7 Top Content Marketing Assets You Need to Promote

Content creation is a significant investment. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 Enterprise Content Marketing Research report, B2B marketers allocated 24 percent of their total budgets to content marketing last year. That’s an awful lot of money spend on content, especially if you don’t plan to make sure it will reach its intended audience.

Enter promotion. It’s no secret that content creation and promotion strategies should go hand-in-hand. Together, the two are crucial for executing engaging content marketing campaigns. Yet producing the kind of content that engages is still the biggest challenge that B2B enterprise marketers face today.

Many marketers are likely held back by weak promotion strategies that are lacking (or nonexistent). Others, however, may simply be off the mark with their content strategies. Whatever the case, marketers must recognize that content assets will never be a one-size-fits-all solution—and more importantly, that a targeted promotion strategy is always necessary.

For starters, though, let’s take a look at some highly promotable content forms that will make the promotion job a little easier for you.

The 7 types of highly promotable content

In February, Relevance co-founder Aaron Aders wrote a post on Inc.com called 7 Highly Promotable Forms of Content Marketing that outlined the most popular content marketing assets that generate attention online. Here’s a quick run-down:

1.  E-books: book-length publications (typically 15,000 words or more) in digital form that are intended to enlighten or teach a concept or practice.
2.  Guides and handbooks: More concise than e-books, these content assets are intended to help someone make a decision, form an opinion, or execute a strategy or tactic.
3.  Apps: self-contained programs or software designed to solve unique problems or serve particular purposes.
4.  Studies: based on credible research and expert knowledge, studies publish results from detailed investigations and analyses of subjects or situations.
5.  Cheat sheets: reference tools that provide brief, simple instructions for making decisions, forming opinions, or executing strategies or tactics. A cheat sheet should be shorter than a guide or handbook, but more in-depth than an infographic.
6.  Videos: Web-based video with the intent to solve problems and/or entertain—this one is pretty obvious.
7.  Mixed-media posts: this format may incorporate a variety of media types (e.g. video, audio, social) with the intent to solve the problems of or entertain a specific audience.

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No matter the type of content you decide to invest in, don’t waste hard-earned money on creation only to let the asset fall flat on its face due to lack of promotion. It’s a shame when hard work and helpful content go to waste because its beneficiaries cannot find it organically. Content marketing is not like Field of Dreams. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’re going to come.