When it comes to optimizing content marketing, there are a few things you can consider early on to increase your likelihood of success during promotion. If you publish content without considering its promotability during development, you’ve already severely hindered your outreach efforts. The research and development stages of content production are the ideal time to ensure you are creating something that will earn attention from media contacts and influencers.
Your first step toward developing promotable content is to ensure your content concept is somewhat unique. If your content is the same old story about your industry or brand the media will see right through that pitch.
Consider if there are experts or influencers you can interview to ensure your content is original and different from the existing competitive content landscape. In addition to exclusive interviews and expert insights, new research and data provide your content with an immediate boost of originality when pitching to media outlets.
If your broad content topic isn’t new, there might be a helpful, new content format that would aid the reader experience and provide more value to them through actionable insights tailored specifically to their situation. Take time to consider how you can plan innovative content formats that will present the information or data in a fresh and helpful way.
The next step in developing promotable content is to ensure that it will serve media contacts and their readers. Ideally, the content will align with and support the current reporting trends of industry publications. Media contacts will consider sharing your content when it can augment an existing story idea or bring a new story idea to the table.
The connection between the content and the larger trend should be easy to identify. The more you have to explain to make the connection between your content and the trend industry trend, the more difficult it will be to pitch to a media contact.
Ensure that your content does not favor the brand or show a product bias. It should never feel like a sales pitch to a reader. These kinds of content marketing mistakes will immediately eliminate your content from a journalist’s consideration.
The ultimate question to ask to ensure it will serve media and their readers is actually quite simple: Will this piece of content save the audience and journalist time, money or both? If you can answer yes to this question you are on the path to content promotion success.
It’s crucial to remember the importance of user experience when developing new content. The experience had when visiting the web page hosting the content, as well as consuming the content itself, should be simple and painless. More than that, the experience should actually be engaging and interesting.
Remember that user experience must be optimized for a variety of audiences. Visitors could land on the page while exploring multiple pages of the hosting website. Media contacts or influencers may visit the page directly to consider sharing it with their own networks, while referral traffic to the page stems from earned media coverage. During content promotion campaigns, the hosting website and related content landing page need to be optimized around the content to inform referral traffic unfamiliar with your brand or website.
