5 Expert Ways to Promote Your Content

Creating amazing pillar content takes a lot of time and resources, and your work isn’t done once you publish it on your blog.

Even if you’ve managed to create an exceptional educational and valuable article that your target audience can greatly benefit from, don’t expect a sudden influx of visitors eager to read it unless you have promoted your new piece.

People need to be aware that a certain blog post or video exists in order to decide to read it, and that’s what makes content promotion an equally crucial part of the entire process.

Every day 2.75 million blog posts are published on the WordPress platform alone, and this stat really puts things into perspective – it’s virtually impossible to cut through all this digital marketing noise without actively spreading the word about your new piece of content.

Here are a couple of expert strategies that will help you put your content out there and help your audience learn about it.

1. Reach Out to Influencers

Content marketing agency experts reach out to influencers on a regular basis in an attempt to connect with them and benefit from their following, but in this case, the procedure is a bit different.

When it comes to promotion, you shouldn’t wait until you finish and publish your blog post – outreach should take place before you start creating your new content piece. This makes sense because it’s important to have a plan and know where you stand in advance so that you can pick the right topic and tailor your post according to their suggestions.

The best approach is doing your research and coming up with topics that are relevant to the industry. Then get in touch with the influencers that might be particularly interested in it. Ask them whether they would be willing to provide a comment or quote that you can include in your blog post.

The odds are that many of them won’t even respond to your outreach, but at least one or two will so agree to send them a draft of your blog post for review before you publish it. They will be happy to offer you a couple of useful tips on how to maximize the impact of your message.

You can do your outreach manually, but it’s much better and more efficient to use automation tools such as Mailshake or NinjaOutreach.

After you publish your blog post, send a link to the influencers you partnered with during the creation process, thank them for their input, and let them know if you included their suggestions in the final version. Ask them to read the blog post, and share it with their audience if they find it interesting and useful.

Finally, if this collaboration has been successful, ask them whether it’s OK to reach out again in the future. If you are thinking of outsourcing this task to a content marketing agency, check out our post on what a content marketing agency does.

2. Leverage Social Media Channels

This is a straightforward and simple tactic that might expand your reach substantially and put your new blog post in front of your target audience’s eyes.

Pick your timing

In order for this tactic to work, you need to post the same content more than once and pick the best timing. These optimal posting times are different for every social media channel, so make sure not only to check out what experts say but also to monitor whether the same rules apply to your following.

By posting your content on social media, you create an opportunity for your followers to re-share it with their networks, which means that even those you’re not connected with on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram will be able to see and read it.

Add Social Media Sharing Buttons

The first thing you should do is add social media share buttons to your blog as this will facilitate sharing. According to a stat, you’ll get up to 7 times more mentions simply by prominently placing your social media sharing buttons.

Create Click-to-Tweet Links

Another way of encouraging your readers to promote your content is by inserting click-to-tweet boxes into your blog posts and allowing your audience to easily share an interesting stat, quote, or memorable line from your blog post.

Offer Incentives

It’s also a good idea to run a rewards program or incentivize people to share your content with others.

Join Social Media Groups to Expand Your Reach

By joining various social media groups and communities related to your industry, you’ll have an opportunity to connect with people interested in reading your content. However, the trick is to not be overly promotional and spammy – make sure that your blog post contributes to the topic and offers useful solutions to the challenges other members try to overcome.

Leverage Paid Ads

Organic traffic is on the decline, which means that only a portion of your followers will see your posts. On the other hand, paid ads are much more effective when it comes to delivering your message.

Besides that, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram have very sophisticated and granular targeting options which means that you can pick your audience and segment it based on different parameters.

Other tips for effective social media promotion strategy include:

• Tagging the people or companies you mentioned in your content
• Tweaking your social media copy for each individual channel
• Using social media management tools to schedule your posts in advance and automate your campaign.

3. Send an Email Campaign

Email marketing is a powerful and cost-effective method of promoting your content (or anything else for that matter.) The latest stats show that 87% of marketers use this channel to distribute their content, while email engagement is the top metric for evaluating content performance.

If you have a well-managed list of prospects and subscribers, it’s very likely that those people are interested to receive useful updates from you, and that means your latest piece of content. With such an engaged audience, it’s 6 times more likely that you’ll get a click from an email campaign than a tweet.

The beauty of email as a medium lies in the fact that you can reach tens of thousands of recipients in an instant. You craft a message, schedule it, and your marketing automation tool does the rest. You also have a very precise way to track your metrics – it’s possible to see who opened your email as well as who clicked on the link to your content.

