If content is king because it gets all the attention, content promotion is the queen that props him up. After all, what good would two thousand billboards in the desert do?
Your content could be powerful and your ideas revolutionary, but if no one reads it, you’ll never convey your message. This is where a content promotion strategy saves the day. With a proper content promotion strategy, you can gain followers, increase your website traffic, and raise your overall search engine rankings for your SEO.
Article Contents
Content Promotion: The Basics
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable, engaging content to a clear target audience. This content is created to answer questions or solve problems your target audience (customers) face.
When people search for answers, your content is there to supply them.
Different types of content are created to fill different gaps in the buyer’s journey. The more helpful and valuable your content, the more trust you build and the more leads you generate. Content can take a wide variety of forms — from written content like blog posts and articles to visual content like videos and infographics.
By creating their own markets and gaining their own attention, content marketing enables marketers to become publishers. Marketers raise brand recognition by building a trusting relationship with customers as they progress through the sales funnel by producing and sharing content they find useful. Content marketing is considered a less expensive approach than other options.
Different Types of Content and Why You Should Use them
With a nearly endless variety of content available, how do you choose which is best for your business? We’ll go over some of the most common and effective types of content below so you can choose which type makes the most sense for your business.
Blogs
Written blogs are ideal for building relationships with your readers and driving traffic to your website. Share things like news about the company, product announcements, or any other topic that your target audience would find valuable.
White Papers
Create informative reports on industry-specific topics to establish yourself as a thought leader. These can also be effective lead magnets.
E-Books
Like white papers, downloadable e-books on specific topics for your niche will draw leads and establish your brand as the experts.
Newsletters
Providing ongoing updates to your audience can establish trust and transparency with your brand and showcase how you are staying on the cutting edge of your field.
Case Studies
Real examples of success show off your expertise and demonstrate effectiveness. These are highly shareable and a great way to showcase your company’s accomplishments.
Infographics
Visually appealing infographics provide an attractive way to dispense information and are also highly shareable, especially on social media channels.
Video
Videos can provide an entertaining and effective way to get information in front of your audience. There are many tools available to make video creation easier for companies without dedicated video production teams.
Why Is Content Promotion So Important?
We all have heard the “content is king” mantra for several years now, but few people are talking about how to create a successful content promotion strategy. Content promotion is all about distributing your ideas through multiple mediums and across multiple channels and platforms.
We have consistently seen that effective content promotion will have both immediate and lingering effects. Let’s look at some of the advantages content promotion can provide:
Benefits of Content Promotion
Website Traffic
The immediate effect of content promotion is the direct traffic you gain from people sharing and interacting with your content across different platforms. The residual effect is the long-term search engine optimization (SEO) benefits that your site will get from having external links. If your content promotion strategy is set up properly, these links will increase your rankings in search engines.
Sales
As traffic to your website increases, your sales will naturally increase with it. This influx of traffic will consist of more qualified leads and less chaff, which will cut down on the effort needed to close sales and generate new business.
Brand Awareness and Brand Affinity
Content promotion across new channels will put your brand in front of more users than without it, resulting in higher awareness of your brand. Increased brand affinity, in which customers feel passionately about and share a company or brand’s values, is one of the most valuable benefits provided by content marketing. Individuals with high brand affinity will become your ideal customers, bragging about how amazing you are to their friends and family. They will vouch for your business without prompting.
Strong ROI
Each new piece of content has the potential to significantly increase the number of qualified visitors to your website each month. Furthermore, other websites want to provide links to useful information sources like yours. Each of these links assists in attracting more eligible website visitors to the linked content, as well as other pages on your website.
Scale Your Retargeting Audience
As new traffic comes to your website, it will feed your retargeting audience pools (assuming you are set up to track users and create retargeting audiences — which you absolutely should). More users in your retargeting audiences mean more opportunities to get your brand in front of potential customers as they journey through the internet.
Where To Promote Your Content
If you are able to execute your content promotion strategy through the sources mentioned below, you will see your search engine rankings go up.
RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are very effective ways to promote content. By submitting your content to an RSS feed aggregator, you are signing your content up to be pushed out to everyone using their feeds to deliver content on their website. RSS feeds can be a great source of social signals and traffic without having to lift a finger.
Post Submission Sites/Communities
Connecting with other sites that host blog networks or that allow you to submit your posts can increase traffic and links.
Blogging and Guest Posting Platforms
There are many blogging platforms that can help you promote content through their internal sharing systems. These platforms are on a constant lookout for content that strikes the right chords with their user and helps them gain a better understanding of the nuances of the trade. Platforms like magazines and news outlets draw thousands of users every day, which could provide you the surge of traffic you’ve been looking for!
Video Submission Sites
Video is a powerful content promotion tool, which is why it’s gotten even more popular in recent years. Whether you are repurposing content or creating original content, you need to promote your videos just as you would any other form of content.
Infographic Submission Sites
Infographic submission sites put your content promotion strategy on the right path and help you build links. Many will use these sites to share their own content.
Influencer Outreach
According to one study, influencer outreach has been deemed the fastest content promotion strategy to gain traffic and natural backlinks for your website. Find out who the movers and shakers are in your industry and contact them. Showcase your previous writing and ask if you could contribute to their community. Get creative!
Content Promotion Best Practices
Share Your Content on Social Media
Utilize your existing social media channels to share your content with existing followers. This will also provide an opportunity for others to share your content or tag others who might find it valuable.
Optimize Visual Assets for Sharing
When creating visual assets like video and infographics, make sure that the end result will work across all channels you intend to broadcast your content on. Few things kill engagement more than a broken video link or a cut-off image.
Repurpose Your Existing Content
Remember that case study you made for a specific client? Or that white-paper you wrote a few years ago? Who says they can’t be used in your content promotion strategy? They’re yours, after all. Repurposing your content is one of the most efficient ways to promote content consistently.
Use Keywords Effectively
When writing content, make sure that you’re including the right keywords to reach your target audience. Do some research beforehand and ensure the content has the right keywords included at the right density to rank high in search results.
Work With Influencers
Identify thought leaders in your space and cultivate relationships with them to help you promote your content. Just make sure they align with your brand and find a mutually beneficial relationship that can help you both.
Engage With Your Audience
Don’t ignore those comments! Comment sections and social media provide the perfect environment for users to leave their feedback — you shouldn’t waste the opportunity to engage with them directly and show that you’re attentive to their responses.
Leverage Your Sources
If you used sources in your content, consider reaching out to them to help you promote your content. They might be thrilled to have their name and information shared in new places and will often be willing to work with you to reach new users and provide credibility to your content.
Internal Link Building
Your site is full of more great content than just the piece users are currently seeing. Make sure to create internal links to other parts of your site or other pieces of content to keep users engaged. This has the added benefit of improving SEO rankings.
Paid Advertising
Paid media channels like Google and Facebook ads can be an effective way to promote your content. These ad platforms provide lots of granular targeting options as well as ways to target audiences similar to your existing users.
Keep Your Strategy Fresh
Not every piece of content will work the same on every channel. Make sure that you’re using the right content promotion strategy for each channel and that you have enough variety in your content that users won’t get bored with stale, reused content.
Optimize Based on Results
Never stop optimizing. One content promotion strategy may work well, but that doesn’t mean the work is done. Do research on your results and use those lessons to improve your content and promotion.
Use Content Promotion To Level-Up Your Business
The internet can be a scary place for business owners who know they are competing on a stage they are not experts in — and that’s where professionals can help. Content creation, content promotion, and repurposing is a critical part of making any business successful online.
Working with a digital marketing agency to help craft your content promotion strategy can give you the edge you need in a market where business owners are trying to juggle running their business and staying competitive online.
The most important thing to remember is that there is no one right way to increase traffic to your website. Increasing organic traffic to your website is about knowing how to use different elements of a content promotion strategy to create a customized solution for your business’ situation.
