8 Must-Try Steps for Successful Content Promotion
There are millions of blogs, videos, and infographics on the internet, but just a fraction get the visibility they deserve.
Why? It all comes down to the art of promoting content.
You (or your content marketing agency) put in a lot of effort to create content, which is why it’s so important to pair content creation strategies with content promotion.
After all, you spend a lot of time cranking out great content for your target audience. Shouldn’t you get as many eyes on this content as possible?
In this guide, we’ll explain what content promotion is and why it’s so important. We’ll even share an easy playbook you can follow to boost your all-star content to internet fame.
What Is an Example of Promotional Content?
Let’s say you’re an eco-friendly kids’ clothing company, and you created informative video content about sustainable living. This piece of content might be a gem, but without the right content promotion strategies, it just won’t reach your target audience.
If you’ve invested hours into creating quality content and no one’s biting, you might just need to get the word out.
For example, you can promote your videos on social media platforms or use pay-per-click (PPC) ads to transform this video from “just another piece of content” to an asset that generates more business.
Why Is Content Promotion Important?
You can write the best content in the world, but people can’t check it out if they don’t know about it. Content development is a must-have, but content promotion is the best way to get more eyes on your content.
If you’re on the fence, content promotion can help you:
- Engage the right audience: You aren’t creating content for everyone—you’re targeting a very specific audience. Creating a promotion strategy ensures you reach the right demographics, which leads to more engagement and conversions.
- Boost organic traffic: Sharing content on various channels and investing in search engine optimization (SEO) increases organic traffic to your site, which doesn’t cost you a dime and puts your brand in front of more potential customers.
- Squeeze life out of evergreen content: Some pieces of content are relevant all year round. Instead of letting content float into the void, a content promotion strategy ensures these established pieces of content get some love, too.
Content promotion isn’t a nice-to-have. If you’re going through the hard work of creating content—or hiring an SEO-focused content agency like Growth Machine to do it for you—you owe it to yourself to promote that content after publishing. It’s the best way to create an effective digital marketing strategy that grows your business.
How Do You Promote Content Marketing?
So, we know how important promotion is, but how do you create a promotional strategy for your business? Follow these eight steps to get more mileage out of the content you worked so hard to create.
1. Create Valuable Content First
First things first, you need to double-check that your content is share-worthy. The more craveable your content, the easier it will be to promote it. In fact, creating engaging content that resonates with your audience encourages sharing, which makes your job a lot easier!
Before promoting a piece of content, be sure to:
- Optimize it for SEO: Keyword research and on-page optimization are a must-have for showing up in search engines. This won’t generate organic traffic overnight, but SEO can certainly boost your chances of attracting more readers.
- Add interactive elements: Text-based blogs are fine, but why not zhuzh things up a bit? Add interactive elements like quizzes, polls, and graphics to encourage people to share.
- Include calls to action (CTAs): This doesn’t have to be anything big. It can be as small as adding a CTA at the bottom of your blog encouraging readers to sign up for your email list. Whatever you want them to do, make sure your audience always has a next step.
Creating quality content is a delicate art that requires a lot of research and finesse. Many businesses don’t have the resources to create their own content, which is where Growth Machine comes in.
You focus on your customers and Growth Machine’s team of SEO and content experts will help you create authoritative, high-quality content that turns heads. We recently helped a client go from 11,000 monthly sessions to over 65,000 sessions in just six months.
2. Identify the Right Channels
Quality content in hand, it’s time to find the right mix of promotional channels. This might sound obvious, but plenty of businesses struggle to share relevant content with their followers.
Look at your audience demographics or customer personas. Where does your target audience spend time online? Which platforms or content formats are their favorite?
Check that your channels and audience make sense for the content. For example, makeup tutorials might not perform as well on LinkedIn as they would on Instagram. The more naturally the content works with the channel, the better your chances are of building brand awareness.
Be sure to choose platforms where you feel comfortable sharing regularly. Consistency matters with your promotion efforts. After all, if you post just a few times a year, few people will follow your content.
3. Post on Social Media
Social media is one of the best (and cheapest!) ways to do content promotion. The right channels depend on your content, audience, and business, but these are some of the most popular social media channels:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- TikTok
You don’t need to manually post content to each platform, either. Pre-schedule social media posts with tools like Buffer. Scheduling tools make it a cinch to bulk-upload posts for automatic social sharing.
4. Try Email Marketing
Email campaigns put your content in front of engaged list subscribers. Since people had to opt-in to join your email newsletter, they’re more likely to engage with your content.
Create a consistent email schedule promoting your content. Try sending emails to your list at least once a month, but make these messages as valuable as possible. Promote your content, but be sure to include juicy goodies like discounts or exclusive content to encourage engagement.
5. Do Influencer Outreach
Influencers and bloggers have a readymade audience that trusts their opinions. As long as you find an influencer who shares your target demographic, this is a great way to encourage more folks to check out your content.
Keep in mind that multimedia, like videos or social posts, is best for influencer marketing campaigns. However, the creators might want a hand in the content creation process so they can feel good about the content promotion.
Ask the influencer how they prefer to work with brands. Established influencers will have a proven process for boosting your brand.
6. Look Into Guest Blogging
Guest posts are a smart way to promote existing content. It doesn’t hurt that posting on another company’s website is also a prime backlink opportunity.
Find another complementary brand that has some overlap with your target audience—but that doesn’t directly compete with your business. For example, if you’re a purse brand, maybe you post a guest blog on a hair accessory website.
Both you and the guest posting site should cross-promote the content to generate as much organic traffic as possible.
7. Invest in Paid Advertising
This is the most expensive option, but paid ads will definitely put your content in front of more people. PPC like Facebook Ads and Google Ads will push your offers to people based on demographic targeting.
But this can get pricey, so try to create hyper-engaging content for your paid ad campaigns. Naturally engaging ad content tends to spread faster and has lower costs per click, which is great for your budget.
8. Repurpose Content
Did you film a pretty comprehensive YouTube video? Don’t just let it sit there—chop it up and repurpose it. Long-form videos can easily become:
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Social media videos
- Blogs (through the power of transcribing tools)
You can create several pieces of content from one original source piece. This gives you more content to share on your website, email campaigns, and social media without generating completely new content ideas. That’s a huge time-saver.
Take a Free Content Distribution Master Class
You put a lot of hard work into your content, so create a promotion strategy that attracts the attention it deserves! The eight steps in this guide will get you far, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Growth Machine’s free content promotion course shows you how to affordably boost your organic traffic through easy automations, community-building, and more.
Check out Growth Machine’s free content promotion course now.