After a couple of days, you can filter those who didn’t open your email, come up with a different, more compelling subject line and email copy, and send a follow-up campaign. This way, you can increase the exposure of your content, as follow-ups will bring you additional clicks.

As for the sending frequency, stick to your subscribers’ preferences. If they signed up for a weekly newsletter, respect their wish and reach out only once a week with your new content even if you publish more than one post over that period.

Also, for better results, it’s essential to segment your audience and tailor your emails based on demographic and behavioural information. For example, you won’t send the same promotional email to your prospects who still haven’t made a purchase and your repeat customers.

Don’t forget to add a call-to-action button to your email and place it strategically so that your recipients spot it the moment they open your message. You can even get creative and use visually appealing newsletter templates, as images draw people in and help them to better understand the message.

We have also written a guide to email marketing for accountants.

4. Repurpose Your Existing Content

Take advantage of the content you already have by updating and repurposing it.

This approach will offer a fresh perspective on an existing topic and expand it with the latest stats and data.

Besides, we’ve already said that content creation is a time and resource-intensive task, and repurposing an existing blog post, especially the one that performs well, is significantly cheaper and faster than starting from scratch.

Repurposed content gives you an opportunity to promote it again and showing it to those who haven’t already read it. And those who did won’t mind revisiting it and finding new information.

Here are some repurposing tips to help you make the most of your content:

• Transform an old piece into 10X content. This doesn’t mean simply updating the stats and adding a paragraph or two – we’re talking about a total makeover and expanding your regular post into a detailed piece offering considerable value to your readers.
• Turn your content into a video. 66% of consumers prefer watching videos to reading about a product. The reason for this lies mainly in the fact that it’s much easier for the human brain to process information when it’s presented in a visual format. You can use a tool such as Lumen5 to extract the most important bits of information and convert your blog posts into videos.
• Convert your videos into SEO-friendly blog posts with a tool for generating video transcripts such as Wistia.
• Create infographics from your existing blog posts. These colourful graphic representations of information are more liked and shared than any other content on social media, which makes them great for capturing the attention of your audience and getting them to organically promote your content.

Repurposing your content can have a significant impact on your Google SEO efforts. It will allow you to rank for a greater variety of related keywords and search phrases, which means that your content will appear in more search queries. Similarly, if you’ve created an infographic from a blog post, this post will show up both in the image and regular results.

5. Create Powerful Headlines

According to David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, “five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”

A recent research study based on 2.7 million blog posts has corroborated this claim, as it has shown that almost 17% of web pages get more social shares than clicks, which means that people tend to tweet or re-share content on Facebook without actually reading it.

Their main criterion for deciding to click the “share” or “tweet” button is the headline.

To take advantage of this powerful effect, make sure that your headlines are catchy, compelling, and memorable.

Here’s how you can achieve that:

• Add numbers to your headlines. This will make them more specific and indicate to your audience that the content is easy to read and digest. For example, “7 Tips for Promoting Your Content” is much more appealing than “How to Promote Your Content,” because it’s not generic and it indicates the writer’s credibility on the subject.
• Use questions. This is a clever trick as it allows you to mention your target audience’s major pain point in the title and imply that your blog post will offer a helpful solution. Besides, questions always create a sense of curiosity and get people to click on them. “Are You Making These 5 Content Promotion Mistakes?” is a headline that will provoke your readers to see whether they’re doing something wrong and learn how to fix these mistakes.
• Make sure to add relevant keywords. This SEO best practice will help your audience to find your content on the internet.
• Try out negative headlines. Positive words tend to get overused, so people might be reluctant to click on the headlines containing “amazing,” “best,” or “surprising.” Reframe your position and come up with negative headlines as they’re more likely to catch your readers’ eye. So, instead of “7 Amazing Ways to Increase Email Engagement,” test something along the lines of “7 Factors That Will Ruin Your Email Engagement.” However, do closely monitor how these negative headlines perform and tweak them if necessary.
• Reuse your winning headline formula. Once you figure out what works for your audience, revisit the best-performing formulas to generate clicks.

Promoting your content is critical to the success of your entire content marketing strategy. All these tactics work, but you’ll have to adapt them to fit your business and audience. A dynamic approach will yield the best results, so make sure to test different tactics and identify the best opportunities. If this all sounds like too much then hire a digital marketing for service companies like us to get results.