Content is king. Most experienced marketers and successful brands are already vouching for that by developing unique and powerful content marketing campaigns.
Really, there’s no wonder why they do it…
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising channels and provides 3x as many results in terms of traffic and leads.
Another study from Curata points out that 74% of today’s companies confirm that content marketing is enhancing the quality and increasing the quantity of leads.
Clearly, content promotion strategies are crazily effective and popular in today’s marketplace. Regardless of your business type and industry, you can leverage content to improve your brand’s awareness, develop a solid brand reputation, and eventually increase your leads and sales.
In today’s post, I’m sharing 10 proven content promotion strategies to improve your business’ exposure and performance. Pay attention to the details, learn new tricks, and implement your own twists.
1. Create amazing content for a very specific audience
A successful content marketing campaign demands many things. However, the most crucial aspect you need to consider concerns your target audience. Simply put, you must acknowledge and understand your target audience’s characteristics, mindset, behavior, needs, problems, desires, and habits.
If you are to deliver value, you must know for sure that your content is going to bring something new, something that people can hardly find somewhere else.
Start researching.
Begin with Google Trends. Type a specific keyword (preferably your main keyword), hit the search button, and discover the amount of traffic and engagement your keyword has received over the last years, months, weeks, and days.
Continue with BuzzSumo. This platform helps you discover the most trending content on social media at the moment, as well as micro influencers who you can negotiate promotion services with later.
Lastly, I’d suggest you get familiar with your audience’s thinking by spending time on niche forums. You can use Boardreader (forum search engine) to discover relevant forums based on your specified keywords.
When you’re confident in your knowledge and understanding of what your target customers want to hear, you’ll know for sure that your content development and promotion efforts won’t be in vain.
The next step is to ensure that you’re writing amazing, exceptional, and breathtaking content, which your target audience will absolutely love.
Easier said than done, of course, but never impossible. The easiest way to ensure that your content is above average is to study your competitors’ content. When you want to write a blog post, search for that topic on Google and read the first and most relevant ten blog posts that cover the same topic.
Study each of those articles and gather their PROs and CONs, gather important details, and identify their best traits. By the time you’re done, you’ll be able to collect all the details and craft a blog post outline that gives more value than all the other ten.
By developing longer content, you’re improving both your traffic retention, your backlinks, and your search engine rankings.
The bottom line is… do your best to create amazing content that actually solves the problems and satisfies the needs of your specific target audience. Create average content and your results will also be average.
2. Segment your audience and create different landing pages
Smart content marketing is not performed randomly. Effective marketers are segmenting their audiences based on different needs, such as product needs, solution needs, and so on.
Segmentation is essential simply because some of your website visitors aren’t customers, yet some of them are.
Therefore, your content cannot be relevant to all your visitors because your visitors have different needs and are at different phases of the sales process. So, as an example, the content you develop to improve your brand’s awareness is basically wasted on people who have already purchased one of your products or services.
The easiest way to segment your audience is to develop specific buyer personas. Here’s how the profile of a buyer persona looks:
Depending on each buyer persona’s characteristics, problems, and needs, begin developing different landing pages that target relevant keywords.
Nuffield Health is one of the companies that leverage personalized landing pages for different buyer personas. They’ve managed to improve their revenues by 60%, simply by optimizing their landing pages with the proper keywords.
There are many landing page templates that can help you speed up the process, and many landing page creation services that might prove to be useful. Check some out and choose the one that fits your needs best.
3. Guest posting and networking
Guest posting is one of the most reliable ways to improve your brand’s awareness and blog traffic. First off, guest posting allows you to connect with niche authorities who already possess an established database of followers and customers.
For example, Entrepreneur.com is being read by millions of entrepreneurs. If you want to improve your digital marketing agency’s brand awareness, this popular platform can do the job for you. The only problem is… the bigger the platform the harder it is to get featured.
Second, effective guest posting generates direct traffic. Nevertheless, you need to target the right blogs that target a similar audience, you must share amazing content, and you’ll need to properly link back to your site so that the readers will feel tempted to click on your CTAs.
Third, guest posting provides you the opportunity to connect with other like-minded individuals and professionals. All sorts of fruitful relationships can arise, as you can share knowledge, links, and opportunities with your network group.
4. Forum marketing and Q&A marketing
Industry forums and Q&A platforms like Quora are goldmine content marketing channels. If leveraged properly, these sources can drive a lot of traffic back to your site.
Depending on your industry and target audience, you should identify the most relevant boards that people use to discuss various topics. For example, if you’re selling healthy animal products, identifying the most popular and active pet’s discussion forums. You can use Boardreader (forum search engine) or simply type “best animal/pet discussion forums” on Google.
Study those forums and make sure that your ideal customers are spending time there. The next step is to create a branded profile, which features your brand’s logo and name.
Forum marketing is about interacting and providing effective solutions to the people who need answers. You should engage in relevant discussions, provide relevant advice, and use your signature to share relevant links back to your landing pages.
The more helpful you are, the more traffic and leads you’ll generate over time. Remember: a forum reply is indexed and will probably stay alive for as long as that forum will be active. That’s passive traffic juice in the long run!
