Let us start this with a short exercise.
Just think about the recent content you came across. It can be anything, a blog, news, a book, a video, audio, or any product or service.
How do you get to know about it? Through social media, or through friends, or you overheard someone, or was it word-of-mouth?
If it was through any of the above methods or through any other that I may have missed. Let me tell you each of the above are examples of content promotion. The above are the examples of inbound and outbound promotion.
What is Content Promotion?
It is the process of distributing content through various social media channels. Since digital marketing is booming, people around the globe are shifting to it and giving away the traditional marketing methods (outbound methods). As a content marketer it is crucial to understand each social media channel so as to connect and engage with the right audience.
Content promotion is followed by content creation. But if you are unable to market the knowledge to your audience, there is no point keeping the content stocked in the word file or in the planner.
Results are generated only when the right steps are followed. Developing a content promotion strategy that brings results may sound easy, but it does require some smart work. If it was as easy as posting a few tweets or sending an email, then more than 42% of B2B marketers would say they are great at content marketing.
The figures portray the gloomy figure. The primary reason behind such lower success rate can be lack of knowledge and understanding of the social media channels, audience, and the strategies used.
In this blog, I will take you through the steps you need to follow to market the content.
Types of Content Promotion
Apart from the inbound and outbound promotion, there are two more ways to it. Organic content promotion and paid content promotion.
Organic Content Promotion
It is the type of promotion where you do not have to spend money on ads to boost content.
It is designed with an aim to increase the visibility of content, and enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. You can do this through various organic content promotion channels like search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, live promotions, events or webinars, influencer networks.
Benefits of Using Organic Promotion Methods
- Increased brand authority.
- Promote unlimited content because of no set budget
- You are able to use multiple platforms for promotion and
- Increased brand awareness
The benefits are immense. However, the biggest challenge is to stay consistent with your content. If you fail to post regularly, you will not be able to get organic followers.
Paid Content Promotion
It is the type of promotion where you spend money to market and promote your content to the specified audience.
Benefits of Paid Content Promotion
- Allows you to show content to target audience.
- You are able to customize the target audience pool as well as the message
- You get instant followers
- Ability to develop and deliver highly-targeted content to consumers who will find the content most relevant.
The biggest challenge is securing enough budget in order to achieve desired results. To prevent any loses, it is best to experiment with a small budget and discover the ways that work the best for your brand.
The channels for paid promotion are search engine ads on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and paid social media campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, Twitter.
For both the promotional techniques to work well, you would require quality, uniqueness, and creativity in the content. Such content is meant to perform better and also gets high engagement.
For instance, platforms like Facebook makes it easy for you to understand the concept. They notify you when your content is doing performing well and suggest you increase its reach through paid ads. This allows you to be more efficient with the results i.e., reaching the right audience, attracting new customers, getting leads, generating ROI, and taking better business decisions.
Steps to Promote Content
The first step is to create a content planner or a promotion calendar. The calendar will help in keeping the track of every activity like the communications to take place, date and time to publish the content. One content calendar may not work for all types of content. You may have to create different planners for different content. Each planner should have details about the target audience, the communication channels to be used, the content to be published.
All minute details together should be there in the plan. This calendar helps you in organizing the posts, and campaigns. It keeps the content strategy and planning in sync. You can also set reminders for important or emergency tasks and keep the stress of remembering every task at bay.
Segment the Audience
Once you have prepared the calendar, the next step is to know which audience you have to target. Narrowing the focus is the key here. You must not promote the content blindly to target the whole wide world. Segment the audience and then decide the promotion method. Segmentation is one of the most powerful practices when it comes to promoting content across multiple channels.
Segmentation means to divide the audience into smaller segments based on criteria and requirements. For instance, if you have a product for the youth, you would not promote it to everyone but only youth considering definite age-group.
Segmentation allows you to target the right group for your business. The content will only be visible to the audience that are a good fit. This also allows you to create segments or buyer persona that align with the interests, demographics, and geographical location of your target customers.
By using segmentation, you not only create custom audience, but you also create customized messages for audience.
This takes us to the next step, that is creating a customized message.
Customize The Message
Writing a message tailored to the needs of a customer may seem easy but it is not. The message should be clear, short, and easily understandable. There are certain things that you must keep in mind while writing a message:
- Tone of the message
- Adding value to the content
Tone of the message means the attitude of the message. Is it inviting, offering, attracting, building interest, creating curiosity or what.
Another thing is to see if your content adds value to the customer. You should make sure that you are neither under selling nor overselling the value of your product.
To know whether your message is doing good or not, you can test it and analyze the results. At the same time, you would also want to customize your message to match the distribution channel because each channel has a unique audience and expects the content to be delivered in a specific manner. For instance, if you are delivering content using social media channels, you get a chance to explore and be creative. You can use funny messages, GIFs, videos, and test these to know which type of message resonates with your target audience.
Experiment and Optimize
If you conduct the A/B test, it means you are experimenting to see what works for your brand and what does not. Experimenting through this test will prove to be the best as this test allows you to test every element of the page. You get to know which colour, font, message is going well.
Analyze Results
Once you do the A/B testing, you get immediate results. But generally, the process i.e., the testing takes time as said above each elements’ efficiency is tested. Analyzing results is important to identify ways to enhance future campaign performance.
Conclusion
Promoting content is as important as creating it. Content promotion must also be done by strictly following the steps described above. Each step plays a significant role and must not be taken lightly. The process is time-consuming and can even test your patience. If you are a business owner and wish to focus on core business activities, why not outsource the content promotion work to the best content marketing agency, the Big Unit in Australia?
Contact us now and leverage from the best services in the town.
