Would you like to be the Don King of content promotion (look him up, you millennials)?
Maybe without the manslaughter conviction and the hair?
As marketers, we know how important it is that our content is shared across various channels to attract new audiences, improve audience engagement and help our buyers to make purchase decisions.
47% of B2B buyers consume 3 to 5 pieces of content before they engage with a salesperson.
But we are all probably guilty of spending lots of time generating new content and very little time promoting it.
I’d like to suggest that we should tweak that and spend much more time promoting our content.
Why?
Because a lot of effort goes into researching and writing blog posts. If all we ever did was to publish them on our blogs, then they would simply languish in quiet obscurity.
How important is it that your content gets read – how much does it cost to develop the content in the first place? For that investment to show you a return, you’ll need to learn some Ninja promotion skills.
You’ve written a great blog post, and you want to get it out there in the big wide world, so you check the buyer personas that you targeted this at. On what social channels do they hang out?
So, you publish an update on LinkedIn, and you Tweet it too from your company accounts.
It’s your blog, so you can retweet that first tweet from your own account and share through your networks too.
This is all free, so why not make the most of it? Ensure that the rest of your sales and marketing teams (in fact why not the whole company?) will also share any content that you publish this way. Then all their contacts will also get a chance to see your new blog post.
That’s a quick way to get greatly increased reach for your content.
If you want to get Ninja with your promotion, start using something like Buffer, Hootsuite, or HubSpot so that you can schedule ongoing promotions through Twitter by uploading a spreadsheet of dates and times to Tweet.
If you have budget for your promotion then you can use paid promotion channels such as Google, Yahoo or Bing to advertise your new content.
All the major social media channels offer this too: Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter and Instagram.
The main benefit of paid promotions is that each of the social media channels have gallons of data on each contact, which means that you can promote to people who will find your content most relevant.
But the best approach here is to only promote those pieces of content that have done very well organically (non-paid). That way you can be sure that you are spending your budget on top quality content that your audience should enjoy.
Turn that blog post into another format.
Would it work as an infographic (is there a segment of your customers who really like infographics?).
How about an ebook – could it be expanded a little and set up as a download behind a form to generate more leads?
Maybe it could be reworked as a video and uploaded to YouTube?
Could each of the points that you have made be turned into a slide? If so, develop a slideshow version and upload it to SlideShare.
With all these sharing ideas, be sure to link the new version of your content back to your website or blog so that it leads the reader back to your original content.
There are dozens of different ways that your content can be repurposed and promoted to new channels.
See if you can find at least ten brief excerpts that you can cut out and share on social media. These could be:
Dive into your content and dig out ten or a dozen. Then share them on social media over the next few weeks.
Who cares about your blog post? Maybe if an Influencer in your industry would offer a point of view on your topic that would boost the popularity of your post.
How do you go about finding such an influencer – try BuzzStream.
You can fill in specific keywords that you want to write about and BuzzStream will show you contact information about influencers on those subjects.
This (as you might imagine) is a paid service, so a ninja promotion skill.
Hopefully that gives you some ideas about how to go about promoting your content. As ever, if you’d like to talk to a friendly marketing nerd about this, just give us a call. Or why not book onto our next free event?