Content only works, only influences potential customers, when those would-be customers can find it. Thus promotion is an important aspect of any content marketing campaign.
In a sense, content marketing consists of three parts: creation, publication, and distribution.
Content creation embodies researching topics, writing articles, producing videos, and generally making the useful, informative, or entertaining content your audience will love.
Publication is the act of making content available. Posting an article to your company’s site and on social media are examples.
Distribution, the final step, is where you share, or, if you will, promote content with the ultimate aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience of customers and potential customers.
What follows are nine ways you can get your content discovered.
Replace Broken Links
In search engine optimization, broken-link building is an outreach technique aimed at helping publishers improve user experience whilst earning backlinks for your company’s content.
First, identify broken links on popular web pages. These are HTML anchor tags that point to pages that are no longer available. Contact the site owner or manager. Let her know that there is a broken link on the page and that your business has content on the same topic as the original linked page.
Produce Video Summaries
Imagine you’ve written a comprehensive listicle, enumerating the top 17 gift ideas for downhill skiing enthusiasts. You know it will have a big impact this holiday season. But how do you get readers?
Consider making a short video summary that describes several, if not all, of the 17 gift ideas succinctly. In fact, Practical Ecommerce uses this very technique.
The resulting video can be shared on social media channels. (See below.)
Make Image Summaries
Following the same principle described in the “Produce Video Summaries” section above, create a graphic for each point in your article. These graphics can be an eye-catching way to let folks know about your content.
Each time you post an image, link back to the content you are trying to promote. As your social media friends, fans, and friends of fans share, they will also be driving traffic to your content.
Transform into a Slideshow
If your company serves business customers, you may also want to convert your content into a slideshow that can be posted to SlideShare or similar.
In some organizations, slideshows are how folks communicate, so providing a slide deck can go a long way.
When you share, don’t forget to link back to your original content in the description. Also, mention the source article at the beginning and the end of the slideshow.
Answer Questions on Reddit
Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the United States, with about 330 million active monthly users, engaging with about 14 billion posts on more than 138,000 active communities.
Often, posts on Reddit can take the form of a question. For example, in 2017 a user called legobagel23 asked, “What are the most comfortable athletic shoes to wear for standing 6+ hours at a time?”
If your company had just published an article about “The 17 Most Comfortable Athletic Shoes for Standing All Day” you could post a reply, recommend a few shoes and encourage folks to use your article as a resource.
Share on Social Media
This particular suggestion may be obvious, but it is still worth mentioning. You should always post your content on your company’s social media profiles.
Apparel retailer Mr Porter posts links to its content on all of its social channels. On September 25, 2018, the company posted links to eight different articles on Facebook by 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Some of those same articles also appeared on Mr Porter’s Twitter profile.
Mr Porter regularly posts content links on its social media channels.
Personal Social Media
Put your employees’ social media clout to work for your business’s content marketing, too.
Ask your company’s owners, marketers, and department heads to post or share your content. It will not be surprising if members of your staff are influencers in the market.
Pitch to Journalists
If you have just written an impactful article about “The Men’s Trends to Know for Autumn/Winter 2018,” you can share your work with journalists, bloggers, and podcasters.
Identify influential reporters or bloggers with a tool such as BuzzSumo. Then contact those journalists. Explain that you’ve just published a definitive post and offer yourself or other experts in your company who can comment on the article or the data it describes.
Buy Ads
Content marketing starts a relationship with potential customers. That relationship can lead to many sales over a long time. For some business, this opportunity makes it worthwhile to invest in content promotion.
Your company can: buy ads on Google, Bing, or other search engines; pay to be featured in email newsletters; or even advertise your content on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.