Content Promotion Strategy | Brafton

Content marketing is a wide-ranging part of your efforts to build your brand. Every piece of media you produce on behalf of your company has a role to play in your overall content marketing strategy.

There’s a risk to only viewing content deliverables as small parts in a large tapestry, however: it’s easy to overlook how much each individual article, graphic or video can accomplish with the right promotional push. Your content team worked hard on these materials, and increasing their reach is a way to make that effort pay off.

An effective content promotion strategy involves choosing the right channels and tactics to spread each new release, thinking about what works best for your industry, your intended audience and the unique nature of a specific deliverable. If your efforts are successful, your content marketing return on investment stands to benefit.

Want a refresher on the value that comes from content marketing? Learn more about helpful outcomes of your marketing efforts.

Step by Step: Increasing Content Visibility

Launching a serious content promotion effort means thinking in stages, starting before content marketers begin producing a new set of deliverables. By considering what it will take to spread your content to the widest possible audience at every step, you can give yourself a clear roadmap to greater marketing success.

7 Steps for Your Content Promotion Strategy

From initial brainstorming to on-the-fly adjustments and later revision, there are important points to consider at every stage of content promotion strategies. While the following steps aren’t set in stone — you can adjust them to match your own brand’s needs — they provide a solid framework for promoting your content and optimizing its reach.

1. Define and research your target audience: A Content promotion effort is all about reaching out to a larger audience, and to start your efforts on the right foot you need to think about the individuals who make up that audience. What do your ideal customers care about? What problems are they trying to solve? What kind of content would get them to click, and what platforms and channels are they using to find this content? Coming up with solid answers to these questions will allow you to make clear decisions later on.

2. Decide on your messaging voice: Once you’ve established the makeup of your target audience, you can choose a voice that will extend through the content deliverables and beyond them. From the body copy of your blog posts to social media messages and video narration, you can adopt a consistent tone. Are you informing your readers, listeners and viewers from a point of authority or speaking to them on their own level? Are you casual or formal? This consistent style will set the tone for your ongoing communications with your audience. 

3. Produce content to suit your strategy: One major advantage to thinking about your big-picture promotion strategy before content creation is the ability to shape each piece with its long-tail future in mind. Since you know who your audience members are and what they might want to know, you can intentionally produce content that will work well for them — such as explainers on the products that can solve important problems or case studies that will resonate. The form of the content can also suit your long-term plans. If you’re planning to distribute content on a targeted social media platform, short-form video and infographics may be perfect, whereas if you’re hoping to have your work picked up by industry publications, blog posts from your subject matter experts are a good choice.

4. Distribute content through targeted channels: This is the step when you put your content to work, potentially multiple times. Intensive pieces of content like whitepapers, eBooks and case studies can shine when you promote them across your social media channels. Videos can reach the widest possible audience if you embed them in written content while also sharing them directly. Repackaging compelling content pieces as features in an email newsletter with a well-curated list ensures they don’t fall through the cracks. Bringing your chosen deliverables to your intended audience is the heart of content promotion strategies.

5. Track the performance and reach of each content piece: Rather than relying on guesswork, it’s worth tracking metrics for your content. Are your videos getting an adequate amount of views? What’s the open rate like for your email newsletter? What’s the response to your blog content? Are website visitors willing to leave their contact information to read your eBooks and whitepapers? Knowing the stats helps you adjust your targeting.

6. Reuse evergreen content to achieve extra reach: If your content is naturally evergreen — that is, it’s not linked to time-sensitive events — you can keep it in circulation for a long time. This may mean revisiting older posts in new email newsletters, making reference to previous whitepapers and blog posts on social media or recirculating video content within the body of new articles. You can even refresh older posts with new facts to update them for the present year or adjust their keyword mixture to keep them relevant on search engine results pages (SERPs).

7. Keep producing new content and incorporate learnings: Each new batch of content can improve in terms of targeting and appeal for your audience, based on what you learned by measuring performance and reach. Analyzing the actual outcomes of your first few promotional campaigns can inspire you to try new channels, content types or cadences in your efforts to build brand awareness.

Want to keep thinking strategically as you promote content? Delve into some of the most useful marketing strategies for your brand.

Promoting Your Content: Channels To Try

Each channel has its own audience and is suited to specific types of deliverables. By creating a perfect match between the people you’re trying to reach and your preferred medium, you can deliver high-quality content to the audience most likely to appreciate it.

A few of the most important content distribution channels to use when increasing the reach of your pieces include:

1. Guest posts and post exchanges: If you’ve produced a particularly compelling blog post, especially one that contains unique thought leadership and viewpoints from your leaders, you can publish it beyond the walls of your own blog. By submitting to a reputable site in your industry that accepts third-party content or trading guest posts with another company, you can put your viewpoint in front of fresh eyes and build brand awareness.

2. Social media post creation: Posting on a social media platform is the perfect way to extend the lifespan of your content. By crafting accompanying posts that are suited to the tone and style of a particular network, such as LinkedIn or Instagram, you can bring in a new audience for video content or imagery. You can also use teasers and excerpts to convince viewers to click through to a full whitepaper, case study, eBook or blog post.

3. Email newsletter spotlights: An active mailing list is one of the most useful tools a marketer can wield. By serving high-quality content directly to your audience, you can shape your message precisely. Using email best practices, like periodically cleansing your list and A/B testing subject lines and preview text, you can integrate email marketing with your content promotion strategy.

4. Targeted SEO: Search engine optimization is a powerful inbound marketing tactic when you treat it with scientific rigor. You can tune your blog posts to appeal to your target audience’s search habits, answering their questions and becoming a trusted source. Since designed deliverables like PDF eBooks and infographics aren’t crawlable by search engines, you can craft SEO-optimized blog posts to accompany these pieces of media.

5. Paid advertising: A well-balanced marketing strategy combines “earned” impressions with paid ads to reach the largest possible audience. This division can apply to content promotion. Inbound marketing tactics like SEO optimization can bring in some readers and viewers for content, while paid ads that appear in the ever-larger “sponsored” sections of SERPs can capture others.

These channels and others each suit specific types of audience behavior and intent — by picking the right ones, you can meet your potential customers where they are.

Delve deeper into the leading channels of distribution to promote content.

Getting Serious About Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content promotion is, at its heart, a cost-effective way to make your digital marketing strategy generate stronger ROI. Your content is good — your marketing team spends time and effort on each deliverable. It’s only right to give each of those pieces the best possible chance to reach a large, receptive audience.

Launching a content promotion strategy means marketing with intention and having a plan — or several plans — to put your materials where they’ll draw the most eyes. If your brand hasn’t fully explored the potential channels to promote your content, now is always a good time to start.

You don’t have to start from scratch when you’re embarking on content promotion. If you inspect your existing content, the best pieces can form the basis of an email newsletter, be the subject of social media posts or become part of an SEO refresh. You may surprise yourself at just how much reach your marketing content has when it’s presented in the exact right form to a well-chosen audience.