admin / December 19, 2023
Readers have got the attention span of a goldfish!
This is a common question every marketer gets to hear regularly. However, data from 2021 confirms that goldfish fare better when it comes to attention span. They have an attention span of 9 seconds, while we humans still struggle at 8 seconds.
Put that into a marketing context, and you’ll notice thousands of marketers vying for 8 seconds of a person’s time. So, how does one compete?
Should we just publish the vacation details and relax after hitting the publish button? Or should we randomly promote our content with, “Hey there, check this out?”
If this sounds like you, you’re missing a crucial part of the equation.
Because creating content is an important part of the plan, content promotion is the resort that facilitates your means to spread the word about it.
Well, it’s the process of distributing content via both paid and organic channels. Some of these channels include social media, email lists, influencer outreach, and PPC advertising, just to name a few.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 86% of B2C marketers and 70% of B2B marketers in the USA use content promotion strategies in some form or other.
And if done well, these strategies can grow brand awareness, drive revenue, attract new prospects, and, most importantly, accelerate conversions, brand loyalty, and growth.
Apart from these advantages, an effective content promotion strategy can entail varied benefits for your brand. Let’s understand that in detail.
Look at your marketing strategy for a hot second. You promote your brand on social media and share updates. What’s the purpose? You want to be a part of a place where your ideal audience hangs out and builds brand awareness. Content promotion helps you achieve that.
In addition to that, content promotion is essential because:
Your social media profile, website, and blog have an immense ability to generate brand awareness. Sharing content on multiple platforms will indirectly increase your prospects’ retention value and incentivize your marketing efforts.
The reason behind adopting content promotion is to make it easy for an audience to see. For instance, repurposing parts of your blog into a tweet can help you grab the eyeballs of a whole new audience–that too with a quick retweet.
Nurture your prospects by promoting your blog or whitepaper. This persuades them to take action and enter the funnel’s next stage. For instance, publishing an email marketing campaign that is valuable and engaging encourages the readers to take the next step.
Content promotion is an undeniable part of your marketing strategy.
54% of B2B marketers reported their organization was extremely successful with content marketing
Source: Content Marketing Institute, July 2020
But, only knowing the importance won’t suffice; you need to master the process and the strategies to get the expected results. So, before digging deep into strategy, let’s understand the process thoroughly.
Content promotion is a three-step approach to promoting your content online and amplifying your brand presence.
The steps include:
A successful content promotion strategy comprises two things: target audience and brand voice.
While the latter requires extensive alignment with your brand’s core values, information can be obtained via Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, or Followerwonk.
With the target audience research, your aim should be to discover the following:
Keeping the target audience in mind, create content and devise a content promotion strategy to redirect the audience into buying your product/services.
For example, each time US-based wealth management firm Glenmede produces a video/blog, they post the link on their LinkedIn page with the relevant caption to generate traffic on their website.
Source: Glenmede’s LinkedIn page
With over 295 Million active social media users in the US, and over 90 million social media users buying through social commerce, it’s little wonder that social media makes up a large part of your content promotion strategies.
However, there are hundreds of social media networks, and it’s not required for a business to be active on all of them. For example, Facebook usage is declining among youngsters, who prefer platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or Youtube. So, if your target audience consists of younger people, it is preferable to focus on other platforms.
Source: Teens, Social Media and Technology, US
It is important to note that different types of content work best on different platforms. Thought-leadership content works well on LinkedIn, aesthetic visuals on Instagram and Pinterest, and videos on YouTube.
If your content promotion strategies are lucrative, you’ll see the following results:
However, if there are no concrete results, don’t panic! It takes trial and error and A/B testing to solidify your content promotion strategies.
Before diving into the six awesome strategies, let’s first learn about the two types of content promotion, i.e., paid content promotion and organic content promotion.
Organic content promotion is designed to increase the visibility of your campaigns without spending a penny on ads or promotions. Some organic content promotion channels are email marketing, social media, events, and the good old-fashioned strategy – word of mouth.
Paid content promotion amplifies your content toward a highly-specific audience. However, you need to spend money for anyone to see your content.
Some most common channels for paid content promotion are search engine ads and paid campaigns across various social media platforms.
