Content promotion makes your articles, blog entries and social media posts more visible. More eyes on your content means more clicks — and more sales — so you want to optimize your content promotion strategies to build your audience. Many content marketers spend more time promoting content than they do actually creating blog posts or articles.
How do you promote content effectively?
Before you can understand how to promote your content effectively, you need to understand how different promotion tactics work and the differences between building brand recognition and driving traffic to your website.
What are the 4 types of promotion?
While there are plenty of ways to introduce your content to a new audience and build your brand with your exiting target market, content promotion strategies can generally be divided up into four main methods. The four primary ways to promote your blog, company or brand to your target audience are:
- Personal selling, which involves one-on-one interactions between audience members and a brand representative
- Advertising, which includes paid promotions on social media as well as traditional advertising
- Public relations, which encompasses the official communication you provide about your company to the community
- Sales promotion, which focuses on promoting specific products or services for a limited time
When it comes to promoting content, such as a blog post or article on your site, you may need to focus on strategies that specifically drive traffic to your website, social media pages or sales funnel.
What are examples of promotional strategies?
Successful content promotion strategies include a mix of different techniques. Here are some of the best ways and blogging tips to get your content in front of the people who are most likely to share your articles or buy what you have on offer.
1. Build and use your email list
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your content, and building an email list helps you make sure your audience sees all of your latest posts. Growing an email list takes time, but the return on investment can be bigger than almost any other content marketing strategy. Some ways to build an email list and encourage site visitors to sign up for email marketing include:
- Putting a pop-up box on your main page that asks visitors to sign up for email updates
- Pinning an email marketing signup box to your top bar or sidebar on your site so it shows up on every page
- Creating a slide-up call to action that shows up after people visiting your site have read 60 to 65% of an article or blog post
Once you have created an email list, make sure to provide high quality articles and information to keep subscribers interested. Focus on your subject line in each email to get the attention of audience members who get your emails, so they click through and open the link. You can also include a link in your email signature to encourage readers to visit your site and check out any new content there.
2. Use social media and social promotion
Share each new piece of content to social media, and make sure it's easy for site visitors to share your content as well. Maintain a presence on multiple social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest. You don't have to be on every social media site, and it's often a good idea to start out with just one or two that suit your kind of business best before branching out to more. If your content is highly visual, sites such as Instagram and Pinterest might be your best bet. To cut down your efforts you can use Instagram tools to upload stories, videos, and schedule posts on Instagram with people who share your industry’s interests. Video content might do well on YouTube or TikTok, depending on the length of your promotional videos.
3. Utilize influencer marketing
Influencers provide a built-in audience and a trusted voice, making influencer marketing a great way to reach targeted buyers. To get the result you want from influencer marketing, you need to choose an influencer who is focused on your target demographics. Instead of seeking out well-known celebrities to promote your brand, look for local personalities who are interested in sharing your content with people in your area who are likely to buy. The best time to reach out to influencers is during the early stages of your content creation process because influencers often like to be part of content creation, so they can integrate your piece with their personal brand aesthetic. Giving influencers a say in how they present your posts or participate in your content marketing makes it easier for them to promote your content to the people who follow them. Trust that the influence you're working with knows how to make their audience members feel comfortable with their recommendations.
4. Work with contributors and interviewees
When you're crafting a blog post or article, consider reaching out to local experts who can add depth to the piece of content you're creating. You might ask them to be a guest contributor to your blog in exchange for a promotional blurb about their business, or you may want to ask for some quotes about the topic. You can ask or encourage your interviewee to share your content or link to your content once the article is online.
5. Reach out to people who create or share similar content
Keep an eye out for other individuals or companies creating quality content in your field. You may be able to find similar or complementary brands on social media or by looking at who has done guest posting on related blogs. These people may be interested in swapping guest posts with you or sharing your blog posts in a list of related content on their site. Make sure to also send a message to the content creators of posts you mention in your related articles list. Sometimes a content marketer who isn't interested in guest posting on your site may be willing to share a link to your blog post mentioning them as an expert.
