In the last few emails we've talked about the biggest causes of content marketing failure, how to make your content work harder, and how to turn your site visitors into leads.
But what happens after you hit publish? How do you get the most mileage out of your content?
It’s important to promote the content you’ve created. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content on the web if no one sees it.
You can't wait around for organic traffic to trickle in, it'll only gather dust. You must proactively promote it.
Yes, you want your content consumed by your target audience, but there are 3 other important reasons to promote your content that most people miss...
1. Collect Unbiased Feedback – To get accurate feedback on your content, you need to go beyond your immediate network of friends and family. Promoting your content allows you to extend your reach outside your network to rapidly determine what your core audience wants more and less of.
2. Build Relationships & Authority – You can't build authority alone and content is the best way to prove yourself and happens to be the perfect conversation starter. Promote others' content and use yours to show your expertise. Who are people in complimentary industries you could partner with?
3. Build Retargeting Audiences – You can build highly targeted lists of people in places like Facebook based on the content consumed or actions taken on your website. For example I can make a list of people that have read email marketing articles on my site within the last 30 days and send them retargeting ads for email marketing services. It’s like having an email list of everyone that has visited your website!
So let’s talk about how to promote your content. There are two methods: Distribution and Outreach
You’re probably familiar with Distribution. These are things you do after publishing every article. They include…
- Emailing your list with your new content.
- Share your new content through your social media profiles
- Republish on Linkedin and Medium
- Include social sharing buttons on every page and “tweet this” links within the content.
- Interlinking other related posts on your site to your new content.
Promotion requires more work BUT has a bigger payoff. I classify promotional activities as things you can't automate. Things that take either time or money to do. This includes...
- Identify an authoritative person in your industry and ask them to share your content.
- Cite influencers in the content, then ask them to share once you’ve published. (If you speak about them positively, they should have no problem sharing for you.)
- Post your article with a helpful comment to a related community, forum, or Q&A website.
- Ask an influencer to contribute to your content before you make it.
- Paying to boost your content to target audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
- Using your content to build custom retargeting audiences you market to in the future.
Don’t forget to promote your content internally as well. By making your team aware of a new piece of content, you can turn them into thought leaders, multiplying your company's reach.
(Grab these free email templates to help your team use your content to better communicate with your audience. Download them here.)
Once you've chosen how to promote your content, the next step is keeping it consistent. Choosing someone to own this task is extremely helpful. They can continue to test promotional methods, optimize what works and discontinue what doesn't.
In our next and final lesson, I'll show you how to turn your leads into clients with email funnels.
Cheers,
Joel Widmer