In this era of information overload, content is the king. But, content creation, however taxing it may be, is only half the work done. The rest of the work is promoting the content and ensuring it reaches the right audience.
The key to nailing content promotion is to do it efficiently – many companies struggle with content promotion not because they don’t spend time, but because they spend too much time on irrelevant and lackluster content. It is important to establish an objective – is it increased brand visibility, are you looking at lead generation and conversion or increasing blog traffic? It is also important to know who your target audience is and to make a decision whether the content be textual, visual (posters, infographics), audio (podcasts) or video.
1. Email. This might sound old school, but email is still a wonderful way of reaching your target audience. Sending links to the article or blog post through newsletters or notifications is straightforward. Remember, people who have signed up for subscription have done so to know more about the company and the resources it can offer. If this sounds too simple, there are a lot of ways through which you can spice up email marketing – drip marketing for one, is a great tool to send automated and tailored email alerts to your audience. Through drip, you can target each member in your audience specifically – including his/her name, what interests them most about your company and relevant content based on which page they have spent most time on. Email is also a simple tool to cross-promote your social media pages.
2. Social media. The next and the obvious platform to promote your content is social media. Depending on the objective, content can be shared either on (or all) of these – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, SnapChat, SoundCloud, etc. While all content can go into all these platforms, a social media strategy on what to post where will add more value – For e.g., videos work great in Facebook and SnapChat, podcasts in Soundcloud, professional posts and infographics in LinkedIn, images and posters mainly across twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
The timing of the posts is also very crucial. Analytics will tell you what part of your audience is active on each channel and at what time. Posting relevant content at the right time will increase views and audience engagement. If it is overwhelming to handle so many social channels, there are social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer that help bring all of the channels in one place. You can also use these tools to post curated content at pre-defined time.
3. Increase SEO through backlinks. While the content you have created may be interesting, backlinks to the relevant page in your website or other pages increases traffic and search engine rankings. A very simple way to create backlinks is to ask your team to share the link to the content on their social media pages. SEO improves when content is shared multiple times – this is recorded by search engines which will give your content a better ranking.
4. Influencer outreach. Identify your influencers – influencers can be media, bloggers or top-level professionals in your industry and/or sources whom you have used or mentioned in your content. Reach out to these influencers and tell them about your new article or podcast and ask them to share it to their network. Content shared by influencers is seen not just as interesting but also trustworthy. Apart from getting more traffic, your brand’s credibility grows – third party endorsement is invaluable for a brand or product.
5. Syndicate content. When done right, content syndication can genuinely boost revenue. You can use sites like Medium, StumbleUpon, Scoop.It to post your content. Through this, you can reach out to a wider audience. This will increase authority and credibility. Apart from these, content can also be posted in LinkedIn. It is usually not recommended to re-post the article on multiple sites as it can pull down your Google ranking, but you can post excerpts in these sites and provide a link to the content page on your website to read the entire article.
For content to reign king, it is imperative for it to be shareable, relatable and understandable. Simple but impactful content can do wonders to the brand and product sales. Hitting ‘Publish’ is only the beginning – promoting the right content at the best time is crucial for success.
