It is normally assumed these days that content marketing, social media marketing and SEO are almost the same thing. They are interconnected but they are quite different and you can execute your content marketing, social media marketing and SEO strategies separately.
Being a content writer my personal opinion is your social media presence and your SEO are by-products of how you do your content marketing. It all depends on your content. I’m not saying this because I’m biased towards the importance of content. After all, what is SEO? It is the appearance of your content in search engine results according to its relevance. Similarly, what is social media marketing? It is about posting quality content under your profiles and continuously engaging people who follow you or connect with you, primarily due to the quality of your content.
But if an online marketer packages all these online marketing tactics into one solution, I don’t think he or she is doing anything wrong. Although you can reap benefits from them as separate entities, when combined, they can give you far greater results. Take for instance focusing just on content marketing. It involves publishing high quality and relevant content on an ongoing basis and then making sure that you leverage the strengths of all the channels available to you in order to spread your content as far as possible, among your niche audience. What are these so-called channels that you use in order to distribute your content? These may be
- Search engines
- Social media and social networking websites
- Blogs and websites that link to your content
- Blogs and websites where your content is published, attributed to you
- Paid advertising to promote your content
- Your mailing list
In order to promote content you need to have content. In order to reap the benefits of content marketing and content promotion, the content must be such as it should instil confidence among people who are drawn to it initially. This blog post explains in detail what’s the difference between content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.