High quality and relevant content is the key to generating a steady stream of traffic – that’s a statement you’d often read from articles and blog posts about digital marketing. While this statement is basically, it’s only half the truth. Content, regardless of how greatly-written or of Pulitzer-price-level of quality it is, will not promote itself.
Content needs promotion… or no one will ever see your content.
Now, add the fact that there are more than 27 million content shared daily, 2 million of which are blog posts – making it doubly hard to get through to your targeted audience. So how can you do it?
Through content marketing.
An effective content promotion campaign is the only way you can get through to your targeted audiences. That’s why as much as 63% of B2B digital marketers in the US rely on content marketing to promote their businesses and generate leads.
Want to learn how the more efficient ones do it? Read through these 9 key tactics we’re sharing here and boost your content promotion campaigns – and get the results you want for your business.
1. Leverage Your Owned Marketing Assets
Many businesses have already started building their own marketing assets which includes social media groups and pages, email lists, business blogs, microsites and their websites. Marketing assets like blogs are important for businesses whatever their size may be. In fact, businesses who have successfully harnessed blogs for marketing can get 13 times better chances of recovering their investments with a positive ROI.
One important attribute of these assets is that online users can sign up or join in order to receive updates or further information. These permission-based marketing assets can be leveraged for content promotion, using a platform where you have full control on when and how your content are published to your subscribers.
2. Join Social Sharing Communities
A great way of promoting your content is to leverage on the power of social media by joining social sharing communities. In these communities, you can join other marketers and online users who also have their own content to promote. You can help each other out by sharing each other’s content. If you share more content from other people within the community, you’ll reap the benefit of having your own content shared by others as well.
Some of these communities that you can join for free include Triberr and BizSugar. However, the key to success in social sharing communities is for you to join in the community conversations. Simply broadcasting content may not get the proper responses from users in a way you want them to do. By engaging and conversing with people in these communities, you can capitalize on the power of word-of-mouth marketing to get your content promoted across and beyond this channel.
3. Ask Readers to Share Your Content
It is so obvious and practical that many marketers tend to overlook the fact that they can actually ask their existing readers to share their content. Derek Halpern, a popular digital marketer from Social Triggers is using this strategy and using it well. His posts always contain a call to action asking his readers to share his content to their network through links in his posts and pages.
Like Derek Halpern, you can add friend calls-to-action on your pages and content that will encourage your readers to share your content. But on top of asking your readers to help you in content promotion, you should also provide the facilities in your pages that will make it easier for them to share your content. You can make use of social sharing buttons or apps like Twitter Web Intents that makes it easier for Twitter users to interact with your content through your web pages.
4. Work with Content Curators
Content curation is an accepted and well-tested manner for producing content that can be used for digital marketing – which you can leverage this time for content promotion. Through content curation, materials that have been previously published in your main websites can get their second chance of being published anew in other websites. This will provide your content with more exposure, giving it better chances of reaching targeted audiences. Get connected and communicate with content curators in your niche and industry and present your quality content for them to syndicate.
Roundups are popular content materials the people love to read as they present readers with links to the best content from the web for the previous week for a particular topic or theme. The difference with standard syndicated or curated posts is that these roundups only include contextual links and probably a short description that will tell potential readers about your content. The key to getting your content curated or syndicated is if you provide high-quality and relevant epic content that readers, and curators, will be interested to read and use.
5. Join Communities and Forums
One of the keys to success to content promotion is for online users to interact or engage with you and your content. Social media networks proved to be great channels for engagement but many marketers are missing out on the great opportunities for content promotion presented by joining online communities and forums. Some of these forums like the Warrior Forum have thousands of members active at any given time.
LinkedIn Groups are like the equivalent of the traditional forum but are housed in the B2B oriented marketing platform in LinkedIn. Another channel where you can join communities based on particular topics are Google Plus communities. There are other variations of these forums, communities and discussion groups that you can join and participate in. The key to effective content promotion here is to give value to members with information that they need based on engagements or interactions you went through by participating in discussion threads.
