Growing your blog isn’t all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and good writing. You also need to put some effort into email and social media marketing if you want to see positive results. The problem is, all those angles involve a lot of work, so it’s important you look for ways to optimize the processes.
The good news is email and social media marketing go hand in hand. Depending on which tools you use, you might be able to tackle both together, which can save you time and enable you to get back to what you really need to be doing, which is blogging.
In this article, we’ll break down why email and social media marketing go so well together. Then we’ll talk about three ways you can integrate both while marketing your blog. Let’s get to it!
Why Email and Social Media Are a Great Match
If you’re running a blog, then you’ll want to tackle email and social media marketing with the same goal. That is to say, getting traffic to that website.
With email marketing, you want to get as many subscribers as possible and then reach out to them periodically. You can do this by sending roundups of your latest posts, notifications for any offers you’re running, and more.
Ultimately, you want people to open your emails and click on any of the links within, which should send them to your blog, netting you return visitors. With social media marketing, you’ll usually publish about your latest posts or some of your old articles:
When someone clicks on those links, they’ll end up on your blog, so it all works out. However, managing both email marketing and social media accounts can be time intensive.
The good news is there’s a lot of overlap between both methods. For example, you’ll usually share the same content in both email newsletters and social media – the only thing that changes is the format.
Moreover, you can use an email newsletter to direct people towards your social media accounts, so there’s a lot of potential there.
Your goal is to look for ways you can optimize your marketing workload, so you don’t need to juggle as many plates. That way, you’ll be able to spend more time focused on creating content for your blog.
3 Ways to Integrate Your Email and Social Media Marketing Efforts
There are a lot of email marketing platforms you can use to help you stay in touch with subscribers. We’ve talked a lot about several of them in the past, but if you’re looking for a quick recommendation, take a look at Constant Contact. With it, you’ll be able to implement all the methods we’re going to cover in this section.
1. Schedule social media posts alongside your email newsletters
Since there’s a lot of overlap between the content you publish on social media and email newsletters, it makes sense to tackle both at the same time.
The best way to do this is to use an email marketing tool that includes social media scheduling functionality. That is to say, it enables you to create and schedule social media posts by connecting to your accounts:
In most cases, you’ll be able to connect multiple social media platforms, which means publishing on all of them at once if you want to. That can be a huge time saver, but remember, you can’t use the same format for all social media accounts. For example, if you want to publish a text-heavy update on Facebook, it won’t look as good on Twitter.
Putting that aside, being able to manage all your social media accounts from your email marketing service can be a huge time saver.
2. Add social icons to your email newsletters
If you take a look at any of the websites you frequent right now, chances are you’ll see an assortment of social icons throughout their pages, and the same goes for emails:
These small elements are incredibly useful because most people are familiar with them. If you click on the Instagram icon, you’ll see that website’s account on the platform, and so on.
Plus, a lot of emails use the same icons for social sharing purposes. That is to say, they enable readers to share their posts via social media with a click.
Ideally, your email newsletters will include both social icons and sharing buttons. That way, subscribers will be able to find your social media accounts and share your newsletter with their own followers. That, in turn, can lead to more subscribers, which should be music to your ears.
3. Run polls via email and social media
One of my favorite ways to take advantage of both social media and email marketing is by using polls. If you ask the right questions, polls can give you a lot of insight into your audience. Plus, they can be highly engaging.
There are a lot of plugins you can use to set up and run polls using WordPress. However, most email marketing platforms these days include polling functionality so you can add them to your campaigns:
More importantly, you can also share the same polls via social media. That way, you can get access to a broader base of voters, and it gives you an excuse to publish on all your marketing channels simultaneously.
Conclusion
Email and social media marketing are all about getting more traffic to your blog. With email, you do so every time you send out a newsletter, hoping subscribers will open it and click on any of its links. The same goes for social media, where a lot of your posts are probably promoting your blog’s content.
Ideally, you’ll look for a tool that enables you to tackle both areas of marketing together, such as Constant Contact. Once you pick a tool to use, here are some ways you can go about integrating your email and social media marketing efforts:
- Schedule posts in advance through your email marketing platform.
- Share your email newsletters via social media.
- Run polls via email and social media.
Do you have any questions about email and social media marketing? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.