5 Best Practices To Promote Your Content Through Multiple Channels
How did you discover the last piece of content that you read? It could have been an e-book, blog post, video or a newsletter?
Did you find it in a newsletter? Or did it pop up while you were surfing the net? However, you might have discovered it. That is a real-time example of content promotion!
What is Content Promotion?
As a content marketer, you spend a lot of time day in and day out in creating a remarkable content (in the hopes of helping others find a solution). Maybe it’s a company that you are working for, a client or even for your own personal needs. Whatever it is, you should understand the importance of leveraging promotional channels in order to connect with new audience members and prospects.
Why should you connect?
Imagine that you are never able to sell your solution or knowledge to the people who need the most. How hurtful will that be?
“When it comes to content. Create less, promote more” — Hubspot
Think about it. You wouldn’t be planning an event like a Webinar or Meetups without promoting it. What would be the point if no one showed up?
With content promotion, you are able to get your message to the people who need it the most. It can also help to communicate the value they would receive as a customer. Also nurturing relationships that turn into delighted lifelong promoters.
Why Should You Promote Your Content?
“More than half (51%) of B2B buyers rely on content now to research their buying decisions, and they want shorter, interactive content that educates rather than sells” — Demandgenreport
This could mean that nearly half of your customers consume your content before your sales team even knew who they were.
But on a serious note,
Content Promotion And Success Goes Hand In Hand
- Brings traffic to the website
- Improve audience engagement
- Aid prospects with purchase decisions
One Wrong Notion In Content Promotion
Developing a content promotion strategy may sound easy but it does require some work. If success was as easy as posting few tweets and sending a mailer out to the masses, then more than,
89% of B2B Content Marketers would be reaping the benefits of content marketing to its fullest — Content Marketing Institute
Alright! Now you know why should you put efforts into marketing your content. The core of this blog is to list out just that: best practices in content promotion and let your audience know what you have created.
Best Practices In Content Promotion
- Create A Content Promotion Calendar
A content promotion calendar will help you keep track of various types of content which are scheduled to go out and the dates and times of when they will be published. However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, which is why it’s important to create a promotional plan that will include details about your target audiences, internal and external communication channels and the content that will be distributed across these channels.
Think of your content promotion calendar like a project management software. Imagine you are heading a team of people, how would you keep track of tasks that they do? Their activities? published materials?
A project management software helps keep you organized. So does your content promotion calendar!
This is how a content promotion calendar would look like:
Once you have a calendar that details your promotional effort, use segmentation to create a specific audience to receive your content.
2. Use Segmentation
Segmentation is the powerful best practice to use when promoting content across multiple channels. It is used to divide large audiences or target markets into smaller segments based on specific criteria.
It’s a helpful step that makes it easier for you to target the right people for your business and avoid showing ads/content to people who are ultimately not a good fit.
When you do segmentation, always keep your buyer persona in mind. Segments like interests, demographics and geographical location of your ideal customer.
Your ability to segment your audience will vary depending on the promotional channel you use. Often, content marketers use segmentation for email marketing, social media and paid campaigns.
Segmentation In Emails
It is typically done using lists with specific criteria of contacts in a company’s database.
Segmentation In Social Media
Social media campaigns can target audience based on information contained in the user profile such as their interest in cooking or hiking, the city where they live, education and lifestyle.
Segmentation In Paid Media Campaigns
Paid media campaigns take segmentation even further by allowing you to target audience members outside of your social network and whom you may have never heard of your business.
“ If you are a company like TripAdvisor then showing your content where they talk about being outdoors, travel, adventure may be a good place to promote your brand “
By using segmentation, you are not only creating a custom audience but it will also make it easier for you to create custom message for each channel, which brings us to our next best practice.
3. Create Custom Messaging For Each Channel
When writing a message, there are few things to keep in mind.
Set The Tone
Tone is defined as the general attitude of your message. When deciding the tone, think about the feeling that you want your audience to carry. Is it to inspire, encourage, educate or maybe just to chill. Decide on it.
Communicate The Value
You want to be sure not to oversell the value or promise more than what you can deliver. You also don’t want to undersell the value in your content which can result in missed opportunities for your business.
A way to check if you are communicating the true value is to define two to three benefits someone would gain from your piece of content. And try using at least one in the message that you will be writing to promote it.
Match The Distribution Channel
If you are delivering content on a social media platform, you can explore new and creative ways of delivering your messaging. From witty messages, short videos to gifts, you can test ways to deliver the most powerful message that will resonate with your audience and get the most engagement.
Email, on the other hand, is a bit more personal. So your message should be highly customized to the individual who is receiving it. You can include information like name, company, job title as elements that will help personalize your message.
The important thing to keep in mind is that each message you create to help promote your content is like an invitation for audience members to engage with your business. As a result, you will want to do your best to personalize each message for every recipient.
4. Experiment and Analyze
Unlock The Brainbox In You!
Experimentation is the best way to learn how to deliver your content to your audience and this is something you should be doing on a consistent basis. There is no great recipe to master content promotion instead you will need to try new ingredients by testing new content promotion tactics.
You may want to experiment with the message used to deliver your content or the distribution channels, time of day, the day of the week and paid vs organic promotion.
Treat each of these areas as a variable in an AB test. You only want to change one variable per experiment. This means that if you are running to promote a campaign for your ebook, you will want to experiment by changing the messaging or changing the promotional channel used to promote the ebook.
Optimization is a little different. It is used to achieve the best possible outcome for your promotional plan.
Key Areas To Optimize Content Promotion
Reach
Reach is used to measure the size of your potential audience. Optimizing for reach helps in getting you more potential eyes on your content.
Think of this as the top of your content promotion channel. You want to grow your reach as far and wide as possible while still remaining relevant.
How To Optimize For Reach?
- Include a link in your email signature
- Share content on social media
- Connect with industry influencers
- Always tell a new people about your content
Engagement
Engagement measures the number of interactions with your brand such as likes and shares.
How To Optimize For Engagement?
- Consider how a user is going to engage with your content. Will they be reading that content, watching that content or simply downloading it for another time? Will they be scrolling through the content in desktop or phone? Are they sending it to their colleague?
- Include relevant action words and visuals
- Make adjustments based off the platform being used
- Be patient
Conversion
Optimizing your content for conversions requires you to have a clear definition of what a conversion looks like for your content type. And in understanding how your promotional channel impact conversion process. Conversions may be downloads, views, trials, signups and the list goes on.
How To Optimize For Conversions
- Link to a landing page for all of your promotional efforts
- Use strong call-to-action
5. Analyze Your Results
Analyze the results of each campaign in order to identify ways to improve your future campaign performance.
How To Analyze Your Content Promotional Efforts?
- Analyze the performance of your promotions’ channels
Is there one or two that exceeded the expectations? Or maybe there is one channel that significantly underperformed.
- Explore each channel individually
Was there a particular message that resonated well with your audience? Or that missed the mark completely?
- Identify next steps that you can take based on new insights
Is there a channel that you should lean in to further? Or tone the content that works best for your audience?
Go ahead, try these tactics for yourself and let us know how it worked for you in the comment section below.
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Small Videos that you see on your Facebook timeline. People like it because it comes with subtitles and auto plays when you hover on the video. You get to watch the video at your workplace or while traveling without even having to wear headphones. That’s the forte! Start using videos, be the game changer.
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