In a competitive marketplace, it is not enough to just have quality content. It is also vital to promote the content through a host of channels. This will allow it to get in front of more people and eventually convert them into customers.
This is where content promotion plays a key role.
Also called content marketing, it refers to a process that distributes content posts vide both paid and organic channels. This could include social media, email marketing, syndication, influencer outreach, etc. All of these help in getting the content to reach as many people as possible and attract more traffic in a way that will positively impact your business.
The channels mentioned have proved to be competent content promotion techniques that have helped to get content in front of the target audience. But many content promotion techniques are not much known.
To promote content even better, the need of the hour is to have a strong content marketing strategy that’s supplemented by a blend of known and unknown content promotion techniques.
Here are six of the most unknown content promotion techniques.
Emailing continues to be a part of people’s everyday lives, including in the corporate world. Office employees continue to send and receive a huge number of emails per day. As per a Radicati Group report, on average an office employee is said to send or receive 121 emails per day.
This presents an opportunity to encourage employees to promote content in their email signatures. Promotion of content in an email signature is still much under-utilized. By leveraging its untapped potential, content can be better promoted thereby increasing its visibility.
Generally, such content tends to remain static. If you’re looking to alter the content as and when needed, tailoring it to the recipient’s preferences, then solutions like Exclaimer and Sigstr can be used to change the content. This way, different content can be developed and sent to customers or prospects, or partners.
Content community refers to a group of people who have shared interests. Many experts rank them as the most effective way of promoting content.
Being a much unknown content promotion technique, its potential remains huge. To extract maximum benefits, the focus should be on not just content that indulges in self-promotion. It should also be on sharing comments and voting on other stories, articles, etc, all of which comes with being a part of the community.
Content can be shared the best by spending as much time as possible with the community. Some of the best online content communities include Facebook Group, Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter, Slack Groups, etc.
Some experts recommend creating your own community. This will help get the content in front of the right target audience.
Connecting with social advocates helps in cultivating a network of people who are ready to share content. This will help promote content to more people and expand its overall reach.
For instance, if you’re looking to promote your brand in a way that will stay in prospects’ minds, then you need to deliver the content to be shared with social advocates. One way is to post the content on your own brand’s channels and then email the posts links to the advocate network. Advocates can be asked in the email sent, to share the content and where possible, fine-tune it to personalize to their unique audience. This way, evergreen content can be created that will naturally increase engagement levels.
Another way is to use an automating service. This will allow for the links to be loaded into it. Once done, it will get automatically be delivered to advocates on the days and times chosen.
There are certain resources like ebooks and white papers that are often confined to just the resources page. That is a waste for they are valuable content that can be better promoted.
This can be ensured by promoting them across the website. As a result of this, they will get the visibility that is justly deserved. This will be extremely helpful if a visitor to the site is keen on knowing more information regarding related topics. Likewise, it will also be beneficial if you’re looking to provide better web personalization during visitors’ content journey. It will help user experience and also increase conversions.
Twitter has a large reach. So, why not use the Twitter profile to promote content. Just as tweets are pinned to one’s Twitter, likewise content can be pinned to Twitter profile. It is a quick and free way as well to enhance the content’s visibility.
Some may ask, why just Twitter when there are other social media platforms like Facebook that offer similar features. That’s because Twitter Pins are by default shown at the top of a profile page. It will stay there whether the profile page is old or not. This is what makes it easy to be recognized and seen by people, which will allow the content to be seen and read by interested people.
A market survey once revealed that 84% of people trust recommendations from people they know well.
Implementing a unique rewards program or referral marketing program the right way can help promote content effectively. It will help get people to share the content. This way, content can reach a segment of individuals who can turn out to be loyal customers later.
The content can also be fine-tuned later in varied ways to make it evergreen content. This will help promote it better and also get more people to share it. A good example of this is a webinar that is hosted. The attendees to the webinar can be lured with a free eBook or eBook offered at a discount, and then asked to refer the content to their contacts and friends.
In the same way, people can also be asked to subscribe to a newsletter. This will see the added benefit of referring it further to more people.
Some other content promotion techniques remain much unknown. They have been highlighted by popular U.S.-based content strategist, Shannon Byrne on KISSmetrics.
She reveals how one can find distribution channels that work effectively to promote content. They include looking in Google Analytics for referral sources; monitoring keywords to find out where and what types of conversations are happening; and which content is trending on the forums that the audience is on. (REFER: https://buffer.com/resources/content-promotion/.)
If you want your content to reach out to as many people as possible, then content marketing is necessary. Many techniques help to promote content. And they are all tried and tested techniques.
So, why not explore and try the unknown?
Leveraging unknown content promotion techniques will help you increase reach and get the content noticed by many more people in ways that will be exciting.