Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: Can You Compare Them?
The Glorious Company Team
One of the common misconceptions of the content marketing vs. social media marketing debate is that they’re the same, when they’re not. While they do have similarities and overlap a bit in strategy, they serve entirely different functions. For one thing, content marketing is a strategy you can apply to numerous marketing channels whereas social media marketing is highly specific and focused on social platforms. Both heavily use content to interact with a business’ target audience.
If you run a business or work in online marketing, you’ve likely used content to promote your brand and build relationships with your target audience. Based on your content strategy and objectives, you’ve had to consider which marketing channels would give you the best ROI. The content marketing and social media marketing debate probably was one that you thought about and discussed with your colleagues.
Is one better than the other, and can they be used together? We’ll explore how both can complement each other.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing has been around for decades. It’s really storytelling, for the most part. When you think about it like this, content marketing has actually been around since the first humans gathered around the campfire and told stories to each other to engage ideas or get buy-in for an activity. An extraordinarily effective marketing strategy, it involves brands using content that they create themselves to spread awareness about their products and services. There are numerous types of content assets, as well as various marketing channels, which you can use to engage with your target audience.
Here are some examples of content:
Blog posts and articles
Pillar pages and topic clusters
Landing pages
Website copy
Ebooks
Case studies
Podcasts
Infographics
Video
Webinars
Email newsletters
White papers
Templates and other downloadable content
As you can see, there are many ways you can attract and build relationships with your target audience on the web.
Content marketing also lends itself well to an array of marketing channels like organic search, paid ads, email, video platforms (like YouTube), and even social media sites and apps.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to create content to directly interact with your target audience. It also includes social content planning, content strategy, content curation, and customer service by directly responding to customer feedback. Social media marketing has exploded in popularity over the last 15 years, primarily due to the direct access that brands and businesses have to their target audience and current customers.
There are numerous social platforms available for you to market to your customers:
X (formerly known as Twitter)
Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
Pinterest
TikTok
YouTube
While these are the biggest and most widely used platforms, there are many smaller social platforms also popping up to serve highly specific niches.
Overall, social media marketing depends on using content to directly engage with your customers where they already are on the web.
The Difference Between Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing
Much of the confusion about content marketing vs. social media marketing rests on the fact that there are overlaps between the two. For example, you do use content on social media to engage with your leads and customers. And both are forms of digital marketing, for which CMO spending has been increasing in the last 11 years, compared to traditional advertising, where spending is now in negative territory.
Still, there are a few crucial differences between the two, which are worth noting.
Content Marketing Is Informational, Building Relationships, and the Sales Funnel
Let’s start with the uniqueness of content marketing. Content marketing is centered around creating and using the content from your own brand to attract potential customers to you. This can be in the form of blog posts to take advantage of organic search, email to reach out cold to prospects, or even through social media posts that talk about what your target audience is interested in.
Once you have prospects attracted to your content, other forms of content build a relationship with them and engage them further until you can successfully sell to them. These are items like how-to tutorials and guides, product reviews and comparisons, ebooks, white papers, case studies, and reports from your own data.
At the bottom of the sales funnel, these persuasive types of content are also instrumental in converting your leads and site visitors to full-fledged customers.
Social Media Is Having Conversations With Your Target Audience
On the other hand, social media marketing drills down more closely on the one-on-one relationships between a brand and its customers. Here’s how.
Social media allows for direct communication between brands and their customers. Brands can reply to customer feedback—both good and bad—in real time, allowing them to react in the moment to what their target audience thinks. People can share, repost, like, and comment on your brand’s posts. This makes social media marketing more personal and instant than content marketing. It establishes a direct connection straightaway.
In fact, surveys show that people believe that social media is the best way for brands to connect with their customers. When your customers are clearly saying what their first choice is for brand communication, then attentive brands will move to interact with them on this platform.
Which One Should You Use, and Can You Use Them Together?
