SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Content Marketing - Why Your Business Needs All Three

If you’re running a business, you have certainly heard about SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. But how sure are you about what this means and what you should do?

Let’s look at the differences between them and the role each plays in your overall digital marketing strategy. Then you will have a better idea of how much effort you should put in for your specific needs.

What SEO is and why you need it:
Search Engine Optimization means optimizing your website for better visibility in search engines. Search engines, like Google, decide how to rank website content that comes up in their search results. Optimizing helps your site make it to the top of these searches. 

Although there are others, Google is still the biggest search engine, and optimizing for Google is a good strategy for most businesses. There is, however, more than one way to optimize for search.

Remember that search engines really just want to serve up relevant organic results that genuinely answer the needs of the search engine user. So for starters, researching to find the right keywords and then adding then to your web pages in the right places will improve the ranking of your website. Improving your website technically, like making it easier to use for humans and easier to crawl for robots, is another kind of search engine optimization.

What social media marketing is and why you need it:
Obviously, this is marketing via social media. Social platforms like Facebook (Meta), Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and so on have proven to be good places for promoting your brand and for interacting with customers. The goal is generally to gain website traffic or attention through social media sites. The bulk of your business operations should be on your website where you have complete control, but you can use social media platforms to guide customers back to your site.  

Choose the social media platforms most appropriate for your business and your audience and be sure to stay active by sharing content that attracts attention, responding to customers on behalf of your business, and encouraging users to be actively engaged as well. The advertising options on each platform are worth exploring as well since they can boost your organic reach and increase your audience.

What content marketing is and why you need it:
In a nutshell, this is marketing that involves the creation, publishing, and sharing of content that is relevant to your business and valuable to prospective customers. The “valuable” part is what differentiates it from advertising content.

Your goal in content marketing is getting people to interact with it by liking, commenting, and sharing what you’ve created with new prospective customers. If you are consistently providing good quality content, you can build up a nice-sized audience for reselling or upselling and for spreading brand awareness.

As you can see, each of these three are important to your business’s presence online. I encourage clients to keep up with all of them, but depending on what you are selling, it can make sense to put more effort into one over another. When was the last time you assessed how well your business is making use of SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing? If you suspect it’s time to do better, contact the Sprocket Websites team. We have tools to tell you where you are now and strategies for improvement. Call today to learn more!

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán

This article is an update to “SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Content Marketing -What’s the Difference?” dated 9/11/2015.

Breanne BannonBreanne Bannon

Breanne is a Content Writer, Social Media Marketeer, and Sales Associate for Sprocket Websites.

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