4 More Content Promotion Strategies to Increase Engagement

If you’re a B2B marketer, odds are that creating content is an integral part of your inbound strategy for attracting prospects. After, all inbound marketing costs 61% less than traditional advertising, while producing 54% more leads. Because of this, however, everyone is investing more in content marketing. This raises the bar, meaning that creating more content is not enough. To reach your intended audience, you need to differentiate your brand and rise above the noise by offering value.

In the past, inbound marketers spent 80% of their time creating content and 20% promoting it. With all the noise out there, that formula is flipped, meaning that content promotion is now the priority. To communicate effectively with your audience, you must provide the right content in the right place at the right time.

Previously, we looked at four ways to promote your content to increase engagement. Let’s go through four more.

1. Amplify Through Influencers

Getting influencers to share your content is a great way to increase its reach. They have large established audiences, including many of the very same people that you want to communicate with. There are a few ways to gain access to these industry megaphones. The first is to get a quote from one of them as you are creating your content. For instance, you could have an influencer provide their thoughts as a subject matter expert for your upcoming blog post. By getting their quote in your content, you have the necessary foot in the door to have them share the post to their network. In reaching out to potential commenters, make sure to cast a wide net, as many of them will be too busy or not interested.

For your biggest and most influential advocates, consider asking them to create their own piece of content (likely a blog) in reaction or response to a longer asset of yours, like an ebook. This is a bigger ask than simply having them share your content, of course, so be strategic about when you deploy it. While quotes and shares can be solicited from new influencers, you will want to stick with people that you have established relationships with for this type of request. Whichever path you choose, promoting through influencers is valuable by helping you both reach new people and enhancing the reputability of your content through its association with them.

2. Be Savvy with Social

We all know that social media is vital to getting your content in front of your audience. Just posting and walking away is not enough though. Here are some ways get the most of what you’re putting out there.

Facilitate Sharing: Make it easy for users to share your content using Click to Tweet, a free tool that allows you to create pre-populated tweets that readers can share with a simple link click. Not only are you making it easier for your content to spread, but you can control the messaging around it.

#Hashtags: As long as you don’t overdo it, hashtags can be an effective way to broaden the reach of your content, serving as a mini search engine within social media. Research the most important hashtags for your industry or topic and go from there.

Repeat Posts: Social media moves fast—I’m sure we can all think of a time when we missed a piece of news or a friend’s life update because it got buried under other stuff. If you want your audience to see your most important content, it will take multiple postings. Make sure to create a promotion schedule so that your audience doesn’t get oversaturated with the same messages.

3. Repurpose Existing Content

Creating new content requires time and resources, so it makes sense to squeeze as much out of what you have as you can. The easiest way to do this is taking excerpts from existing content and repost them to sites like LinkedIn Pulse, Quora, and Reddit. This opens you up to potential new audiences with minimal effort.

If you want to be more ambitious, consider creating derivative pieces from some of the larger assets you have. Webinars can be great for this—you can turn session slides into a SlideShare, make an FAQ sheet out of the Q&A questions, or even make social media posts out of quotes or key stats. For more ways to repurpose your webinar content, check out this great blog post from our partner, GoToWebinar.

Ebooks are another great source for derivative pieces. At Marketo, we accompany our definitive guides with blog posts, cheat sheets, infographics, and more. When you create smaller pieces out of your big rocks, it makes it a lot easier to promote them. If a prospect isn’t ready to read your 50-page ebook right away, reading some of the associated shorter content may help them get there.

4. Don’t Forget About Email

Emailing your existing lists is still an effective method of promoting your content because of the speed with which you can reach large numbers of people. Sending a monthly newsletter to people who have opted into receiving your content can be very effective—it’s frequent enough to keep you top of mind but doesn’t risk feeling spammy. For more specific content types, make sure that you are segmenting your audiences properly. People have opted in to hear from you and further crowd their already cluttered inboxes, so you don’t want to abuse that trust. Remember that to be GDPR compliant, you will need to have clear customer consent and data privacy policies in place. For a refresher, check out our resources on the subject.

At the end of the day, your content is only as valuable as who sees it. Without the right content promotion strategies, it can’t stand out from the crowd, and will be useless. What other content promotion strategies do you use? I’d love to hear in the comments below.