“The glue that holds all relationships together–including the relationship between the leader and the led–is trust, and trust is based on integrity.” —Brian Tracy
In the lead generation business, Track5Media focuses a lot of our energy on gaining traffic to our sites. We religiously check over the analytics for our pages to see what pages are performing well. But just because we’re getting more clicks, doesn’t mean that we’re truly benefiting from them. Paid clicks don’t always translate into building a following or a strong connection with our clients and site users.
Content Marketing Tips
You would think that we use social media to primarily gain clicks, followers, and traffic. However, Mark Shaefer shared in his book, The Content Code, that 83% of CMOs claim that social sharing is the main benefit of social media marketing. But why?
Shaefer also points out that 60% of those brilliant CMOs have seen that 70% of their customers are more likely to purchase services and things after their friend has posted content about it.
Sharing over Liking
When people are sharing your posts, the impact is gargantuan. It pretty much gets real people to validate your thoughts as well as endorsing your brand. They might as well say be saying “I support this idea and this organization.” Plus, it gets exposure to a whole new crowd of people. And, naturally, we are inclined to follow the herd and pay attention to what others like us are posting. “If they support that brand, maybe I should be.”
This makes sense. After all, in the era before social media, we trusted companies that had products our friends and family used and raved about. Just because that information is spread on the web, doesn’t mean the basic formula changed.
When people simply “like” your post, the fleeting act is far less powerful. In fact, some people don’t even really bond with the posting they “like.” There’s absolutely no value if your content exists without being seen and shared no matter how great it is.
Harnessing Social Marketing for Shares
The concept is very transparent. The problem is mastering the technique to gain shares. You can pay for advertisements and SEO until you’re blue in the face. However, those efforts are fruitless unless you have a marketing team that is primarily focused on creating strategies that bring in the audience you want.
In my experience, I’ve found that the most shared and engaging content is the stuff that really engages them. Here’s an example; a blog I wrote about other bloggers was extremely popular and to this day outperforms most of my posts. Why? Because the real people I featured in the article were happy to share and their built-in communities promoted it as well. The trust was built from sharing through real people interactions.
How to build trust with content:
1. Discover your audience: businesses with blogs drive 55% more traffic than ones without. Pinpointing the right topics that spark the interests of your customers or clients is crucial to gaining visibility.
2. Engage with your social crowd: don’t simply post your stuff on your company’s social profiles and forget about it. Check it frequently and reply to your audience. This makes your company feel more genuine and less corporate, more personal.
3. Constantly evolve your topic choice: analyze your successes and failures to continue to perfect the methodology for connecting with the public. Are “how-to’s” your main articles getting shared? Maybe funny videos are just what gets people talking and you should allow more budget for those. The important thing is to keep developing the right stuff that draws the crowds.
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