I’ve been frequently asked the question “why invest in social media and content marketing?” .

The question often asked to substantiate whether there is any clear ROI in engaging in creating compelling new content and distributing it through social media channels. Somehow, it often takes time for executives more comfortable with traditional marketing tactics to come to reason with why they should consider content and social media core to their marketing online. The prospect of how all the content you generate and all the relationships you build with people online through your blog, social networks, podcasts, articles, slideshare presentations work together to create an online “pull” which will drive your inbound marketing sounds good but it’s not a pack of “instant noodles”. It’s perhaps something PR professionals will appreciate more than marketers since they can relate to how personality, image and brand can be built through strategic communication over a period of time.

To convince many other marketing professionals, we may need something a little closer to home to help understand the need to have an active social media and content marketing strategy in play. Something more comparable like “Lead Nurturing”. Lead nurturing doesn’t result in instant conversions. It is however, a highly effective marketing strategy and we marketers love it!

It keeps a constant engagement with prospective customers in the form of emails, newsletters, updates and other content which could be of value to them. It keeps “you as an organization or business” fresh in their minds since they are reminded of you with each “contact” and when they are ready to “buy” or “act” they know who to go to.

Social content marketing works much the same way. It’s perhaps even less intrusive that typical lead nurturing which in itself is pull based. Here’s an example:

The other day someone asked me if I knew a good web design firm in the APAC region. I thought about for a good 3 seconds and said ” try getting in touch with Brightlabs!”.

Now I’ve never used Brightlabs personally for any web design or development work. I do however read their blog posts quite often, see updates from them on Twitter, read their articles which show on my Linkedin feed. Since I ended up following them on Facebook, I also often come across a wall update or hear about what they are up to on my Facebook account feed. Simply through all the outreach and content they publish, they come off as a firm that really knows what they are doing. In my view, they come across as real professionals who have an eye for detail and passion in the sites they design and build. I feel like I know them well through their online communication. Whenever I’m online on any of my social sites such as Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter, I see them there. So when a requirement came up, the first thing that came to my head when I head web design was “Brightlabs“.

Your content and interaction with people on social networks does what you would expect from lead nurturing campaigns.

- Touch base with them frequently

-Provide them information and content which is valuable

-Don’t sell (at least not directly through your content)

-Be everywhere, social networks, search engines, blogs

-Build relationships through what you publish and what you say online

-Become known for what you do

When the time is right and they have a requirement, they will come to you. Going back to the question “Why invest in social media and content marketing?”. The same reason you would invest in lead nurturing program. To keep your prospective customers in the loop so that when they  have a requirement, they know you are there.

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.