Is there anything better than getting into sweatpants and curling up on the couch with a glass of wine after a long day of work?
We think not, and many adults would agree. The most significant shift over the last few years has been towards people winding down after work by scrolling through social media.
Now that people rely on social media channels to show them the next best thing, it’s essential to be on the feeds that people scroll through. (Especially when they’re already thinking about how much they want a drink.)
You take the time to craft phenomenal content for your leads, and then it sits on your website, waiting for people to magically appear. By amplifying your content, you can get more eyes on the incredible things you have to offer your potential customers.
You can easily amplify content using social media. It’s a great way to expand your audience pool and establish yourself as a trustworthy supplier in the wine industry. Find out how you can use social media to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
What Is Content Amplification?
Content amplification is the process of promoting and distributing your content through various channels. In short, it’s the online version of shouting from the rooftops.
Content amplification is done through paid media, owned media, and earned media, and your strategy should feature a blend of all three types. Marketers use content amplification to increase the ROI of generated content and raise brand awareness.
Let’s say one of your goals is to increase the amount of time people spend on your website. If the content is only on your website, you’re only getting visitors who typed the right thing into a search engine. Yes, having clear calls to action at the end of every page will keep people on the site longer, but you’re still limiting the number of people who are getting their eyes on your site. Amplifying your content on another platform makes it easier for people to discover it.
Sharing your content on more than one platform allows your leads to interact with it organically. The person scrolling Instagram on their couch after hours could see one of your blog posts and end up exploring your website for the rest of the evening. The next day, they share your site with their coworkers, and the company decides to reach out to you and set up a meeting.
Content amplification may be precisely what you need to obtain your marketing goals. Amplifying your content can lead to increased reach and impressions, shares, engagement, web traffic, backlinks, leads and conversions, and sales and revenue.
How To Develop a Social Media Content Amplification Strategy
Balance Out Your Published Content
If you post the same types of things in the same format, it’ll be hard to keep your followers’ attention. At the same time, if all you do is brag about how awesome you are, people will start to tune you out.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B marketers reported that their top-performing content prioritized their customer’s informational needs over brand messaging.
However, this content should still be relevant to your industry. If you work closely with wineries, you probably won’t be writing blog articles about your favorite episodes of the Office. (Unless you tie wine into that somehow, and we are always eager to find new connections.)
Your social media content should rotate through educational, promotional, and entertaining. You can use your informational and fun content to balance out your promotional content. By keeping things fresh on your social media channels, your followers will begin to develop a relationship with you and see you as a trusted source in your industry.
You can develop content that
- Breaks down a specific topic in your niche market
- Gives people a step-by-step tutorial on how to do something
- Inspires people to make a change in their daily routine
- Tell people a story about how your product resolved an issue
- Updates people on the latest trends in the industry
The more diversity you can add to your content and how you promote it, the more leads you’ll gather. Pair your content with eye-catching graphics or videos, and you’ll be unstoppable.
Team Up With Influencers
One of the craziest phenomena of the 21st Century is the development of influencer marketing. Influencers are people on Instagram who are considered “experts” in a particular market. They recommend a product, and their followers rush out to buy it.
While it may seem insane that one person could increase your content's reach to a wider audience and drive a ton of traffic to your website, it’s entirely possible if you partner up with the right person.
Pairing up with a niche influencer is probably the easiest way to amplify your content on social media. Why? Because these influencers have the reliability and the engagement numbers your content needs to reach the right audience.
The first step is identifying an influencer who has the market you want to tap into. While most people think of influencers as celebrities or gorgeous young women, influencers can also be big-name brands.
As a B2B company, you’ll most likely want to partner up with a brand rather than an individual. If you’ve already worked with a well-known winery, you can ask them to give you a shoutout on social media. If you haven’t had the opportunity to work with a big client yet, you can reach out to a spokesperson to see if you can send them free products in exchange for a feature on their social media platform. They might even love your product so much that they continue to work with you moving forward.
If you are hoping to work with an individual, you can look for a local winery owner, sommelier, or other trusted source for all things wine.
Don’t Be Afraid to Hashtag
We don’t mean go crazy with the hashtags, but using targeted hashtags can help get your content viewed by a larger audience. On platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, people can run searches on hashtags they’re interested in. If you’re using the right hashtags, then you’re getting your high-quality content in front of the people who would benefit the most from it.
