Let’s pretend you wrote the best blog post your industry will ever see. It’s optimized for search engines, easy to read, and keeps the readers’ attention from start to finish.
Some would call it a masterpiece – that is if they saw it.
Your blog post didn’t get the attention it deserved because you overlooked an important piece of the content marketing puzzle –
content promotion
.
Remember, your content isn’t a Ronco Oven… You can’t just “Set It and Forget It.”
You need to amplify your efforts with content promotion and in this blog post, you’ll learn:
- What is content promotion?
- Four content promotion channels
- Content creation tips
What is content promotion?
Content promotion is when you share a piece of content using organic or paid marketing channels.
To get a better understanding, let’s go back to the example at the beginning of this post.
In that case, you’d take your mind-blowing blog and share it across your marketing touch-points.
This could look like an organic post on Linkedin that links out to your blog.
A video on YouTube that shares the link to your blog in the video description.
Or, an email marketing campaign that teases your blog and sends readers to your website to read it.
Now, that’s just scratching the surface.
Let’s keep digging.
Content Promotion 101: Strategy, Channels & Tips
Content Promotion Strategy
There’s no one-size-fits-all content promotion strategy.
What works for one brand, might not work for another.
With that in mind, when developing a content promotion strategy, you want to reverse engineer your efforts.
Start by nailing down where and how you’ll share your content with your target audience.
Where
When building this plan, you want to meet your audience where they are.
This means you’ll have to do your research to uncover where your audience is most engaged.
To do this, head to each social channel and type popular industry keywords into the native search bar.
Take a look at the results of this search.
Are your competitors having conversations with your target audience?
Is your target audience talking amongst themselves using these keywords?
Can you hear virtual crickets chirping because your audience doesn’t spend much time on this platform?
Rinse and repeat this process on each social channel.
The answers to these questions will give you a better idea of where to place your attention when promoting content.
How
Picture this.
You found your audience loves a great steakhouse.
So, you open a steakhouse, get them through the doors and when they order their steak well done, you serve them steak tartare.
How do you think that’s going to end?
The same applies to content promotion.
The social channel is the steakhouse and your content’s like a juicy steak.
Let’s say you found that your target audience is most engaged on LinkedIn. From there, you’ll want to peel the content promotion onion back another layer to uncover how they like to consume their content.
Do they respond better to text-based content? Video posts? Posts with images? LinkedIn articles?
Once you know where to promote your content, you have to serve it to them in the way they want to consume it.
4 Content Promotion Channels to Consider
We briefly touched on where to promote your content. But that’s just the tip of the content iceberg. When it comes to content promotion, there are many options to choose from. Here are four to consider.
Email Marketing
- According to Statista, there are four billion daily email users and this number is expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. The attention’s clearly there and brands like yours can capitalize. Whether your brand’s new to email marketing or need to shake the dust off your efforts, the best way to understand how to promote your content via email is to test.
Test subject lines. Test layouts. Test sending times. Test it all to uncover the best strategy to meet your audience where they are with the content they want to consume.
Get Social
- Social media is the axis on which the world turns. With 4.9 billion users around the globe, there are opportunities for brands of all sizes and industries to find and connect with their target audience. Go back to the “Content Promotion Strategy” section to pinpoint what channel(s) are most popular with your target audience.
Press Release Distribution
- Think of a press release as a megaphone that amplifies your message above the noise of a crowded marketplace. When you consistently distribute strategic
press release campaigns
, you increase the odds of securing earned media mentions. And, earned media mentions are one of the most effective ways for a brand to build awareness because they didn’t pay for the coverage. The media found their content valuable enough that they pursued the topic, built a story around it, and shared it with their audience.
Paid advertising
- Paid content promotion is just that…You pay to promote your content to a targeted audience. Examples of paid advertising include:
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
- A brand pays a fee each time their ad is clicked by a consumer.
- Social media advertising
- Brands can create and deliver advertisements on respective social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, for example.
- Sponsored content
- This is content that looks like editorial content on a site, but is actually a paid piece that’s meant to promote a brand’s products/services.
- Influencer Marketing
- Brands will collaborate with an influencer (a person with an engaged following online) to promote its products/services with the influencer’s audience.
Content Creation Tips
Content promotion is only as valuable as the content you create. That said, here are some tips to help you write newsworthy content.
Listen, Don’t Talk
Social listening is the key that’ll unlock your content creation efforts.
Here’s how to do it.
- Head to a social media channel
- Find the native search bar
- Type in a relevant keyword
- Read through the comments of popular posts
- Engage with your audience and ask questions
- Rinse and repeat
This process is a valuable and
free
way to uncover and collect information that’ll help you better understand the topics and types of content your target audience is interested in.
From there, create content like blog posts, press releases, white papers, etc. that directly address your target audience’s pain points, interests, questions, and more.
