An Initial Guide to Content Marketing – Why Is Content Promotion Significant?
Now that you’re done with everything from the basic ideation to creation to the publishing of your content, now what? Sit back and relax while the conversions roll in themselves? Give me a chance to burst your bubble of imagination because nothing is coming your way without efforts. You sure have put all the sweats and energy in the creation and publishing of incredible content copies but how come your audience gets to see that? Even though your content is unique and amazing, there’s a lot more such content already swirling through the internet and it cannot reach the potential audience unless you rightly do the content promotion.
So, instead of sitting back and relaxing post content creation and publishing, your job is to begin promoting your content unless it reaches every potential audience. For that, you will also need to learn about the hows and whys behind content sharing. It is very less likely that an influential share gets followed by so many subsequent shares.
To help you learn all the hows and whys of content promotion, I’ve put together a comprehensive part on content promotion inside this initial guide to content marketing.
Dive in to burst your curiosity!
How to Build an Audience for Promotion?
Building audience sounds familiar, huh? Yes, you already did that during the phases of content ideation, strategy, and creation. Those tons of efforts weren’t for one-time use; instead, they were a foundation on which you can build all your bricks. So, if you had already researched a tunnel to determine the audience then you are just a few steps away from building your loyal audience. Hold on and let your business bloom.
The following are some great means of building a loyal audience. Take a look at them.
Influencer Marketing
That’s simple yet requires a specific skill set to produce outcomes. At first, you shall know who the influencers are? They are the industry experts, big names who have already made an impression among the audience and possess huge followings. The particular audience you aim to reach is already in theirs and listens to them at the same time. Thus, you need to build relations with these influencers to reach your desired audience. But make sure you build relations with only genuine influencers who have loyal followers with a strong connection.
But wait. You cannot just go to any industry influencer and build relations with them to get your content promoted. Instead, you need to dig out those influencers having the most relevant audience to your brand. Also, not all the influencers related to your brand would be willing to share your content. But they also ask for content that’s of value to their presence, contributes to their goals and objectives, etc. Some of them might also charge a few bucks. Don’t resist spending that little amount. They can pay you back fortunes if your influencer making strategy was on point.
Comment Marketing
Comment marketing serves you with both relationship building as well as content promotion. A lot of brands do that via both black hat and white hat methods.
Now, what’s a black hat and white hat comment marketing?
Black hat comment marketing is where brands simply kept posting automated comments with their links. As they are automated comments, they get posted without any relevance at any post or blog. The truth is, that’s a waste of effort and time. Automated comments with lots of links are most often marked spam by websites and no−followed by the social media platforms.
On the contrary, white hat comment marketing tactics are way too great and seem to produce some amazing results. It involves building real relationships with the people having similar interests as your brand and to write genuine comments on their posts and blogs with no or fewer links. The primary objective of comment marketing is to be known among the audience having similar interests as of your brand. You can genuinely write comments, either praising what’s written, sharing your opinion about the topic, or even share a link to some relevant blog that’s been written by you or any other trusted blog.
However, remember the key, it’s always more fruitful to implicate comment marketing on the stuff posed by the influencers in your niche and not with your potential customers. Because more the people get to see your name, the bigger your brand can grow!
Here are the quick steps extracted for comment marketing. Boom.
- Find blogs in your industry with good page and domain authorities as well as having a nice conversation base.
- Start posting genuine comments on their blogs and engage in useful conversations. You might share a few links in those comments as well. Be it your content or one from a trusted website, the condition is it shall be relevant and useful.
ReadMore: An Initial Guide to Content Marketing – From Where Do We Get Content Ideation?
Guest Posting
That’s another great way of content promotion. Your content shouldn’t be limited to your website only. It shall have an expanded presence to get itself recognized by a larger audience. But just as in comment marketing, there are black hat techniques popular with guest posting as well. A lot of brands blindly put up the content to the websites without knowing their niche nor focusing on their content quality to get the links.
Their bad. It gives them no outcomes but a loss of time and effort only. Also, they might get spammed and blocked by a lot of websites as well as search engines.
However, when you do it rightly using the white hat tactics, guest posting is a great means of building your audience as well as authority.
What are these white hat tactics?
They are simple. You need to search for the relevant websites that have bigger audiences but of your niche as well. And most importantly, you have to create unique, fresh, and stellar content that reciprocates well with the niche of the websites you aim to build relations with and is of value to their brand as well as the overall niche.
