A content marketing strategy is more than creating great content (although that’s a good place to start). It has to include a structured approach to how you’re going to share and promote your content. Social media is a great place to start, but there’s plenty more to it than that. Here are 9 great ways to promote your content and top tips to help you maximise the traffic coming back to your website.
Probably stating the obvious, but sharing your content via social media is a great way to promote what you have created. It’s vital to spend time determining which is the best social media platform – or platforms for your business to be active on, so establish that first. Knowing your target audience is crucial to any successful marketing activity, and content marketing is no exception. “A piece of content should produce 20+ snippets that you can share on social media.” Kissmetrics
Spend time crafting the posts you are going to use to announce your content to the world. Create a number of ‘snippets’ – some people suggest up to 20 per blog post to promote your content! Use soundbites and statistics from your post, and play around with the title to attract different readers and maximise traffic to your post – and your website.
A great tactic to employ occasionally is to help you promote your content is to refer to another professional in your industry, someone respected in the community, or perhaps a celebrity who might have an interest in what you’ve written. If so, let them know the content is out there: scoring a social media share by someone with respected (and who has thousands of followers) is content sharing gold.
We’ve blogged before about the importance of mobile – how we are accessing content through smaller and smaller devices. Make sure your content is easily readable on mobile devices. Some even suggest going beyond mobile optimisation and making your website ‘feel’ like a mobile site, especially if you are selling B2C as more and more of your customers will be using mobile devices.
Email marketing might have fallen off your radar but it remains an effective means of engaging potential customers and has a consistently high conversion rate. Serving up great content directly into your customers’ inboxes significantly increases the chances of your content being read and acted upon. “Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion”. Capterra, 2014
Content sharing platforms? Aren’t they social media? Well, we don’t think so. Whether you ‘scoop’ content – both your own, and interesting content created by others, onto Scoop.it boards (think Pinterest for blog posts), or join ‘tribes’ that are interested in your niche on Triberr, these platforms go beyond social media and have the potential to get your content in front of key players in your industry who can choose to share it on.
Creating an online ‘newspaper’ can be an effective way of sharing your own content along with other interesting and related material. It puts your content into a different format, getting it in front of different audiences. Paper.li taps into the fact that people still like reading newspapers, yet serves up digital content. And by serving your online newspaper up via social media, you can count on sharing by others whose content you have, yourself, shared.
Placing your content on someone else’s blog can be a great way of driving traffic back to your website. Your content will be read by a new audience who will flock to your website to see what you are about. And because your website is awesome, they will click through and do what you want them to do – be that subscribing to your email list, or buying your new product. Carefully select the blogs you’d like to guest post on before approaching the editors to make sure their readers will be interested in what you have to say and will be likely to share your content with their own followers. “78% of people watch videos online every week” Hubspot
Whatever video did or didn’t do, promoting content through video is hot. If you can create a video that will engage with your target audience – be that professional, quirky, silly, cute – you can guarantee that you’ll push your content further. And there’s always the chance you’ll ‘go viral’… What are your favourite ways to share and promote your content? If you’re struggling to create your own content marketing strategy and to get your content seen by the right people, why not get in touch?
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