The attain success in the world of content marketing and your promotion game needs to be on point. The fundamental principle that needs to be followed is to write many middle-to-high-quality blogs and use many targeted keywords to attract the audience. Writing blogs at a breakneck speed enables one to put the competitors under the table. It’s like you race down the ski hill for unbeatable domination. That is what is needed.
All said and done, writing at a constant pace can turn out to be very noisy and occasionally ineffective. Even if there is complete control over the originality and quality of your content, the quantity of blogs may sink the site’s visibility. You must be wondering why? You tend to reach a point of diminishing returns. A lot of duplicate content comes into the picture. Numerous blogs may compete with the exact keywords. That piece of writing no longer remains original, and the search platforms get confused too!
Content marketers typically have a habit of intelligent working. They wish to defeat competition through intelligent marketing techniques. Comparing work produced and promoted is of prime importance to them and tends to come down to an ideal 20:80 ratio. It is more like a lot of time goes into thinking about creative and effective ways to promote the blog post that may have taken just about three hours to write.
This blog aims to provide some effective ways to spend time on content promotion. The goal needs to be to optimize the time spent on promoting the blog posts.
As per research, companies publishing more than 16 blogs per month tend to get nearly 3.5 times more traffic for their website than the ones who publish less than 4 posts per month.
The ratio totally depends on the aging of the blog. While starting a new blog, the priority remains to establish quality content. With the content budget being low initially, the ratio of time spent on marketing to content creation appears to be 20:80. You will spend more time to build up quality content.
If the blog is old enough and has already left a mark in the digital space, you might wish to adopt a few marketing strategies that will enhance the blog’s visibility. Getting more traffic for your content is directly proportional to success. Let’s get started!
Need of Content Promotion Strategies
Before getting onto the marketing strategies, let us understand their importance. Content marketing is vital for any content creator because it helps you reach out to the audience’s questions, build mutual trust, improve conversions, develop relationships, and generate leads. In today’s times, customers are the king and expect consistent and high-quality content from you. The inherent advantage of content marketing is that:
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More content for the website
It is a very simple observation. The more time spent on content marketing, the more content you have for your site. The customers will have all the more reason to come back to the site and stick around. They will get an opportunity to get well-versed with your brand, generate mutual trust, and lead to better sales conversions. With great content posted on the website, the traffic will stay longer and browse through relevant stuff.
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Improved visibility on search engines
Every blog post you add to the website is like another page that will be indexed in the search engines. More quality pages indexed in search engines will always provide better engagement activities. Though it may not necessarily mean more traffic, but will surely rank you up for better search queries. It is vital to strategize the use of target keywords. Frequently searched topics and keywords will make your website appear on the top of search results.
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Improved domain authority
The first and foremost important thing is to write a lot of high-quality content. It will help you get the desired expertise, relevance, authority, and trust for the site. Accompanying the quality content with a well-crafted marketing strategy will help the content earn the desired reach, and the website gains domain authority. An enhanced domain authority will lead to higher search rankings, and your quality content will reach a wide audience group.
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More traffic for the site
The content marketing strategy is a must to create hype for your quality content. A big chunk of your content strategy contributes to generating more referral traffic for the website. Posting great content coupled with consistent marketing is a must to drive the desired traffic.
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Drive the followers
The content on various social media platforms needs to be syndicated to increase exposure. By adopting a good content marketing strategy, you will get a huge audience base that browses through your website, read the blogs, share this relevant content with followers and friends and help to increase your follower base. With time you earn a large follower base for your brand and get more traffic for the website.
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Increased sales conversion
The key focus of a content creator is to engage, help, inform, and add value for their readers. Once you have established yourself as a content creator, the next step is to pitch your products and services to potential clients. Pitching the products tactfully can help you gain a lot of conversions. The content must not be portrayed like an advertisement. A tactful marketing plan is the need of the hour.
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Enhanced brand reputation
The blogs and content that you post on the website create an impression in people’s minds as they read the posts. If the blogs are helpful, enlightening, or informative, the audience creates a positive impression of the brand. Furthermore, if you market the content well through external sources, the posts often show up on their social media feed and create a better picture of your brand.
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Enhanced client relationships
A great content marketing strategy helps you garner a perfect brand reputation that will help to enhance your brand’s recognition in the eyes of the audience. Great content coupled with a perfect marketing plan will improve the loyalty and client relationship. Writing and sharing regular content helps you develop a personal relationship with the clients. They see your website as a reliable source of information and turn their loyalties towards your brand.
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Universal value of marketing
There’s no such industry where content marketing is not relevant. Every business needs to have content marketing as an effective marketing strategy. Traditional industries like trading and manufacturing also need content marketing in today’s time. They can provide valuable insights on the latest developments and make their brand relatable and reachable to consumers.
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Lower the marketing expenses and enhance the brand value
Content marketing involves less money and more time. It’s very cost-effective and offers compounding returns. The initial months of incorporating a content marketing strategy may not provide any constructive results, but you will see the difference in the coming months. The growth in the brand value is proof that content marketing is worth the efforts.
Thus, the key advantages that your company can reap using strategic content marketing are:
- Save on costs and augment the sales.
- Gives the brand enhanced visibility on search portals.
- Improves the brand reputation and enhances the customer relationship.
- Builds a long-lasting and trustworthy relationship with all the customers.
Different Categories of Content Marketing
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Blog content marketing
Writing a blog provides excellent flexibility when discussing any creative topics. Another advantage of writing a blog is that you can promote the brand’s internal and external content and put forward the relevant product information in the blog. As a brand, you may touch upon relevant topics and allow the audience to share this relatable content. The option to share blogs on various social media platforms can help you get enhanced visibility for your online content.