When deciding on which hashtags to use, you should examine hashtags that:
- Are trending in your market
- Your competitors are using
- Your target audience is using
- The top influencers in your market are using
- Are unique to your brand
If you didn’t sign up to use the pound sign as a “hashtag,” that’s totally okay. There are a lot of AI hashtag generators that can create a list of hashtags you can use. All you have to do is copy and paste.
As you can see below, Innovint did a great job of using hashtags on this post of a client review. The hashtags are unique but still relevant to their brand.
Invest in Paid Ads
Let’s go back to our person scrolling social media in their sweatpants. At this point, she doesn’t follow you on any platforms, but your post shows up on her feed because you paid a little bit to put it there.
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest give you the option to promote your content to your targeted audience. Since you’re already posting on social media, you don’t have to develop an additional ad to implement this marketing tool.
If you want to get your content in front of new eyes but you’re not necessarily ready to go the influencer route yet, paid ads are a great way to go.
Host A Giveaway
Everybody—and we mean everybody—loves free things.
Encourage engagement with your posts by offering followers the chance to win something. This method has become increasingly popular over the last year and is especially common on Instagram.
You can offer one month free of your service or exclusive access to a new product. You can team up with one or more of your partner wineries and offer a bottle of wine with some other goodies to people over 21. They have to like the post, follow you, and tag a friend in the comments to enter.
They can tag more friends in the comments or add the post to their story for bonus entries. In the end, the rules are totally up to you. But the more you can incentivize people into following you and reposting your great content, the more traction your business will gain.
If you have 10 people initially enter by tagging one friend each, and each one of those people decides to follow you to enter your contest, you just gained 10 followers. That’s 10 new eyes on your content without you having to make any extra effort. Imagine what will start happening when people start sharing your content on their profile for all of their followers to see.
If you have the means to hold a giveaway, it’ll be a great way of organically growing your list of followers.
Give Shout Outs
An easy way to get people to share your content is to tag them. If you highlight a particular customer, they’ll likely share it on their own profile. If the people you tag share your post, their followers will see it and feel inclined to check you out.
Mentioning your followers is an easy way to increase engagement with your content while developing a relationship you already have. The more customers feel like they have a direct relationship with you, the more loyal they’ll be to your brand. And as you know, loyalty goes a long way in business.
Embed Social Links on Your Website
In the header or footer of your webpage, you can feature small icons of the social platforms you’re on that take the users directly to your profile on the site. Certain web design platforms can even display a bit of your social media feed that takes customers directly to a specific post when they click on an image.
If customers can directly access your social media accounts, they’ll be more likely to follow you. These links also prompt your customers to like and share your content if they already follow you.
A great example of this is Bricoleur Vineyards. They include links to their social media platforms at the bottom of their website along with a call-to-action.
Strategize Before Your Socialize
Like every other form of marketing, plastering your content on social media platforms without purpose will yield little results.
Instead, take the time to do investigative work and develop a social media strategy before you begin setting up profiles on every medium under the sun. Figure out where most of your targeted audience is. As a B2B company, your audience may be more invested in Facebook or LinkedIn than Instagram or Twitter.
It’s also important to know where your competitors are hanging out. If your competitors are getting a lot of engagement on a specific platform, then you’ll want to establish a presence on that platform ASAP. The opposite is not necessarily true, though. If your competitors aren’t on a certain platform, it doesn’t mean that your target audience isn’t there either. When in doubt, follow your audience.
Unfortunately, social media trends change constantly, so it’s essential to keep tabs on your industry’s presence on various channels. Running a search every year can help you stay on top of the best places to promote your quality content.
Watch Your Content Reach New Heights
You don’t have to stand on a street corner with a megaphone to let people know how fantastic your business is.
Social media marketing has developed into a necessary part of content marketing as a whole. It’s an effective and efficient medium for introducing yourselves to people who didn’t necessarily know they desperately needed you in their lives.
It can be overwhelming if you aren’t sure where to begin, and we’re more than happy to help. We’ve mastered the art of assisting businesses like yours to succeed with social media amplification.
Reach out to us today to begin strategizing social media content amplification for your company.