How to begin with guest posting in simple and scalable steps?
- Search those websites relevant to your niche and having superb domain and page authority.
- Put up genuine comments on their blog posts and engage in worthy conversations.
- Now that you’ve marked your presence, begin pitching their editors with exciting blog post ideas that are relevant to their niche. Remember not to talk about backlinks in the beginning. Focus on building your authority first, backlinks would naturally come following. Trust in yourself.
- Begin loud promotions as soon as your content gets published on any of such sites. That’s a way of showcasing your talent as well as authority.
- Do all of this again. Tada.
Social Media
Creating and publishing a stellar content does not mean to bring you all the hype neither keeping it particular to your niche. It calls for an extra effort in the form of content promotion. And one of the amazing platforms for the promotion of your stellar content is social media.
That’s the ultimate place where you can connect with all your targeted audience at once. Sharing all your content on social media sounds fun but make sure not to make it boring by posting content that triggers direct selling. Social media platforms are more of a community-building place rather than a place for pitching sales. Also, you can share the content that’s not yours but relates to your niche, post reviews, and a lot more to simply engage with the audience. Sharing content that isn’t yours also contribute to showcasing your presence in front of those who aren’t your followers already.
Therefore, maintaining a strong social media presence requires you to build a strong connection between the content and social team. The better the content team would be able to define their strategies and communicate goals to the social team, the better they would be able to handle social media. Here’s the list of directives you shall follow to come up with a strong social media presence and following.
- Research and dig out the perfect social media channel for your brand. Not every channel is perfect for every brand. You must know where your audience is most likely to be active. That’s where you shall be active too. Simple.
- You cannot just post at any time or day. There are insights into social media available that lets you know the times and days when your targeted audience is most likely to use the particular social media channel you are planning to post on. There are multiple tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Social, etc. which enables you to learn about such insights.
- Adding the right hashtags with your content is no doubt a superb strategy. They can simply boost your reach and let a lot of people view your content. They work like keywords. The better you use them, the bigger reach you’d be able to attain.
Paid Promotion
Above all the types of promotions comes paid promotion. It includes paid social, display ads, and content distribution networks. All of them are most often counted inside the umbrella of pay per click advertising. Even though paid promotion is a real expanded thing, I’ve tried putting the things that matter most comprehensively in this blog post.
First things first, you must know your targeted audience by heart. The next is to determine a budget. Because most platforms for paid promotion offers diverse budgets ranging from too low to too big. Determining your budget already can help you chose the tactics really quick as well as prevent you from overspending.
Paid Social Media
That’s the biggest platform for effective paid promotion. It guarantees results. It has a lot of audience insight and the modernization of technology has made things pretty easy. You can easily target your desired audience with your content and convert them into potentials using paid promotions. They have the power to boost your reach a lot and can turn up massive business for your brand.
Paid Search
Now, what is paid search? That’s just another name for search engine marketing as it requires putting ads on the result pages of search engines. This is a paid marketing or promotion tactic that lets you bring your content to the top of the search engine results in an exchange of money. There are multiple such tools introduced that allow your content to appear in front of the customers as paid searches but the most common among them includes Bing Ads by Microsoft and AdWords by Google.
Display Ads
Display advertising is another great means of content promotion that allows you to put up your content in any form as an ad across the web using servers such as Google Display Network or Facebook Atlas. It works simple. For instance, you visited a home décor website and showed interest in some products, their ads will appear to you at multiple platforms like a blog, a social platform, any other website you visit, and even at your email address. This usually happens with the mechanism of cookies.
It is a great form of content promotion as you can choose to customize the audience as well as retarget your audience whenever required. Thus, the better you strategize the distribution of display ads, the bigger audience you’d be able to reach and convert.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a superb way of content promotion. There are several ways you can do that. The best among them is offering your targeted audience and potential customers subscribe to your content so that they remain updated about all your moves and keep visiting you back and forth. Also, you can do this by collecting the email addresses of each person visiting your website in the first place. Sending them a newsletter once or twice a month determining all your new offers, products and services can be a great idea for keeping your audience and customers updated.
Putting it all condensed, content promotion is almost the last but equally significant phase of content marketing. It helps you expand the reach of your content either organically or via paid channels. Therefore, the above-mentioned methods and platforms are excellent for content promotion and can surely help you attain an incredible reach.
