Content promotion can be difficult. It takes a lot to stand out from the crowd, or even to just gain the confidence to promote oneself. Or maybe your recent analytics revealed that you’re in a rut and you need a few ideas to get back on top. Have no fear—these following tips will enhance your content promotion. After all, even Business Cat knows that content creation is just part of the equation.
1. Reach Out to Influencers
Influencers are any prominent people in your industry with a hefty or targeted following online. When you have some content ready to go, or even if you’re still in the planning stages, contact an influencer or two (or more—it’s always good to reach out to as many as possible and expect a lower response rate) to see if you can garner a quote that you can use. If you’re lucky, great! Your content just got an authority boost, and a reputation level-up
But how about finding a fresh voice? 30 percent of consumers are more likely to take the recommendation of a non-celeb, so try finding lesser-known influencers in places that aren’t directly related to your company’s industry. We call these micro-influencers because while their followers aren’t in the millions (or even hundreds of thousands), they have targeted fans and much more organic engagement. For example, let’s say you’re a handbag company trying to reach young women who’ve recently graduated. Rather than targeting well-known fashion influencers, look for more relatable voices in universities and sororities. By targeting the influencers of the future and leveraging their networks, you can build more organic influence. Once that connection is established, keep that communication open; you never know what kind of partnership opportunities can open down the road.
2. Paid Ads, Social Media, and Search
Good old-fashioned paid advertising can always help boost content promotion. Paid search, which places sponsored listings at the top of search result pages, requires a keen understanding of keyword targeting and optimization. You can also go social by boosting posts on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all of which allow you to create targeted social ads based on demographics, location, and other categories.
There are also many free content syndication platforms that can help target a wider audience, including Medium and Stumbleupon, which offer personalized daily digests of relevant content. And then there are paid content syndication platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola, which recommend your content across various sites such as CNN, NBC, Fox, and USA Today. Meanwhile, B2B brands should target paid ads on industry sites and blogs, which can drive traffic back to a brand’s website.
3. Repurpose Existing Content for Wider Distribution
To reach new audiences and to give each piece of content you create some extra mileage, you should always repurpose that content by sharing it across every distribution channel that matches your target audience. But keep in mind that individual types of content work best with different distribution platforms. Twitter, with a user base of over 330 million, is a great place to answer customer questions and to engage with consumers in an authentic way, because according to a report from Twitter, 93 percent of people who follow small- and medium-sized business on Twitter plan to buy from them. You can also take a strong pull quote from a blog post or curated article and post that on Twitter, along with a shortened URL. If you can pair that with a GIF or video, even better.
But if visual content is your main bread and butter, you’ll want to leverage Instagram in a meaningful way. Have a graphic artist create an image that visualizes the content of a blog post, and then link to the blog post in the comments or status update. And don’t always go for video; photos generate 36 percent more likes than videos. For Facebook, simply plug in the blog post with a a quippy status update and publish away. Its 2 billion users will find it. There are a lot of options for repurposing content; it’s just about matching the right type of content with the right platform.
4. Submit Guest Blogs and Op-Eds
Don’t just stick to publishing on your company blog. There are plenty of other places to get your writing noticed. For instance, recently, we partnered with Forbes Agency Council to have guest blogs published alongside prominent thought leaders. And there are also plenty of other ways to find interesting and non-traditional guest blogging opportunities. For example, an insurance provider could craft an article that talks about the challenges that California construction companies face, then share it with an industry organization in targeted California cities that could share it through an email list. Or a company that creates speciality health and fitness apps could submit an op-ed to a niche health blog to capture the interest of a focused and attentive audience.
Surprisingly though, only 6 percent (!) of bloggers actually leverage guest blogging. This gives content creation teams that are looking for more unique content promotion ideas a big opportunity to find interesting partnerships to help distribute useful branded content through.
5. Email Marketing
Nope, email still isn’t dead. It actually has some of the highest ROI out there–up to a median of 122 percent according to eMarketer, which makes it one of the best ways to reach and engage with an audience. It makes sense; there are 1 billion Gmail users and worldwide email users are estimated to reach 3 billion by 2020. Why not take advantage of that fact? An email list (or newsletter) is a useful way to keep in touch with past customers and increase customer rentention. It’s also a great way to help move prospects and leads down the sales funnel with easy-to-manage touch points before they become a customer.
One extremely simple way to utilize email marketing as a content promotion tool is to simply collect a week or two’s worth of blog content into one handy anthology with a few blurbs and links and a call to action. Keep the design nice and minimalist (a straightforward, mobile-friendly list works), give the subscribers the option to unsubscribe, and check your analytics to see how it performed, and find opportunities to improve open and click-through rates. Rinse and repeat.
6. Make Your Content More Shareable
This is kind of an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how often this quick content promotion fix goes neglected. To make sure people can share your content, right then and there on the page, add sharing buttons. Add a “Click to Tweet” social media button at the top (or bottom) of your content and don’t forget the couple dozen or so other platforms you can use to share. Look below the banner image on this page and you’ll see buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, email, and a button that leads to even more options.
You can also create buttons that tweet out specific quotes from your article; Content Marketing Institute does a great job of this. If your content is informative and valuable people will share it, and when people see it shared they will share it too, and so on and so on. When you consider 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as friends, it’s easy to see how powerful a simple sharing button can be.