How To Create a Content Promotion Strategy That Works
Digital Marketing
Dec 20 2023
Content establishes brand credibility and builds rapport with customers at every stage of the buyer journey, giving them the information they need to trust your brand and its products. But if no one can find your content — or worse, if they don’t know about it at all — you risk wasting time and resources on marketing efforts that will never see a return.
Fortunately, online content promotion doesn’t have to be a challenge. Here are a few strategies to help introduce your content to its ideal audience, as well as tips for improving what you publish and share.
Where Marketers Struggle in Promoting Online Content
Whether your business creates blog posts, newsletters, how-to videos, or other types of content, each item should add value to the customer’s experience. With businesses competing more fiercely for customers in the face of recent inflation, the value of good content marketing is especially high: 71% of content marketers say the practice has become more essential to their organization over the past year.
Despite content’s acknowledged significance, only 29% of marketers believe their organization is “extremely successful” with their efforts. This opinion might be attributed to the challenges of content promotion. When it comes to promoting content, some of the most common questions marketers ask include:
-Is paid or organic promotion a better route?
-Which channel is the best for promoting our assets?
-Should we experiment with new distribution platforms?
-What content is relevant to our audience?
While there isn’t one definitive answer for each question, it’s safe to say that a multi-channel approach offers the most reach while still allowing businesses to zero in on key customer segments.
Content Promotion Strategies That Work
There are many ways to promote content, but implementing the following strategies will get you started and allow you to collect data to inform future promotion plans.
Search engine optimization
When applied to online ads and content itself, search engine optimization (SEO) has many benefits:
1. Optimized content tends to rank higher in SERPs.
2. Short keywords can introduce your content to a broad audience, while long-tail keywords will attract more informed prospects who are closer to conversion.
3. Your content and ads are both working to generate qualified traffic to your site.
Though SEO tactics are more effective as a long-term strategy, it’s a smart complement to quick-win strategies, such as paid search.
Paid search
Paid search is a smart strategy for the same reason that organic search works: almost everyone has used an internet search to find a product or service at some point.
If you’re already using Google Ads and familiar with pay-per-click (PPC), you understand the importance of keyword research in creating ad copy and bidding strategies. Use this knowledge to create paid search ads for content at each stage of the buyer journey. Prospective customers will search differently than someone closer to the bottom of the marketing funnel — the ad’s landing page, CTA, and audience segments should reflect that.
Email marketing
Send links to new content and high-performing assets to email subscribers via email marketing campaigns. If your team uses a CRM for lead scoring, use that data to determine which content is the best fit for different audiences and create campaigns from there.
Social media
Social media offers a direct way to reach online audiences who are specifically interested in your brand or product — if they follow your account, they just want to know more. Many social media platforms feature options for promoted ads alongside organic content, so this can be used for both paid and organic campaigns. Plus, social posts are easily shareable; users can promote your content simply by sharing it with their followers.
Tips for Improving Online Content
Before you can effectively gain traction with promotional strategies, you need to craft content worth sharing. Consider the potential purpose of each asset: education, conversion, building trust, or solving a problem. Then, incorporate these tips into your team’s next content brainstorm.
-Use customer feedback to develop relevant content. Social media monitoring can help you develop content that resonates with your audience.
-Before hitting “publish,” make sure your written content includes internal links to additional relevant content from your brand.
-Create more than one type of content to reach a wider audience. Podcasts, videos, blog posts, guides, infographics — all of these have a place in content marketing. Virtual events, webinars, online courses, and research reports are among the best-performing types of content in the past year.
-Make it easy for visitors to share content from your site. Install buttons to popular social media platforms near the title and at the end of blog posts, and include the option to share via email or text message.
Effective online content promotion isn’t an either-or situation. Instead of paid or organic, email or social media, blog posts, or video, look at what resonates most with your audience and consider how different channels can work together. Customers prefer different forms of communication and discover brands through a variety of channels, so use a few strategies when creating a cohesive promotional plan.
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