6. Repurpose blog posts and other content
Repurposing content is one of the best content promotion tactics because it lets you use previously created blog posts and articles in new ways. Great ways to repurpose content include:
- Creating a new blog post
- Making an infographic to share on Twitter or Facebook
- Turning a written article into video content
- Building a lesson or presentation for your LinkedIn page with a link back to your site
- Send an email to your list subscribers with a roundup of a few older posts
- Develop social media snippets encouraging new followers to take a look at some of your older content
7. Submit to relevant communities to reach niche audience
Article promotion in niche communities can help you reach your target audience without a lot of effort. You can link to a prior post in an answer on Quora or share your piece in a relevant community on Reddit or on a Facebook group. The key to content promotion efforts via online communities is to become an active member of the group and follow any relevant rules for promotional posts. Some groups or sites have one day per week or month when they encourage members to self-promote, and people are usually happy to check out the business ventures of community members who regularly interact with others in the group.
8. Use paid promotion to find a new audience
One big goal of content marketing is to get your best content in front of as many people as possible, and paid promotion can be a great way to reach an audience that might not have otherwise found your content on social media or through search engines. You can tailor ads to reach specific target markets, such as people in a particular geographic region or people who have previously shown interest in a particular topic. Be sure to include a call to action in your ads so people who see the post click on through to your website or social media page.
9. Submit to directories that promote content for you
Some content promotion sites are designed specifically for brand and content marketers to list their articles, blog posts or promotional offerings to people interested in those types of products or services. High-quality directories include Google My Business, Yelp and Trip Advisor. When you include your site in a directory, people who visit the directory can see information about your business. You can often include a link back to your website to let the directory's audience members learn more about you.
10. Optimize everything you create for convenient sharing
Every new piece you create should give your audience members an easy way to share your content with others. Add social share buttons to your site and make sure people have ways to share both your overall website and each individual piece with friends via social media feeds or email. Content optimization also includes making any visuals or videos easy to share. Some people might want to share visual content, such as an infographic, on their favorite social media sites but don't like to share content that involves a link or long blocks of text, so enable sharing of post components instead of requiring people to share the whole blog post.
11. Make SEO work for you to get organic search results
Organic search engine results bring new visitors to your page when they find you during a casual web search. Build your brand and entice new visitors to your site by using SEO, search engine optimization, to help search engines find you and serve up your pages to people interested in your type of posts. Many people only click on the first few results of any search, so best practices for content creation includes using effective keywords and phrases in your post title and throughout each piece.
12. Manage internal links on evergreen posts to keep site visitors reading
Whenever you create a new post, go back and add an internal link to the new content into a few of your most popular evergreen blog posts. Evergreen posts include any content that remains relevant in the long term, such as how-to articles, blog posts about everyday topics, and factual content that people use as a reliable reference.
Because you already have an audience for those popular posts, adding a link is a way to promote a new piece of content to the people already visiting those existing articles. This can boost the relevancy of an old blog post as well, since most search engines reward new or updated evergreen content and adding links could indicate to a search engine that you've done some refreshing on your overall site.
13. Get creative with live content
One relatively new content promotion strategy is to take your promotional message live. Livestreaming lets you provide exclusive content to followers, which encourages people to follow your social media pages. Live streams are a great way to showcase behind-the-scenes content or introduce a new product line. You can embed live content into posts on social media for people to view at a specific time and also offer a recorded version for audience members to view later or share. You might also want to edit short clips from your live broadcast to share on Twitter or TikTok. Clips featuring someone at your business answering specific questions from audience members often work well as shareable content.
14. Encourage audience engagement with your social media posts
Audience engagement should be part of your content promotion strategy because people who actively engage with your content are more likely to share content with friends and return later to check out your next article or blog post. Encouraging content engagement can be as simple as including polls on your social media page or adding a question to the end of each blog post.
15. Develop a cohesive content marketing strategy across all of your platforms
The most effective way to promote content is to make sure your message is consistent across all the different platforms you use. Whether you're sharing each piece of content on a multitude of social media pages or using targeted paid promotion tactics to reach a specific audience, content promotion best practices include coordinating everything to minimize confusion and make your brand instantly recognizable no matter where people encounter your posts. Thinking ahead of time about your company branding and marketing framework, and how to get your message across to your target audience can save you time and money in the long run.
How to promote an article or blog post to get the best result
Keep in mind that you don't have to participate in all of these content promotion tactics to build an audience or get good results from your marketing efforts. Social media best practices includes data analysis in addition to content creation and promoting blog posts.
You should regularly analyze the effects of your website and social media promotion strategies to see what is working for your business and what things might need tweaking. Focus your efforts on the content promotion tactics that get the best audience reaction. A content promotion strategy that isn't getting results just wastes your time — and you could easily spend that time on creating new content or adjusting your existing blog posts to reach new audience members or drive traffic to your sales page.
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