You may be familiar with the phrases social media marketing, content marketing and SEO but could you tell the difference? All are part of an online marketing strategy and interlinked but the main differences are:
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is using the various social media platforms to engage with their audience in conversation. For example on Facebook you can set up a Facebook Business page like Red Desk VA and post information about your business, related industry content or other items of interest. The ultimate idea is to spark conversations, gain likes and shares then these posts will appear in the newsfeeds of fans of the business page and their friends.
The magic word here is “social” – you are marketing and directing traffic to your website but in a non-pushy way.
Red Desk VA have written several other articles on this topic: Red Desk’s social media setup guide, about social media dashboards and the possibilities of social media.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the most technical type of online marketing. In short, you are doing everything you can to please Google (other search engines are available!).
Search engines rank website content depending on the number of links from external websites and the number of relevant keywords on the website. This in turn affects the visibility of how far up the search you appear in the search engine’s unpaid results. This is often termed as “organic” or “natural” results.
For more details, please read our basic guide to SEO.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that creates and distributes relevant, informative and sometimes entertaining content to the target audience. The aim is to be the expert in your field or “go-to”, whilst increasing brand awareness but without scaring off your audience with heavy advertising messages.
At Red Desk VA, we write content for our clients for social media posts & blogs as part of our content marketing strategy. In fact, we were a finalist in the UK Blog Awards 2014 for one of our client’s blogs. Content can also be videos and infographics.
SEO should always be considered when writing content, ensuring you are also including your keywords from your website throughout your social media.
You may wish to read our other articles on content marketing: Why blogs are good for business and content marketing calendars.
At Red Desk VA, we provide online marketing solutions for small businesses using a combination of social media marketing, content marketing and SEO. We tailor each campaign depending on the client’s needs and can focus on one particular aspect if needed.