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Content Promotion: The Key to Content Marketing Success

[columns bordered=”true”][three-four-columns]Spending hours crafting the perfect piece of content for your site doesn’t guarantee that it will reach your target audience. The key to content marketing success actually lies within content promotion. How you promote your content online with paid, earned and owned media can be the difference between one person reading your content and one hundred thousand people. With this in mind, here is a step by step guide to choosing the best channel to amplify your content, plus we’ve created a handy infographic to help!

Download your infographic here

Finding Your Target Audience

Content promotion isn’t simply about tweets, posts, pins and photos. It’s about targeting your audience and finding out which platforms they populate daily. Integrating your content on a channel that your audience uses every day is a simple way to get your brand noticed for all of the right reasons. So how do you know where your audience hang out? Research. If your target audience are males under the age of 35, Facebook and YouTube are where you will find them. But if females over the age of 35 are your target demographic, focus your content marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to keep an eye on the channels that your competitors are using and the track the response they are getting. Social tools like BuzzSumo are ideal for identifying key influencers in your industry by helping you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Choose a Channel

Once you have found where your audience is, you can then use this channel to communicate your message. In order to locate potential brand ambassadors that will share your content, you must find a channel that complements your brand and the type of content you wish to promote.

Social Channels

Will you be engaging your customers with interesting blog content via Twitter and Facebook or would your content be more suited to YouTube or Pinterest? You don’t have to pick one and stick to it, experiment with a few channels to see which one works for you. Facebook and Twitter may be the most popular channel but if you are a beauty, fashion or lifestyle brand trying to target a young demographic, an image based platform like Pinterest or Instagram may be more appropriate.

Tailor Your Content for Social

The key to content curation is maximising your chance of success on each of your chosen channels. For example, rather than pushing out the same content on Twitter and Facebook, tailor your status updates accordingly. Updating each social platform with the headline of your article or infographic is not going to engage key influencers so take a moment to make each update bespoke and give your followers a reason to share it. If you are using Twitter as your chosen channel use a hashtag to expand your reach and use a URL shortner like Bitly to make your tweet more reader friendly.

Paid, Earned and Owned

Without content promotion, a huge social following or a database full of engaged email subscribers, your content will probably fall on deaf ears. The best way to tackle this problem is to use paid methods, like PPC, display advertising and email list buying to increase your owned channels – like your email subscriber list and your social media channel.

When you continue to deliver great content, these subscribers, followers and customers become your brand ambassadors, earning you great reviews, testimonials, and ultimately promoting your messages for you, meaning that the initial cost of earning and owning those channels through paid media can be reduced.

Effort vs. Budget

SEO Moz created a really helpful reference guide to help choose the best channel for your marketing (we’ve included this in the infographic we produced). When considering which channel to use to promote your content, take into consideration which is going to give you the best result quickest – a.k.a the low hanging fruit. That doesn’t mean you should dismiss higher cost or higher effort channels.

Looking at the broad ROI expectation is a must to be able to make an informed decision. Your content needs to impact the bottom line. The effort and cost of one channel is only worthwhile if its going to give you a greater ROI than the next channel. Use your content as a tool for nurturing and growing each of your channels.

How to Choose the Right Channel for Your Content

We’ve created an infographic as a quick reference guide to how to choose the right channel for your content. Whether you need to work out the best social platform for your audience, you’re assessing the benefits of paid, earned and owned channels, or you’re looking at what will achieve the best ROI compared to the time and effort required, we’ve got it covered.

Download the free infographic here.

Takeaway

  • Developing a multifaceted strategy to promote your content via shared, earned and owned media is essential for content marketing success.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of your own marketing assets. Use your social media presence, email lists and blogs to leverage your content.
  • Always take a bespoke approach to content curation.
  • Assess channels based on their ROI – and then decide whether to spend the time or money on nurturing them with your content.

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infographic

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