Simple Content Promotion Best Practices: Promote Early and Often
Content promotion is not just pushing it live. After you publish your content to your website, it still needs attention. While one method for getting the most out of your content is to recycle it, in this post I want to focus on what you can do with something without repurposing the content piece into different formats. Don’t change it. Share it. Here’s how and where.
This post will highlight content promotion best practices to make sure you’re getting the most out of your kickass content.
Publish to social media
Once your content goes live, posting to social media has to be the first step you take. If you don’t already have social accounts, make sure you start those. Because yes, you do need social media marketing.
Set up the fundamental social media accounts for your business (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+). Certain companies might want to invest time in Instagram or Pinterest if their product is particularly picture-worthy. If you have demo or product videos on your website, make sure you also host those on Vimeo or Youtube to ensure they’re searchable.
Share directly
But let’s not stop after sharing content once on social media. Engage in social listening to stay on top of what people are saying about your brand, about your industry, and about the problem you solve. Sometimes, these people have specific questions. If you have content that can answer those questions, that’s another opportunity for you to share your awesome content.
Twitter is a particularly great platform for reaching out to prospects and customers directly. Take advantage and share relevant information when you can. Also, consider monitoring and engaging on Quora. This site gives you even more direct contact with your customers, allowing you to respond to customer or prospective customer questions. You can also mediate negative reactions. Read more on marketing with Quora here.
Be timely
Be aware of all those silly national holidays (that everyone but you seems to be aware of ahead of time), and use that to your advantage. Re-share your content based on these calendars.
Alternatively, be aware of what’s happening in your industry. If you have an upcoming annual event, maybe promote that blog post you did about that event a year ago. If a partner company is doing a certain promotion, maybe share a piece of content that highlights your connection to that partner.
Republish on LinkedIn or other sites
Republishing your blogs on LinkedIn is a great opportunity to get your content out there a second time with minimal effort.
LinkedIn’s article feature allows you to easily copy and paste your original content, choose a picture, choose a headline, and share. While we don’t want to completely rewrite the article, there are some things that you might consider tweaking, or adding.
First, consider changing the headline of your post. This will decrease the likelihood it will be seen by Google as duplicate content. Second, make sure your call to action makes sense in the context of LinkedIn (where your audience is now reading this). Ask them to leave comments, or drive them back to your company’s website where they can read more blog posts like this one. Ideally, you want them to visit your blog directly next time.
And finally, it’s important to delay publishing this content. After all, it’s not very effective if you share the same post on your blog and on LinkedIn at the same time. You never want the LinkedIn post to rank higher than the one on your website. Wait at least two weeks before republishing to LinkedIn
Your sales team can share it, too
Do you have articles on your site that are really helpful for prospects? Does it cover a resolution to a specific problem? Or maybe you have something that might not be about your product in particular, but it makes you seem like the thought leader on a subject. That’s content that your sales team can share via email or online chat.
So make sure you put your best content in the hands of your sales team so they can share it directly with customers.
Email campaigns
And finally, use email nurture campaigns as a vehicle for content promotion. You have a specific path in mind for your customer. To help them along that journey, make sure you choose your best content, building a complete story from beginning to end.
You can even test different content over time to see what resonates most with your audience: Do they prefer blogs, videos, or white papers? What topics are they most interested in?
Monitoring this not only helps you with your email nurtures, but with creating new content you then get to publish and promote endlessly.
Looking to create a fully-realized content plan from concept to promotion? Reach out to DemandZEN today.
You Might Also Enjoy These Posts
Demand Generation vs Lead Generation
Gamification Strategies: Badges in B2B Marketing
Welcome To DemandZEN
DemandZEN specializes in Account-Based Demand Generation and solving the challenges around finding, engaging and converting target accounts into real opportunities for B2B Technology and Services companies.