You’re riding the content treadmill. You’ve spent hours researching keywords, writing copy, designing the perfect visuals, and laying out the content just so.
You finally hit ‘Publish.’
*Whew* All done, right?
Nope. Not by a long shot.
Regularly making and publishing quality content keeps your company’s name, branding, and offerings at the top of your ideal customer’s mind—but only if they actually see it. Don’t waste your effort by failing to promote your content.
But how do you promote your digital marketing content? Here are a few ideas to prime your thinker:
How to Promote Your Content on Your Website:
- Create calls-to-action (CTAs) for your content on relevant pages.
- Create a content library for all of your content to make it searchable in one easy-to-find place.
- Put a “related content” section at the bottom of each blog post to promote relevant content.
- Link to your content from your existing high-traffic pages. (Use analytics to find out)
- Use social sharing buttons on the thank you page for the content.
- Use a chatbot to offer the content on relevant pages.
- For more extensive content (ebook, white paper, etc.), create a network of several blogs that each link to the content.
- Create a CTA for your content that triggers after someone reads a certain way down the page or is about to leave (exit intent).
How to Promote Your Content on Other Websites:
- Share your content on forums about your niche. Search google for “intitle:forum” + your keyword.
- Use guest posting to write about a tangential topic and link back to your content in the post.
- Syndicate your content on Medium, Hacker News, Reddit (in context), or Product Hunt.
How to Promote Your Content with Email Marketing:
- Create a section in your company newsletter to promote the latest content you’ve produced.
- Send out an “in case you missed it” note to the relevant target segment of your email list to tell them about your latest educational content. If you don’t have an email list yet, you can start one by inviting your existing customers.
- Update your nurture emails with references to the content to drive additional interest from your future customers.
- Place a link to the content in your email signature (this is a seriously underrated method for promoting timely content and events—less than 19% of marketers currently use this touchpoint).
How to Promote Your Content on Linkedin (and other social networks):
- Pull one of your most compelling quotes and turn it into a simple graphic using Canva.
- Sponsor your best-performing social post about the content to a lookalike audience.
- Use tools like click-to-tweet (WordPress only) or publish.twitter.com (Universal) to make it easier for others to share your content.
- Influencer Marketing: Mention influencers in your content and then tag them on your social platform. (“Hey @name. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on <topic>. We included your insights in our latest ebook. <link>. I’d love it if you’d share this with our audience, if you feel inclined.”).
- Use LinkedIn’s Notify Employees button.
How to Promote Your Content on Google (and other search engines):
- Drive traffic over time with SEO marketing strategies (this crosses into building your content, but how you build it can make a big difference on how well it ranks on organically)
- Use pay per click ads for your targeted keywords to immediately place your content in front of your ideal audience. You can dial this back as you begin to rank higher organically using SEO.
How to Promote Your Content with Employees:
- Ask your employees to share the content on their social media accounts. This tactic alone can 10x your reach.
- Give your sales team a direct link to share with their engaged prospects and customers. (Track that link with UTM, bit.ly, or your marketing automation software!)
- Ask your engineering team to send it to their friends at other organizations. (You have been talking to them, right?)
How to Promote Your Digital Content: Get Physical!
- Does your content target the decision part of the funnel? Print the content out on nice paper, and NextDay Air it to the 2-3 most influential decision-makers and include a gift card for an impromptu “Educational Coffee Break.”
How often should you promote your content?
Like so many things, it depends. Try things, and learn what works best for you and your audience.
Social content posts do not last for very long. For business blog content, we recommend sharing it on social media using the following schedule:
- Post.
- Share again 1 day later.
- Share again 2 days after that.
- Share again 1 week after that.
- Share again 1 month after that.
- Then put the content into your Editorial Reshare Calendar to reshare every month or two until it ages out.
On Twitter, you can share it even more.
If you want to take it up a notch, you can give your subscribers a head start by sharing the content early with them as a reward for being part of your community.
The goal is to optimize your promotional efforts and spend the least amount of time and money to reach the greatest concentration of receptive potential customers.
Where are You Promoting?
Your customer base, by its nature, may differ vastly.
If you are a multi-location business (especially multi-national) or if you cater to a broad spectrum of people, you should consider geographic, demographic, and psychographic factors (in addition to industry and market).
- Where do your ideal customers live and work?
- What are their specific regional and industry needs?
- What do they read?
- Where do they hang out?
- How can you cater to these differences?
If your business is naturally diverse, you may want to consider creating multiple Ideal Customer Profiles and Buyer Personas to account for each target market. (Make sure to segment your emails list)
Target your content to a single ideal customer—ideally a single buyer persona—to maximize your content’s impact. By tailoring your perspective to these unique personas, you will speak more directly to your ideal customer’s situation, build deeper connections, and optimize your spending.
What Form of Promotion Will You Use?
These decisions will be somewhat based on the above as you consider regional and demographic factors—some people prefer social media outreach; others prefer email. Some audiences may prefer video to text, or a phone call to a digital flyer, and even a select few may respond better to a hand-written note.
Do your due diligence, research your target audience, and promote your content to connect with that particular customer type.
AKT (Always Keep Testing) Idea: Using the ideas above and a whiteboard, brainstorm with key team members to discover new ideas to test for your particular audience.
What is Your Promotional Budget?
A budget is more than dollars. Consider the cost of your time as well.
Numbers can create their own kind of gamification. How can we get the most out of a limited number of resources? Limitations breed creativity. So get creative!
But it’s also essential to allocate a realistic budget for promoting your content. “Realistic” will be determined by the size of your audience (addressable market), and how many people in that group you want to connect with (market reach), and how often you want to communicate with them (market frequency).
You’re not going to reach 148.5 million people (the 2020 Super Bowl viewership) with $1000 and 2 hours, but you might touch 2500 of the right people with $15 and 30 minutes.
To keep you from being way off, Falcon.io researched an expected median spend for CPC and CPM across the main social channels.
Optimizing your audience might cost you more per click than a general audience, but it will make the person who clicks much more likely to convert.
Who is Responsible for the Promotion?
Decide who will ultimately be responsible for doing the work.
Will it be you? Your marketing manager? Your website developer? Or your social media team? Or will you break different aspects of the outreach across teams?
Regardless of what you choose—make sure the responsible parties know what they’re responsible for and when it’s due.
Make the Most of Your Marketing Resources
Don’t waste your critical marketing time and resources building content you send out into the internet wilderness alone. Promote your content to the people who need and want it most so that they’ll know, and you’ll grow.
