8 Expert Ways to Promote Your Content and See Results

Creating amazing pillar content takes a lot of time and resources, and your work isn’t done once you publish it on your blog. A comprehensive content promotion strategy is essential to ensure your content marketing efforts don’t go to waste.

Even if you’ve managed to create exceptional high quality content that’s educational and valuable that your target audience can greatly benefit from, don’t expect a sudden influx of website traffic or site visitors eager to read it unless you actively promote your content.

People need to be aware that a certain blog post or video content 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. An effective content promotion strategy can help you drive more traffic to your landing page and ensure your valuable content reaches the right audience.

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

1. Build a Content Promotion Strategy

Setting Goals and Objectives

Building a content promotion strategy begins with setting clear goals and objectives. This involves identifying what you want to achieve through your content promotion efforts, such as increasing website traffic, generating leads, or driving sales. It’s essential to make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) to ensure you’re focusing on the right metrics.

When setting goals, consider the following:

• What is the primary purpose of your content promotion strategy?

• Who is your target audience, and what are their needs and interests?

• What metrics will you use to measure the success of your content promotion efforts?

• What is your budget for content promotion, and how will you allocate resources?

By setting clear goals and objectives, you’ll be able to create a focused content promotion strategy that drives real results for your business.

Choosing the Right Channels

With your goals and objectives in place, it’s time to choose the right channels for your content promotion strategy. This involves selecting the social media platforms, blogs, email newsletters, and other channels that will help you reach your target audience.

When choosing channels, consider the following:

• Where does your target audience spend most of their time online?

• Which channels are most relevant to your industry or niche?

• What is the competition like on each channel, and how can you differentiate yourself?

• What is the cost of promoting content on each channel, and what is the potential return on investment?

Some popular channels for content promotion include:

• Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram

• Blogging platforms like Medium and WordPress

• Email newsletters like Mailchimp and Constant Contact

• Influencer marketing platforms like AspireIQ and HYPR

By choosing the right channels, you’ll be able to reach your target audience and drive real results for your business.

2. 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. Building relationships with influencers is a key content promotion tactic that can significantly boost your content promotion efforts.

When it comes to content 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 target keyword and tailor your post according to their suggestions.

The best approach is doing audience 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 and improve your content promotion strategy.

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 content 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 relevant audiences 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.

Partnering with Niche Influencers

Partnering with niche influencers is a powerful way to promote your content and reach a wider audience. Influencers have built a following around their expertise and interests, and they can help you tap into that audience.

When partnering with influencers, consider the following:

• What is the influencer’s area of expertise, and how does it align with your content?

• What is the size and engagement of the influencer’s audience?

• What is the influencer’s content style, and how does it align with your brand voice?

• What is the cost of partnering with the influencer, and what is the potential return on investment?

Some popular platforms for finding and partnering with influencers include:

• AspireIQ: A platform that connects brands with influencers in their niche

• HYPR: A platform that helps brands find and partner with influencers

• Upfluence: A platform that connects brands with influencers and helps them manage their influencer marketing campaigns

By partnering with niche influencers, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience and drive real results for your business.

3. Leverage Social Media Channels as a Content Promotion Strategy

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 for each social media post. These optimal posting times are different for every social media platform, so make sure not only to check out what experts say but also to monitor whether the same rules apply to your following. Understanding social media algorithms is crucial for maximizing the reach of your social media posts.

By posting your content on social media channels, 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. This value exchange can significantly increase your organic traffic.

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 social media users to share your content with others. This encourages your audience to become active participants in your content promotion efforts.

Join Social Media Groups to Expand Your Reach

By joining various social media groups and online communities related to your industry, you’ll have an opportunity to connect with your targeted audience interested in reading your content. Facebook groups in particular can be excellent places to share relevant content with an interested audience. 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 promotion through paid ads is 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. A good social media strategy incorporates both organic and paid promotion to maximize reach.

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 social media channel

• Using social media management tools to schedule your posts in advance and automate your campaign

• Optimizing your content for each platform’s preferred format (images, short form videos, etc.)

4. 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 with Google Analytics – 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 and drive more traffic to your website.

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.

5. Repurpose Your Existing Blog Posts

Take advantage of the content you already have by updating and repurposing content. 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. Evergreen content in particular is perfect for repurposing as it maintains its relevance over time.

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 written content into video content. 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 YouTube videos or short form videos for multiple channels.

• 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 search engine optimization efforts. It will allow you to rank for a greater variety of relevant keywords and search phrases, which means that your content will appear in more search results. Similarly, if you’ve created an infographic from a blog post, this post will show up both in the image and regular results.

6. 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.

7. Optimize for Search Engines

To ensure your content ranks well in search results, incorporate these technical content promotion tactics:

Focus on On-Page SEO

Add internal links to related content on your website to keep visitors engaged and improve site structure. Ensure your page speed is optimized, as slow-loading pages can cause you to lose traffic. Implement structured data to help search engines better understand and display your content in search results.

Guest Blogging Opportunities

Writing guest posts for news sites and industry blogs is an excellent way to build links back to your content. This not only helps with SEO but also puts your content in front of new audiences. Look for opportunities on relevant digital platforms where your target audience spends time.

Fix Broken Links

Identify broken links on other websites in your industry and offer your content as a replacement. This technique helps website owners fix their broken links while providing you with valuable backlinks.

8. Use a Content Calendar

Organize your content promotion efforts with a comprehensive content calendar that outlines:

• When and where each piece of content will be promoted

• Which social media accounts will share the content

• Scheduling of email newsletters featuring the content

• Timing of paid promotion campaigns

• Dates for repurposing and refreshing content

A well-planned content calendar ensures your promotion is consistent across multiple channels and helps you track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Promoting your content is critical to the success of your entire content marketing strategy. All these promotion 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 promotion strategies 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.