Even if you create the absolute best content out there, how do you reach the people that want it? Publishing articles or content on your blog is only part of the process – brands must also effectively promote it and attract their target audience to a product or service. Here are 3 quick tips to consider for effective content promotion:
While all of the content you create should be useful, informative and interesting, a number of factors should be considered when choosing specific content to promote, such as the overall budget and goals for the content marketing campaign.
For companies with a lower marketing budget, free guides and white papers that are gated behind a lead-capture form make for a great marketing content. It should be valuable enough to get visitors to provide their contact information in exchange for the content. It’s vital to make sure your messaging and content are targeted to potential customers, or you may just be filling your email and lead lists with low-value contacts.
Video content and infographics can also make for great content to promote to a specific audience. If you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on something that you believe has the potential to really resonate with a subset of your audience, but just can’t seem to get any traction with them, paid promotion might make sense as a viable promotional option. Often, video or graphic content just needs a bit of a publicity boost to gain the traction and visibility you seek. Platforms with great segmentation tools, such as Facebook, really let you hone in on your target market.
Regardless of your company’s goals or budget - your content must be relevant, valuable and engaging. Irrelevant or uninteresting content will drive low click-through rates, lower your brand's authoritative voice within the industry, and stall conversions.
Choosing the right network to publish your content is a critical factor in effective promotion. Utilizing popular channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube to promote content is a great way to reach the biggest audience possible. Here you have two options: You can create great content specifically for a network, or you can choose a network to publish existing content.
Remember, certain content will resonate better with certain social media networks. There is an active community and etiquette that comes with each social channel, so try to put yourself in the shoes of the user and think about what content would interest you based on the network’s style.
For example, a highly technical white paper related to your industry may be a great content piece, but that doesn’t mean that it should be promoted to all your fans or followers on Facebook. A better network to test may be LinkedIn, where you can target users by profession and job title, increasing your odds of getting in front of a highly technical audience that is already in a more professional frame of mind.
With any marketing strategy, accurately measuring and tracking efforts against targets and goals is essential in proving ROI. Content marketing is no different; when specific goals are set in place, the measurement of different metrics will be easier to track – making your content marketing strategy more effective. Taking advantage of free resources like Google Analytics and using them to their full capacity will take your content efforts to a level you’ve never known was possible.
In order to start tracking the success of content promotion (and guide future efforts), you need a content marketing strategy with specific promotional objectives. By implementing these specific objectives or goals, you’ll be able to determine what makes content works best on various promotional channels. Your team can then make the necessary adjustments along the way to improve an effective formula.
Through this measurement, you can focus on the kinds of content that have generally worked for you and your competitors. Adapt your content marketing strategy toward success and stop wasting time promoting content to an irrelevant audience.
