How to Create a Successful Content Promotion Strategy

2. Paid Promotion

While organic content marketing practices can produce significant results on their own, paid advertising will help you reach your objectives in far less time. 

However, advertising initiatives require a budget that always restricts your possibilities. Paid marketing initiatives have to be calculated ahead of time and demand more strategy than any other type of content promotion.

The best-paid content promotion tactics you should focus on right now are:

• Paid social promotion: Create full-blown social media campaigns with targeted filters that allow you to reach your specific audience with ease. You can also choose the budget-friendly option of boosting your best-performing content to gain more visibility at a lower cost. 
• Search engine marketing: Do you want to be the first result that pops up whenever your customers look for your type of products or services? With SEM, you can pay for specific keywords to be one of the first results for searches with conversion power.
• Influencer marketing: Influencer collaborations can expose your brand to a new audience and boost your sales through effective initiatives, such as giveaways and contests. By associating your brand with a positive online figure, you get to improve your credibility and establish yourself as an authority in your field.

3. Blog Marketing

Starting a blog gives you plenty of opportunities to promote your content on search engines and on your other communication channels.

To make sure your articles rank well on SERP, you first have to work on your optimization process. What does this mean?

Well, search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy used to improve both your website performance and content (text, images, structure, links) so that your pages get featured among the first search results.  

The key to reaching your target market through blogs is to plan your content in terms of search intent. This means that you first have to create a list of keywords your potential customers might use to search for your type of products and services. Then use that list to inform your next blog articles. You can increasingly use AI for SEO, speeding up this research process.

Here are seven blog content promotion tips:

1. Maintain a weekly posting schedule
2. Add internal links to valuable pages on your website
3. Plug your product and services seamlessly within your articles
4. Include visible CTAs to your products/services
5. Do outreach and get other blogs to link to your websites
6. Guest posts on other blogs to gain visibility
7. Share your latest blog post on social channels and include your best content in your email newsletters

You can even automate your blog promotion with SocialBee. All you have to do is import your RSS feed to the platform to turn your blogs into promotional social media posts. 

Whenever you share a new article, a social media post is created automatically in a specific content category inside SocialBee. Select your posting schedule once for the entire content category, write a short caption for each post, and let SocialBee do the rest. 

4. Email Marketing

Did you know that email generates $42 for every $1 spent? That sure sounds like a great deal.

Besides having a high return on investment (ROI), email marketing is also a cost-effective promotion channel that has proved to be effective year after year. However, this doesn’t mean that just sending newsletters to your leads from time to time will be enough. 

Here is how to go about creating a strong email marketing strategy:

• Find a quality email provider
• Send weekly newsletters with promotions and valuable content
• Create engaging subject lines that spark curiosity
• Reconnect with inactive customers or subscribers with re-engagement emails
• Monitor and adjust your strategy based on your analytics

What differentiates email marketing from other promotional channels is the fact that your message reaches the inbox of every recipient from your email list. 

Through email communication, you get to interact with your customers on a regular basis. Consequently, you stay top-of-mind and keep your audience up-to-date with your latest content, events, company news, and promotions. 

5. Online Forums

Taking part in online discussion communities like Quora, Reddit, or LinkedIn groups can help new audiences find your content. 

Quora’s top writers can gain millions of views on their answers, with many clicking through to external links. For example, health and fitness writer Rohan Monga has accumulated 13.7 million views across 589 responses, or an average of almost 24,000 views per 300-400 word answer.

While many of these sites don’t allow you to link directly to your blog or channel, sharing your thoughts on trending topics can still attract users to that content indirectly. Even when external links are allowed, it is good to get involved with other discussions first to build a rapport with other users.

For brands, online forums are a great way to attract new leads by offering professional advice and support. 

Let’s say you run a marketing company. In this case, you would want to keep an eye on marketing-related questions and discussions where you can intervene and provide more knowledge. 

An efficient way to find relevant forum discussions is to use a social media monitoring tool to get notified whenever your company name or other relevant keywords get mentioned online. 

For example, if a potential customer wants to receive recommendations from marketing agencies, you could answer by providing a short description of your services. Additionally, you could offer to help them identify their needs and objectives through a free consultation.

How to Create a Content Promotion Strategy

Now that you have a better understanding of content marketing and the channels you should use, it’s time to create an action plan.

Let’s find out how to build a content promotion strategy in five steps:

1. Know Your Target Audience & Marketing Goals
2. Choose the Best Channels for Your Business
3. Customize Your Content for Each Channel
4. Maintain a Consistent Posting Schedule
5. Monitor Your Content Performance

1. Know Your Target Audience & Marketing Goals

Before you define your next action steps, there are two main aspects you have to base your strategy on:

• Who are you addressing your content to?
• What do you want to achieve through your content?

Go into detail regarding your target audience and objectives to make sure you create a strategy that will help you work your way up to success.

Start by building a buyer persona and including the following details:

• Demographics (location, age, sex, employment status, income)
• Needs/desires
• Objectives
• Hobbies/interests
• Buying behavior
• Challenges/pain points

Once you have your target market defined, it’s time to set your marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). This step will allow you to figure out your content marketing plan and make it easy for you to measure your progress.

