If you want your content to serve its purpose and drive marketing goals, you need to be proactive with your content promotion. Here are seven content promotion tactics you can use to get your website noticed.
1. Send an email broadcast
Your email list is (hopefully) composed of people who signed up because they’re interested in your brand and want to receive your latest updates. According to Campaign Monitor, you’re six times more likely to get a click from an email campaign than a tweet. That’s a great audience to promote your content to because they’re already engaged and much more likely to share.
You’re 6x more likely to get a click from an email campaign than a tweet via @campaignmonitor. #emailmarketing
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Once a new piece of content is published, send a message to your list. Include a short teaser of the content to encourage them to click through, and be sure to include a call to action asking them to share it.
Five days after you send the first broadcast email, check your analytics to see who didn’t open it. Send the broadcast again — with a different subject line — to this group. You will be surprised at how many clicks you are missing by only sending the broadcast once! (Thanks to Adam Franklin from Bluewire Media for this trick.)
See who didn’t open your e-blast and resend w/ a different subject line, says @Franklin_Adam via @WillBluntAU.
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If you create a lot of content, how often you use this strategy will depend on your audience. For example, if your subscribers signed up for a weekly newsletter (nothing more), then stick to that.
AdRoll sends a regular newsletter highlighting several recent posts from its blog. You could do something like that as well.
Email Marketing: A Fresh Take From the Experts
2. Engage with your community
Plenty of tools and platforms will help you join your industry’s conversation and give your content more reach at the same time. Here are some options:
Social media groups
Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great opportunities to dig deeper into a social platform and target your niche audience. Join groups that your content is relevant to, join the conversation, and suggest your content naturally. You can also join and contribute to specific boards on Pinterest.
.@Facebook & @LinkedIn groups are ways to engage with your niche audience, says @WillBluntAU.
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Content promotion networks
You can also get more reach on social media with the help of content promotion networks, such as Viral Content Bee. This platform connects you with other people wanting to promote their content. Share their posts and you receive credits that you can then use to promote your own posts.
Quuu is a tool that automatically curates content for people to share. Sign up to promote your content and select the relevant categories. Then your posts can become a part of the curated content queue.
Online communities
There are plenty of other platforms where you can discuss topics related to your niche. Join Q&A sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers, and you can suggest your content as a resource to answer people’s questions. Just make sure you actually engage in discussions on the platform so it’s not all about promoting your content.
TIP: If you create content about marketing-related topics, Inbound.org and GrowthHackers are two content curation and promotion communities to take advantage of.
50 Best Social Media Tools From 50 Most Influential Marketers Online
3. Pay to promote
Advertising your content is a fairly new concept that can work well, especially compared to traditional direct-marketing tactics. Pay per click or by number of impressions to help your content get more reach on a variety of platforms.
Facebook Ads
Facebook makes it possible to create targeted ads based on all kinds of criteria, including demographics, location, and specific interest categories. If you know your target audience well, you can take advantage of these features for your content promotion.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon offers a paid discovery feature with a pay-per-click model. Its users are mostly college-age millennials so if you have content relevant to this demographic, look into it.
If your content targets college-age millennials, look into promoting it with @StumbleUpon, says @WillBluntAU.
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Reddit Ads
Reddit is another platform full of millennials, but not exclusively. Reddit Ads are an inexpensive option to get more reach for your content on the crowdsourced platform.
Outbrain
Outbrain is a promotion network that displays your content on relevant blogs and news sites. The “related content” section at the bottom of a lot of web pages is usually full of promoted content from Outbrain or one of its competitors.
How to Orchestrate the Concert of Paid Content Promotion
4. Reach out on social media
Social platforms are crowded, so there’s no guarantee interested people will see and share your content. To improve your content’s visibility, target interested people directly.
Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find social media users who share content like yours. Just take a keyword from the content you want to promote and type it into its search bar.
You’ll see a list of popular content related to that keyword ordered by most overall shares. Find the most relevant content post and click on “View Sharers” — you’ll want to target this list with your content.
Targeting influencers with a lot of followers is important, but only if they’re likely to engage with your messaging. Make sure you select people with a high retweet and reply ratio (detailed in their BuzzSumo profile).
Connect on a social platform using an @ mention of your influencer to ask for opinions on your content or suggest that his or her audience might like it.
5 Ways to Get Noticed by Influencers on Twitter
5. Connect with influencers outside of social
Social media isn’t the only place you should target influencers. Email is another option likely to capture more attention, especially if your influencer has a busy social profile. A cold email to a previously identified influencer can help you with a lot of things — building links, getting comments, or encouraging sharing. Consider this template:
An email to identified influencer may capture more attention than a social mention, says @WillBluntAU.
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Hi (Name),
I was doing some research into influencers in the (Industry) space and came across your name. I’ve got a lot of respect for the brand you have built for yourself on Twitter.
The reason I’m reaching out is because our team recently put together a helpful resource about (topic), and I think your audience could get some great value from it.
I know you’re busy, but if you have two seconds I’d love you to share it around… Here’s a clickable link:(insert clickable link)
And here’s the original article: (insert article URL and name)
Thanks and have a great day.
Regards,
(Your name)
An 8-Step Process to Use Influencers to Elevate Your Brand
6. Ask to include your content
Getting your content to appear in roundups is a great way to get more reach and build backlinks at the same time. You can find relevant link roundups to target with the help of Google. Include your niche keyword and one of the following in your search:
- Roundup
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Best of
- Top 10
- Link love
Getting your content to appear in roundups is a great way to get more reach & build backlinks. @WillBluntAU
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Once you’ve found some relevant roundups, reach out to the roundup curator to suggest your blog post be considered for the next entry.
One of my favorite roundups is from Ana Hoffman at Traffic Generation Café who is always open to share the love with a link if you do the same.
7. Write for others
Attract people from the web to important pages on your website (e.g., a squeeze page or sales page) by guest posting or blogging. Create amazing content and pitch it to other sites. If they let you, include links in the content and your author bio to key pages on your site.
There are tons of guest post opportunities, and finding them is easy. Most serious blogs will have a guest post submission page. Use Google to find them:
- (Niche keyword) + “guest post submission”
- (Niche keyword) + “write for us”
- (Niche keyword) + “contribution guidelines”
TIP: Install a plug-in like Alexa on your browser. When you visit a blog you want to pitch to, you can see important traffic stats with just one click.
How to Get Guest Posts Published on Top Sites
Wrapping up
Content marketing can do a lot to bring traffic to your website and progress your business goals, but only if you take the right steps to promote your content.
Follow these tactics and monitor their impact on your site traffic:
- Broadcast to your email list (more than once).
- Evaluate content promotion networks.
- Explore options with paid media.
- Reach out on social media.
- Connect outside social media.
- Ask content curators to include your content.
- Increase your reach by guest blogging.
You might find that some tactics work better than others, so adjust your strategy and get the most out of your promotion to get your content noticed.
Create, Distribute, and Share: 15 Essential Content Marketing Templates
Which other content promotion tactics have you found to be most effective for your business?
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
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Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picumbo
The post 7 Promotion Tactics to Get Your Content Noticed appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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