One of the most efficient ways to minimize the risk of spending huge bucks on paid ads is to promote your well-performing posts.
Facebook informs you about your high-performing posts and recommends increasing its reach through ads.
Let’s take a look at this example Facebook post from Walmart.
This was one of their top-performing posts in April(till the 20th). So, if Walmart was looking to boost its social media presence, this post would be a good start.
Having understood the why’s and the what’s, let’s dive into the content promotion strategies you need to adopt for your business.
Influencer marketing can help you increase the reach of your content while allowing for more targeted distribution because influencers have already nurtured large audiences and possess enormous capabilities to reach many more.
While crafting content, reach out to influencer marketing platforms like Grin, CreatorIQ, Upfluence, etc. Through these platforms, get in touch with influencers in your niche to tap into their follower base and build strong brand recognition.
Let’s say you work in the nutrition space and have identified a fitness influencer who has amassed significant knowledge and following on their socials. So, while writing a blog post, you can ask her for a quote and publish it.
While publishing it, alert them. The odds are that she will share your content since it includes her quote. This way, influencer marketing acts as a catalyst while devising a winning content promotion strategy.
The article, 35 content marketing tips from top industry experts by SEMrush, gained so much traffic because it had quotes from various industry experts. One of which is:
Social promotion should be your go-to content promotion strategy. Identifying your target audience is crucial. If you regularly post content on social media accounts. Besides, social promotion is a perfect place for word-of-mouth marketing.
If you publish valuable and niche-specific content, your target audience will appreciate it by becoming your advocate. Consequently, they’ll share it within their group, increasing the number of impressions.
For instance, Huawei shares regular updates on its Twitter handle about its new blog posts, so people can simply click on the link and read it.
Changing the format of an existing content piece, i.e., repurposing content as per the social media platform, is much cheaper and faster than creating content from scratch. One of the most crucial benefits of repurposing content is its platform adaptability. It can be molded into the character limit( in the case of tweets) or transformed into a different format( infographic for Instagram) per your preference.
For example, imagine publishing a blog that generates high organic traffic through your website. You can maximize its impact by repurposing it as a Twitter thread, as Wistia’s Brendan Schwartz does here.
Paid Promotion is one of the most effective content promotion strategies that involves paying for any media space or placement. Paid promotion ensures that your content reaches the target audience by making it visible in their newsfeed. It is a great opportunity to assess the effectiveness of your content strategies and marketing message.
Different paid promotion activities are search ads, social media ads, display ads, google shopping ads, and ads inside emails. And one of the most lucrative options among them is social media promotion.
Paid promotion on social media is priced based on the campaign length and the number of impressions you’ll generate with your ads.
Three characteristics of a converting paid ad are:
For example, this Facebook ad of Network for Good targets prospects with their checklist with their clear-cut CTA.
Remember using a telephone directory during your childhood to find out numbers? Just like that, through directory submission, you can find any business and its related information with the help of this directory.
Directory Submission is one of the most trending off-page SEO techniques that help increase your domain authority and website traffic. To avail benefits of directory submission, you need to select the best directory, submit your website details like name, description, link, etc. and get high-quality backlinks that improve your search engine rankings.
Undergo this process for directory submission and document your work to compare whether this content promotion strategy benefits your company.
According to Statista, the number of email users worldwide is expected to reach 4.3 billion by 2022.
Email marketing signifies that those who have made it to your email list will gladly explore your new blog posts, articles, and podcasts.
When you promote your content amongst your email list, it is vital to make your subject line compelling so that the receiver clicks through it and reads it. Keep your body text concise and crisp with a clear CTA at the end to make them enter the funnel.
Let’s take the example of Neil Patel, founder of Ubersuggest. Below you can see one of his emails informing his users about how they can optimize their ad campaign while plugging in a link to his recent article.
Content is the best way to establish your company or brand as a valuable source of quality goods/services within your niche. But you can’t just publish the content and call it a day. Instead, devise a content promotion strategy and witness the growth of your business.
With a content promotion strategy, your content will stay visible to the enclosed web corners and generate leads. Instead, these strategies will help you drive your desired traffic and engagement. So, start implementing these strategies in the coming days and skyrocket your company’s revenue for this quarter.