So, when it comes to setting marketing objectives, you have to be as specific as possible. What do you want to achieve? How do you plan to do it? What is your deadline? 

Feel free to follow the S.M.A.R.T. objective formula to ensure you cover the most important aspects:

• Specific – Focus on what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it.
• Measurable – Identify KPIs that will help you measure your progress.
• Attainable – Aim for a target that is ambitious but realistic.
• Relevant – Make sure your objectives align with your business needs.
• Time-based – Set a deadline for your objectives to help you stay focused on achieving them in a limited time frame.

We also mentioned KPIs, but what are they? KPIs are metrics businesses monitor to measure the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. They are part of the structure of an objective and allow you to add metrics you can track to evaluate your progress.

Here are some examples of marketing KPIs:

• Return on investment – The profit you make compared to the money invested in marketing.
• Return on ad spend – The generated profit for every dollar spent on advertising.
• Customer acquisition cost – The financial resources you need to spend to turn a lead into a customer.
• Marketing qualified leads – A lead that has engaged with your business and has the potential to become a serious prospect.
• Sales qualified leads – A serious prospect that is ready to make a purchase.
• Conversion rate – The number of visitors that performed the desired action.
• Website visitors – The number of people that visited your website.
• Referral traffic – The source of your website visitors.
• Social media engagement – The number of likes/comments/shares/mentions on social media.
• Follower growth – The number of new followers you gain on social media.
• Net promoter score – Customer satisfaction
• Organic traffic – The free traffic you get to your website from search engines. 
• Customer retention – The ability to retain a customer over a period of time.
• The lifetime value of a customer – The total amount of profit a business can make from just one customer.

2. Choose the Best Channels for Your Business

With your audience and objectives in mind, it’s time to choose the channels that will help you promote your content successfully.

Firstly, you have to identify the ones that will have the most impact on your audience. What social platforms do they use? Do they check their email regularly? Are they active on online forums?

Next, you need to think about how these channels will help you achieve your goals. For, instance, let’s say you just launched your business and you want to increase awareness and educate your customers, which one of the channels we mentioned above will help you do that?

In this case, by just starting out you won’t have a large following on either channel, so online forums and ads will help you expose your brand to the right audience and build a decent following.

As your brand evolves, you can expand the number of channels used and link them for a more effective promotion:

1. Promote your blog on social networks and by email
2. Grow your email list by using social media
3. Gain newsletter subscribers by providing free resources and discounts on your blog 

Ultimately, you want to build an internal network that will allow you to make the most out of your content marketing efforts. 

3. Customize Your Content for Each Channel

To ensure you write content that will have a significant reach and engagement rate, you must customize it to fit the requirements of each network.

While for your blog, you must follow SEO guidelines to rank higher on SERP, on social media, you will have to create short posts that are highly visual and include elements such as emojis, hashtags, and tags to improve performance. 

Not only this, but each social channel comes with a different set of rules that affect the visual format you use and content length.

Fortunately, there are social media management tools that can help you adjust your post for each network with ease. With SocialBee, you can actually create a different variation of the same post for each one of your accounts from one content editor.

Adjust the posts you share on all your social media networks from the same content editor to increase your reach and engagement levels.

Start your 14-day free trial to improve your social media strategy easier than ever before!

To give your strategy more shape, assign your marketing goals to different promotion channels and use them as a way to decide on the topics you will tackle on each platform.

Let’s say you provide accounting services. In this case, social media could be used to build a loyal customer base through constant interaction and customer support. 

On the other hand, your blog could be used to educate your audience and establish yourself as a reliable source of information. How? By creating articles dedicated to answering their most frequently asked questions and curiosities.

4. Maintain a Consistent Posting Schedule

Consistency is key! This applies to almost every field, but in content marketing being consistent gains new meaning, especially when relying on mostly organic strategies.

With every new post comes a new opportunity to reach and interact with your target audience. Being active on all your marketing channels shows that you are a reliable presence that makes an effort to provide content for your online community.

On top of that, posting regularly will expose your brand repeatedly to your potential customers which will help you become a recognizable entity in their life.

5. Monitor Your Content Performance

We mentioned consistency as an important factor in your content promotion strategy. It’s important to clarify that doesn’t imply that your approach should remain the same as time goes by.

While your schedule should stay more or less the same each week, your strategy should evolve constantly to maintain and increase your performance.

Marketing best practices are always changing—some channels change their algorithms, others become irrelevant, and consumers change their behavior (to only name a few examples). So, your strategy approach should be informed by all these aspects.

To audit and keep track of your progress, you first have to invest in the right analytic tools for your marketing channels. 

For example, SocialBee doesn’t only make it easy for your to create, schedule, and share content from one dashboard, but it also provides insightful analytics about your:

1. Audience demographics
2. Page growth
3. Post performance (clicks, reach, likes, comments, shares)
4. Account activity
5. Most engaging time intervals during the week

With the help of SocialBee, you can access all your social media analytics from the same dashboard.

Start your 14-day free trial today!

To evaluate your entire content performance, you might want to opt for tools that will analyze your website traffic and performance and invest in an email provider that also has monitoring features.