Making Email, Social And Content Marketing Work Together

Social media, content marketing and email marketing should support each other for you to get the best results.

Digital marketing is about attracting, convincing, and selling to customers. There are many ways to do this, but one thing has been clear for a number of years: that it takes more than one or two interactions to sell to the majority of customers.

In fact, research has shown that 80% of transactions are not made until the 5th and 12th interaction with a brand. This can be hard to achieve on one channel, which is why you need as many channels as possible, working together to create a sales funnel that creates those necessary interaction points as quickly as possible.

Why Use Multiple Platforms To Market Your Product

There are many who believe that one sales channel is their only way to achieve sales. However, this is a flawed system. If you used emails exclusively, you might need to send 12 emails to get them to buy. If you send one email per week, that’s 12 weeks to generate the sale, a long time, and that could mean you lose out to a competitor.

However, if you use a mix of platforms, you might catch the eye of the consumer at several points of the day. For instance, when they check in on Facebook and see some of your content (organically or paid) they are making an interaction.

When they are doing some research, with good SEO work, they might see some of your content on the subject and then read it: another interaction point. Therefore, when you next send an email, your potential customer isn’t just on interaction point one, they are on interaction point three or four.
However, if you don’t have these marketing channels aligned, you might be doing more harm than good to your marketing. Instead, you need to find a way to combine them into one campaign that’s mutually beneficial.

How To Combine Platforms Into A Single Campaign

The first step to combining platforms into a single campaign is to ensure that each platform is connected to the others. You don’t want each platform to just connect to another, you want to include as many platforms as you can from the other platforms.

So for instance, on a piece of web content, whether it’s a landing page, downloadable content, or blog post, you need to connect it to your social media accounts and mailing list. On your emails, you should direct them to a landing page and also social media profiles.

The challenge is on social media. Here, each piece of content should refer to just one link, e.g. a mailing list, or web content. But generally, with your social media campaigns, you should refer to all your other platforms equally.

You’ll then need to find a way to direct audiences to the next platform. This can be done with a good call-to-action. A good call-to-action should include:

• Urgency
• Definition of the action you want them to do.
• Time delay.
• An interesting offer and/or promise.

Finally, you need to consider how each piece of content is connected to the next. You want to take the customer on a journey where each interaction is another step in a single journey. So, if you sent an email about cooking a holiday meal, you could have call-to-action about the desserts or games for the festive meal. As long as it’s relevant and adds value for your customer, then you’ve got some good content. Here you have at least two interaction points.

Another good example of this would be offering people tips on social media about cooking, and linking that to a landing page where they can subscribe to a mailing list for ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. This scenario has at least three interaction points.

Therefore, by connecting marketing on all channels, you can cut down the time to sell from up to 12 weeks to under three weeks.

Conclusion

Selling online can often mean that you have as many as 12 interactions before your customer makes a purchase. This can take a long time if you only use one platform to sell. Instead, you need to combine social media, web content and email marketing campaigns to minimise the time it takes to sell to your customers.

Do you combine your marketing platforms? How do you ensure they are aligned?

Let us know in the comments below.

Tagged in: blogging, email marketing, marketing strategy, Social Media