers.  The brand itself will become more recognizable throughout the campaign leading to greater email open rates and subscriptions.  The more blogs published means the likelihood of them being shared increases.  The above are just a few of the many benefits content marketing can provide a social media marketing campaign.  Don’t do social media without it. . .

Image Credit: jeffmarmins