It goes the same with Quora, Yahoo Answers, or any other Q&A platform that you may target. Find the relevant questions, provide the best answers, and reap the benefits.
5. Update, repurpose and link to old content
Old content should never be forgotten, especially if it’s qualitative and evergreen. Instead, it should be updated, repurposed, and reminded of throughout your newest blog posts.
Updating your content means simply adding new information, new visual content, and new twists in order to make it more comprehensive. Updating content can often improve your search engine rankings, as crawlers detect changes and revisit the pages that have been modified.
Linking back to your old blog posts is another effective way to improve your site’s traffic and brand’s reputation. By adding internal links that solve different needs and problems, your audience will spend more time on your blog, getting familiar with your style, value proposition, and products.
Repurposing your content involves the modification of your content’s media type. You can turn text into videos, slides, audio, infographics, and the other way around. Once you’ve got multiple versions of the same information and value, share it through different content channels: YouTube, Slideshare, Pinterest, Mix, and so on.
6. Master one social network but be present on all others
Out of 7.6 billion people alive on Earth, 3.03 billion are active social media users. If you think about it, almost half of the population is using social media for various reasons.
On average, people have 5.54 social media accounts, out of which one or two are favored and mostly used. Finally, 91% of today’s retail brands are active on 2 or more social networks.
What does this tell you?
To me, this means that social media is no longer a should but rather a must for every type of business, blog, or enterprise.
Content marketing and social media marketing are basically interconnected. One completes the other and the other way around. Social media is the perfect place to develop brand exposure, create meaningful relationships, and gather relevant leads that’ll eventually turn into buyers.
When it comes to promoting your content on social channels, you should identify the social network that’s most preferred by your target audience. Where do your buyer personas hang? What communication channels do they use? How do they spend their time on social media?
Quality over quantity is always better, so decide the social channel that you’ll focus on the most. It could be Instagram if you’re targeting young demographics, LinkedIn if you’re going for professionals, or Pinterest if you’re targeting artists and art lovers.
Of course, you shouldn’t limit your social presence to just one platform. Create your profiles on all the relevant ones but focus on understanding and mastering just one in the beginning.
7. Leverage professionals to get better results
Content marketing is a demanding process. If you want to stand out and overshadow your competitors, your content’s quality must always be great.
A good marketer, webmaster, or entrepreneur is not always a good writer or editor. In those instances, outsourcing professionals are the most effective solution. Besides the fact that you’re saving time and energy, your articles’ quality will be preserved and written in a consistent style.
Finding talented freelancers on platforms like Upwork or Freelancer.com is difficult, mostly because there are lots of average writers and so few talents to choose from. An unconventional yet effective approach is the hiring of academic writers who possess an advanced vocabulary and grammar control:
Before you contact them, make sure you create the profile of the ideal writer. Mention experience, knowledge, and skills requirements, and let these services assign the perfect match.
8. Consider investing in paid ads
Paid advertising is the quickest, the most direct, yet the riskiest way to improve your content’s visibility. Right now, you have hundreds of paid advertising options to choose from, yet only some of them will be profitable.
Every social media network has its own advertising features and rules. For example, Facebook and Instagram offer advertising options and targeting based on demographics and interests, while Google PPC offers you the chance to target your audience based on keywords and search intent. Both are effective if used properly!
There are also many different advertising networks you can choose from, each offering its particular features and benefits.
The key to improving your traffic through paid ads is a great understanding of your target audience, consistent A/B testing, and a lot of conversion rate optimization work!
9. Influencer marketing
Unfortunately for society but fortunately for us, marketers, most people are crowd followers. If an influential person believes or does something unconventional, this person can influence the perspective and future behavior of so many other people.
Statistics reveal that 30% of consumers are inclined to buy products recommended by non-celebrity bloggers (micro influencers).
Around 70% of millennials are influenced by their peer’s recommendations that concern purchasing decisions and 60% of today’s consumers have been influenced at least once by a blog review or a social media post.
Influencer marketing is extremely profitable right now, as employing the right industry authority can help you skyrocket your brand’s reach and reputation in a very short time.
For a better understanding, here’s a definitive guide to influencer marketing. This post should provide everything you need to know to get started immediately.
10. Encourage engagement on your own platform
Many contemporary successful brands have chosen to close their social media pages. Perhaps, their decisions were justified, perhaps not. Why am I telling you this?
Simply put, social media networks aren’t the only platforms where you can engage with your fans. In fact, “gathering” your followers and getting them used to engage on your own blog, website, or platform is the best way to gather important data that’ll help you improve your users’ experience.
Also, if more and more people spend time engaging with your blog or with each other on your own platform, you’ll be able to turn these random visitors into email subscribers. From there on, you have full control over the communication with your prospects. Nurture your audience, pay attention to your email subscribers, and give them more reasons to spend time on your platform rather than on your social profiles.
Guest author: Tiffany Harper is a talented writer from New York, an extremely active woman, and a real leader. She began her career as a journalist and later proceeded it as an educational writer and editor. Now she works as an expert writer in Proessaywriting and EssayOnTime UK, mostly in the technology digital marketing area. Please do not hesitate to contact her on Twitter.