To use a blog to attract and engage audiences on your website, you can’t hit the ‘publish’ button and expect your page views to skyrocket. You must use strategic content promotion planning to draw readers to your site.
Writing and publishing are only part of an effective content marketing strategy. To get the full benefits of a strong company blog, you must also promote the content you create.
Here are a few tips for how you can get your content the attention it deserves.
Identify and Analyze Your Target Audience
Before you can bring readers to your blog, you need to know who your ideal readers are. Start your content promotion planning by clearly defining your target audience.
This part of the strategic content promotion plan will help you identify the best places to promote your content. When you know where your target audience spends time, you can seed your content in those places so your ideal readers see it. To gather insight about your target audience, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the demographics and psychographics of my target audience?
- What are their wants, needs, and desires?
- Where does my target audience get their information?
- What websites does my target audience use?
- What social media networks does my target audience use?
Use the answers to these questions to identify a few of the best places to promote your content.
Choose Your Strategic Content Promotion Platforms & Strategies
The next step in your content promotion planning is deciding which platforms and tactics to use to connect with your target audience. Review the following options and decide which platforms will be most likely to connect with your ideal readers.
- Organic social media posts: posting free updates on social media networks
- Paid social media promotions: posting promoted, paid posts and ads on social networks
- Social media groups: sharing in public or private groups on social networks
- Paid search ads (PPC): paying for search engine marketing to show at the top of search results pages
- Display ads: paying for multi-media ads to show on other websites
- Guest posting: writing for other blogs and mentioning or linking back to your content
- Republishing: publishing content again on your other platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, etc.)
- Repurposing: reformatting the content and publishing it on another website (YouTube, Slideshare, etc.)
- Syndication: republishing content on another, third-party website
- Email marketing: promoting to your list of contacts through email
- Digital PR: reaching out to publications to see if they will share your content with their readers
- Influencer marketing: reaching out to popular social media influencers to see if they will share your content with their followers
- Content distribution networks: paying to share your content through third-party content promotion networks
Remember, you don’t need to use all of these digital advertising platforms and tactics. Your content promotion planning only needs the top three or four strategies that are most likely to attract your ideal audience.
Test and Revise Your Strategic Content Promotion Campaigns
There is no perfect formula for content promotion planning.
Some platforms will work better for some brands than others. Some content will work better on some platforms that others. And, the return on investment (ROI) will be higher through some tactics than others.
The key to content promotion and digital marketing is testing. So, your content promotion should include the following steps:
- Create 3-4 content promotion campaigns.
- Assign goals, metrics, and key performance indicators to each campaign.
- Review the results of each campaign to determine if it was a success of not.
- Decide which campaigns are worth running again.
- Identify ways to improve select campaigns for the next iteration.
- Continue to repeat and refine the process.
Strategic content promotion is an ongoing process. Audience habits, platforms, and trends change. And, with each campaign, you will learn new information about what works and what doesn’t. Your marketing plans need to be built to change based on what you discover.
Continue to track, review, and revise your campaigns to identify ways to improve and attract the most attention to your content.
Learn More About Strategic Content Promotion Planning
This is just a brief look at what goes into strategic content promotion planning. There are almost endless options when it comes to seeding your content across the internet to connect with your ideal audience.
To learn more about how to create a strategic content promotion plan that will attract your target audience, get our free ebook. This free guide will teach you how to use digital marketing tactics that save money and increase effectiveness across all your campaigns.