6. Get the Attention of Experts and Influencers
Experts and influencers have sizable following, many of which are active in monitoring for updates or new materials that these influencers share in their channels. Citations from these experts and influencers can really give your content the promotional boosts it needs. But how can you get the attention of these experts and influencers well enough to actually generate citations from them?
Quote the thoughts, concepts, tips and other stuff they share and use these as part of your content. Just make sure you properly cite their names or businesses and provide an active link that goes back to their original pages. Aside from links, you should also make use of proper hashtags as well as a “+” which you can add to their name in a Google+ shout out. They will receive notifications through their email when you do this, which could eventually get their attention.
Of course, you can also communicate with them directly (in this example I asked Aaron Bradly, a leading authority in Semantic Search to critique our work) but make sure that you approach them well. The key again is to produce high-quality epic content which your targeted experts and influencers may find interesting or relevant to their content needs – so they’ll respond to your invites or contact approaches.
7. Interview Influential People
You can take a step further from merely getting citations from experts and other influential people in your niche or industry by actually asking them for an interview session. Interviews can be through person-to-person meet-ups (if they are near your locality) or through online communication through chat sessions. You can record these interviews through audio or video recordings and use these as part of your content, with transcripts added, after getting their permission for you to do so.
You should create a separate interview page in your website for influential people like these. Link your content to these pages and don’t forget to include them in your main navigational interfaces. These influencers will surely link to these pages and share them to their own networks. Not only will you get citations from these influential people, but you can also get great exposure to their followers and other people interested in what you all have to say through your content.
8. Schedule Your Posts and Publications Properly
The basic act of posting just a single article in your blog can already give you 70% better chances of generating leads compared to others who don’t own a blog. However, you can get even more mileage if you properly time your posts, publications or emails according to the best periods of the day where recipients will most like respond. Timing is indeed everything and you can maximize how you can use this to your advantage by using tools like the following:
- Tweriod
This is a free tool that basically notifies you when a big number of your Twitter followers is mustering online. With more followers online, you can get better exposure with your content and generate good engagements or even conversions from them
- Facebook Insights
This analytical tool can give you good information about your page fans’ online behavior. It can tell you specifically which particular day and times of the day these fans are most active on Facebook
- Timing+
From the name of this free tool itself, you already know that this is intended for giving you insights on the best times for promoting your content on Google Plus. You can also gain insight about the performance of each post as well as help you identify posts that generate the most engagement
9. Make Use of Paid Promotion Strategies
Although you can leverage your content promotion strategy by using only free tools, you can get better mileage and exposure if you make use of good paid promotion strategies for your content. Some of these paid content promotion channels include:
- StumbleUpon Paid Discovery – you can use this to generate engagement from StumbleUpon’s socially active visitors through your content
- Reddit Ads – Just like StumbleUpon, you can make use of this low cost paid advertising channel for promoting your content to a particular sub-Reddit where you can find targeted audiences
- Promoted Tweets – Individual tweets can get better mileage and exposure through this paid advertising channel which you can customize for targeting based on interests, demographics and other attributes
- Facebook Ads – Like Promoted Tweets, your posts and stories can get better exposure and reach through paid promoted Facebook content
- Outbrain – This paid syndication service provide a cost-effective way of promoting your content through related blogs where your content will be suggested for syndication
- +Post Ads – A relatively new paid channel on Google+. You can use this model to promote your contents on Google display network
- Promoted Pins – A new paid social channel as well, you can promote your pins (with your contents or products) across Pinterest network
There are other paid content promotion platforms like Taboola, Adblade and Zemanta that you can utilize for your campaigns. Promotions can be in the form of advertorials, press releases and inclusion in newsletters to email lists.
There are other tactics that you can use for effective content promotion but you can get a good headstart if you focus and utilize on these top key tips that we just shared. Again, there are two things for getting good results from your content marketing efforts. One is through promotion which was just discussed here and the other is to produce high-quality content worthy of sharing. With these two as your ingredients – expect only success with your campaigns!