Building amazing content is hard, but you’ve mastered it.
You have content that’s specifically tailored to detailed customer personas, your website is optimized to appeal to potential clients at all points of the sales funnel, and you’ve built out a beautiful analytics dashboard to track your success.
But – now your content is just sitting there!
Having great content is almost meaningless if you aren’t promoting it properly. Let’s walk through some awesome options for building a sustainable content marketing empire:
6 Ways to Effectively Promote Your Content
1. Social Media
Social media sometimes feels like a sinkhole of time and attention. Writing posts, responding to comments, managing ads and sifting through endless analytics can be overwhelming.
Use your content to both make your social posts sparkle, and to drive traffic back to that carefully crafted funnel on your website. Distribute and promote your posts, whitepapers, and infographics via all social platforms.
Also, time a follow-up post a few weeks later for a second hit of traffic you may have missed the first time around.
For the best results from social media when it comes to content promotion, prepare a daily social media plan. This way you can schedule posts to go live automatically instead of having to remember to do it yourself (or worse – forgetting to!). In addition, you can find out when your profiles have the most traffic and schedule your posts for the busiest times of the day.
2. Email
Whitepapers and other gated content pieces are excellent for building a solid database of interested readers. Don’t let that go to waste!
Distributing your work through social media and using SEO will build that list, and then all you have to do is write those e-mails and put it into motion. When you publish a new blog post or have a contributed piece picked up by an influential outlet, make sure you’re sending out those useful stories to your opted-in audience.
One more note on email content distribution – if you have customer personas that differ quite a bit, make sure to be segmenting your email list. It’s not useful (and doesn’t make a great impression) to send inapplicable content to parts of your audience. Make sure all emails contain valuable information for the specific person you want to engage through the communication. Nobody likes to feel like they’re getting an inapplicable mass e-mail.
3. Outreach and Influencer Marketing
As part of your larger content marketing strategy, influencer marketing is more than just a buzzword these days – it can really be a game changer.
The first step here is to identify key influencers in your area. Select industry darlings, bloggers with a large audience of ideal customers, or local leaders that have access to the audience you’d like to reach. Then, only market to them.
Develop a specific marketing campaign or networking goal of converting that person into a follower, and create the opportunity for that influencer to spread a tailored marketing message or piece of content to that audience. This tactic is like a super referral campaign.
The influencer’s audience trusts them and sees aspects of their own personalities reflected in the content the influencer shares. When they recommend your product, service, or blog, you’ll have a much higher rate of success with conversions in that audience.
[RELATED: Social Media Marketing Plan in 7 Steps]
4. Link Building
As with most content machines, a lot of your content will relate to other areas of content, or even build on itself from post to post. Translation: link other articles you’ve written to articles you’re currently writing, like this: Use internal linking to build SEO and lead the reader from post to post (see how we linked another related CCG article there?).
For search engines, all this internal linking builds authority and decreases your bounce rate, making you look more appealing in search rankings.
On top of a strong internal link structure on your website, you want to make sure you are actively acquiring quality links from other websites, too. This will have the biggest influence on your search engine rankings.
5. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is perfect for the fledgling blogger. This is another tactic that piggybacks on an established outlet’s audience, to drive traffic to your own.
Create a list of bloggers or industry publications that members of your audience would frequently engage with. Develop content specifically for those blogs.
Many outlets that accept guest contributors have strict rules regarding self-promotion or linking back to your own website outside of a bio. Read up before you send something laden with links to content on your site. Don’t fret if you can’t link to your own blog in an article! Even without these, getting your name out there with larger audiences in your industry will increase traffic and engagement with your own content.
6. Paid Media
Finally, sometimes you’re going to have to allocate some budget to amplify your voice. There are a ton of ways to do this, so we’ll just outline a few here:
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Search Engine Marketing: B2B Content Marketing Survey found that this is the most used method for B2B businesses using paid methods to distribute their content. 66% of B2B business are shelling out cash for this medium. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) refers to paid search methods like PPC, CP, and CPM. These are generally paid only when the medium performs.
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Digital Ads and Retargeting: This option refers to buying into an ad program that places advertising on websites in the program’s network. Once a visitor leaves your site, the retargeting system will push your digital ad to that same visitor on other websites they visit, keeping your content top of mind.
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Promoted Social Posts: These are the ads you see in your Facebook or Twitter feed. They can be relatively inexpensive to get started and are easily targeted by keyword or demographic.
