If you don’t understand content marketing, you’ll have a hard time understanding why your social media marketing isn’t an overnight success.

And if you don’t have content for content marketing, you’ll have hard time understanding why keeping up with a social media strategy can be time and resource intensive or a significant investment if you choose to hire for it or outsource it.

Let me explain.

Content marketing relies on content (blogs, videos, photos, etc.) to increase awareness and establish a brand’s trust, expertise, and authority.

The main goal of content marketing is not to rein in customers immediately, it is to establish trust and authority so that consumers can associate a brand with the topics covered in its content. This process is done over one or several distribution channels and it takes time.

Social media is one of the distribution channels for this content. Others may be website SEO, email marketing, etc.

When you hire a social media manager (or freelancer or agency) you should ideally have this content already created for them to manage its distribution in the most optimized way using social media platforms.

Once the content is distributed, they will monitor its performance. Over the course of time and as patterns develop, they will advise you on the types of content that perform best so that you can create more of that.

However, many times businesses want to start marketing on social media without having any content. In such cases, the social media agency or manager has to take on the role of content creator. This of course changes the scope of a social media management role or service package.

It is important for both businesses and social media professionals to recognize the differences between social media management and content marketing. Understanding that content creation is needed in order to build a content marketing strategy that can be distributed via social media is key when it comes to creating adequate job descriptions when hiring as a business owner and to adequately set up and price services as a social media professional or agency.