It’s not about either or. It’s about using both content marketing and social media marketing to complement each other and boost your overall online marketing campaigns, as a result. You’ll get the best results if you use them together, which is how they should be used, actually.
Your brand’s social media profile is a strong driver of traffic back to your website, especially if you can cultivate a large following. Growing this following will be based on the content that you share on your social posts, whether it’s original messages, links back to your blog, or eye-catching images and engaging videos. So, in a way, you’re using content marketing as you build out your brand on social media.
Without content marketing, social media marketing would not be possible.
On the other hand, social media marketing will amplify the content that you have created. This is especially true if you have a large following on your profile.
You can share the link to your newest blog post, advertise your upcoming webinar, or ask your followers to join your email newsletter. Each of these examples means that your content will be put in front of a new audience that you don’t yet have access to if you only focus on using content through your organic search and website sales funnel.
At the end of the day, you can’t have one without the other, and content marketing and social media marketing can’t exist independently of each other, in silos. You have to harness them simultaneously, so that you get the most impact from both strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the most popular FAQs people have when it comes to understanding the differences and similarities of content marketing and social media marketing. We’ve compiled them all here for you, so you can understand even the smallest nuances around each type of marketing strategy.
Q: Is Content Marketing in Demand?
A: The answer is yes. Content marketing is very much in demand in 2023, as well as in 2024 and beyond. CMOs are planning to increase their content marketing budgets by a significant 38% for 2024, in spite of some challenging economic issues ahead. The fact that CMOs and marketing decision-makers are this committed to content marketing with all the headwinds in the world proves how popular this approach to marketing is. You can even say that it’s increasing in popularity and is not showing any signs of demand slowing down any time soon.
Q: Is One Better Than the Other?
A: It’s not about one form of marketing being “better” than the other. What it is about is the need to understand each one’s unique strength and then plan how to use them together to complement one another as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Content marketing is an informational and educational strategy, which takes time to implement. It uses content to build relationships with your ideal customer profile and that same content to move them down your sales funnel. It’s an organic marketing strategy based on providing value to your target audience and answering their pain points.
Social media marketing is more personal and instant. You’re able to reach your customer base right then and there on whichever social platform they’re using. You deal directly with them, posting your content, getting feedback from them, and providing stellar customer service in return, with your replies. You can also direct this audience back to your website, making social traffic an important part of any marketing strategy.
Q: What Is Better, Content Marketing or Digital Marketing?
A: There’s something of a misconception about content marketing and digital marketing. Some people think it’s the same while others aren’t sure if there’s a slight difference between them. We actually cleared this up in a previous blog post titled, “Content Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: What’s the Difference?”
Content Marketing refers to assets like blog posts, articles, ebooks, and case studies. Its purpose is to create informational content that educates your target audience throughout all stages of your conversion or sales funnel. Digital marketing includes SEO, social media marketing, and PPC (pay per click) advertising, all three of which drive traffic to your website quicker than the long-term strategy of content marketing. This is because all three empower you to put your brand in front of your target audience immediately, whereas content marketing is an organic strategy that takes time to work.
Don’t Limit Yourself to Just Content Marketing or Social Media Marketing
One of the worst mistakes you can make is not to take advantage of the relationship between content and social. Don’t treat them separately and only choose one or the other. To successfully raise your brand awareness, move leads down your sales funnel, build relationships with your target audience, interact with your customers directly, and drive traffic to your website, you have to have a strategy that includes content marketing and social media marketing.
Use these two, complementary strategies as part of your well-rounded online marketing strategy. You’ll need content for your blog and website just as much as you need content for your social media platforms. Work on longer term lead conversion with content marketing and more immediate brand building and target-audience interaction with social media marketing. Together, these two can make your brand unstoppable.
If you’re in need of a highly skilled content marketing agency you can partner with to grow your business and website conversions, then reach out to us today. Contact The Glorious Company today for a no-obligation consultation and estimate.
Have any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.
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