The “if you build it, they will come” approach no longer works in content marketing. With more blogs than ever producing more posts than ever, it’s increasingly harder for your brand to cut through the noise and reach your customers. The crucial second step in a successful content marketing strategy is content distribution and finding new channels to actually get your content in front of your target audience.
While Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram have been the go-to channels for sharing content, here are four low-cost ways to circulate your content and ultimately drive traffic to your site.
1. Be Active On LinkedIn
In my opinion, one of the most underutilized social platforms is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has spent the last few years building itself up from “the Facebook for professionals” to a real media empire, full of clickable and shareable content.
Make it a habit to regularly share your articles with your professional network on LinkedIn. Consider critically which colleagues would truly benefit from this content and target them accordingly; LinkedIn still remains career-centric, so consumer-facing posts may not receive quite the same response as business-to-business content like industry news, how-to advice or company updates.
2. Get In Front Of The Camera
YouTube remains one of the most daunting channels to many marketers. High-quality video production is expensive, and you may not know how to translate your brand identity to this medium.
That said, you’d be amazed at the response even a low-budget video will generate if you simply produce honest and authentic videos. Don’t fixate too much on making the video perfect and polished; instead, just get in the habit of putting the video out there with helpful information your readers-turned-viewers can learn from.
Review your most successful blog posts and tease out a script for an informative video. How-to videos, demonstrations, product reviews or comparisons make for great content. Also, be sure to include a link back to the full post in the video description to capture some additional traffic.
3. Invest In Paid Ads
If you have the budget, put a few ad dollars behind your content with a promoted post. A modest paid social spend will (of course) heighten your content’s virality, but you still want to select content that people are likely to read and, more importantly, share.
Video proves to be the most well-received type of content on Facebook. According to data from more than 777 million Facebook posts in 2018, analyzed by BuzzSumo and published in “The 2019 Ultimate Guide to Facebook Engagement” report, videos on Facebook earn an average of 59% more engagement than other post types. But inspirational, humorous, helpful or practical content can also generate positive engagement.
Start with a small test to see how people respond to the content. Do they share it? Do they comment? Do they visit your Facebook page or website? Once a paid ad catches on, that paid traffic may convert to organic traffic, giving your blog post more search engine optimization (SEO) juice, which leads to more traffic and perpetuates that SEO flywheel.
4. Answer Questions In Niche Forums
Engage niche audiences through forums like Quora and Reddit. The audience is already actively looking for answers to usually very specific questions, so you can step in and capture eyeballs by sharing your expertise on relevant subjects.
But be careful: Well-moderated forums may reprimand you for promoting your company too heavily or accuse you of being a spammer. Respond to questions that you are qualified to answer and can smoothly weave a content mention into as an option for more information. That said, a well-crafted response, without the content plug, may generate enough interest to prompt readers to look up your company anyway.
Ultimately, you want your content to go where your customers are. Finding new ways to distribute your content will help bolster your SEO value and further your content’s reach. Test different channels and strategies to see what catches on with your audience.