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Social media content marketing
Social media is seen as an essential part of our day-to-day lives. It has revolutionized the communication between businesses and prospect buyers. The rapid growth of social media provides a new space to display and showcase brands. Businesses nowadays promote their products and services online because social media significantly influences purchasing decisions. As per studies, customers are 71% more likely to buy a product based on their social media influences. Social media helps to reach out to countless people all over the world. Having a well-drafted social media content marketing strategy looks after all the platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn and helps create and curate content for these individual platforms.
Social media has become an ideal place for brands to gain insights into customers’ buying behavior. Businesses can’t miss out on the social media space in the increasingly competitive environment. Till a few years back, the sole purpose of social media sites was to generate traffic, but now they are evolving as a significant influence factor. It has opened the doors to interact with a new audience.
Since everything happens online, it is a quicker and easier way to build a database of prospects. With increased visibility, your brand finds opportunities for conversion and builds trust amongst the customers. This tool has allowed reaching the right message to the right prospect at the right time. It has connected people globally. It helps to recognize and identify the consumer’s needs and engage with a wide group of people in a way that they relate to.
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Video content marketing
Visual means of posting content are much more effective than written ones. Videos can engage in a significant way and can easily reach out to people across the globe. According to research, 85% of businesses opt for videos as a marketing option, and 66% of the audience prefers watching the content through videos rather than reading a review. The videos tend to be effective as they create a visual appeal and generate a great user experience. The video can efficiently communicate the product features faster and have a greater retention rate.
Amongst other benefits lie an improved ROI and better engagement with the audience. As a brand, video content marketing is a must as you try and publish your videos through the website landing pages, social media platforms, or third-party platforms.
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Podcast content marketing
The trend of podcasts has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. The expanse of social media is increasing at a fast pace. Edison Research suggests that podcast listeners have grown by almost 37.5% over the past three years. Podcasts have gained a vast audience base and have grown to become an excellent medium for brands to communicate their views. Having your own podcast provides an innovative edge over the competition and improves client engagement. Just pick a topic that is relevant to the audience and adds value to their lives. You may even invite guests to the podcast.
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Infographic content marketing
The use of Infographics has made it a cakewalk for the customers to interpret the complex business aspects like comparative analysis or statistics. Nearly 65% of B2B marketers have used Infographics in the past few years. The Infographics can be complemented with short textual content to communicate with your target audience effectively. Infographic content marketing can be helpful if your brand deals with complex topics or educational content.
Best Content Promotion Strategies
A lot goes behind the content promotion. Significant points that need to be kept in mind are:
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Go in for Videos to do Social Media Promotion
As discussed earlier, videos used for posting content are much more effective than written notes. Videos can engage the audience better and can easily reach out to people across the globe. According to research, 85% of businesses opt for videos as a marketing option, and almost 80% of the traffic on the internet watches videos. The videos tend to be effective as they create a visual appeal and generate a great user experience.
In addition, the video helps in effective communication of the product features faster and has a better retention rate. Amongst numerous other benefits, it also leads to an improved ROI and better engagement. As a brand, video content marketing is a must if you publish your videos through the website landing pages, social media platforms, or third-party platforms. As per HubSpot, nearly 50% of the brands add Facebook and YouTube channels for video content.
Today, companies like Wistia help embed all the descriptions in the form of metadata to get a streamlined experience and access tools like Lumen5 for free. Thus, it makes the entire process of creating compelling videos more effortless than ever before.
Based on the type of content, you must decide on the visual design and strategize the marketing plan with your marketing team.
Videos that are informative and long can generate valuable content and drive a lot of traffic for your website or YouTube channel. It will enhance your brand value too. You may also opt for small, fun videos to attract blog traffic and generate on-page conversions.
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Don’t go in for the same Headlines on Social media
The people get attracted to your blogs or posts if they see a new thing every time they scroll by. A theme in all your posts can be an excellent short-term approach but may become a bit monotonous in the long run. Writing numerous blogs or sending out a few tweets using the same headline is terrible, but it might not sound sustainable in the long run.
Actually, you may mix up a few headlines in moderation. The problem arises when you run low on time and rely on bulk schedulers. You must have a well-defined strategy for your content marketing that elaborately focuses on the headings and keywords used in the content.
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Go in for Influencer Marketing
In simple terms, an influencer has the power to affect people’s decisions to purchase certain products by creating a virtual relationship with their audience. The ability to influence decisions depends on their popularity, reputation, knowledge, and expertise in the subject. They make regular posts about their preferred topics and generate many followers who closely follow them and try and replicate their views.
Partnering with an influencer opens the business to explore new avenues and reach the target audience. An influencer creates content in posts, videos, stories, and reels that match their audience’s taste.
To be successful, they need to pick a niche segment, get a business account, write captivating captions for the content, wisely choose the hashtags, and regularly interact with followers. Influences with a higher number of followers drive more increased traffic and deliver better results for big brands. When companies collaborate with the influences, they rely on their credibility to market the products. The influencers help generate trust amongst the audience and let the brand skip hours of exposure, targeting, and nurturing.
As Per DemandGen, nearly 87% of B2B consumers give more weightage to the influencer content. Consumers’ buying behavior makes the companies understand how individuals select the products and services. A lot of factors influence buying decisions. These decisions are impacted by buying psychology, their motivation behind the purchase, the impact of marketing done by the brand owners, after-sales services, and many others.
Certain personal factors like individual interest also affect the purchasing decision. Psychological factors based on individual perceptions and social influences like peer group choices, social media influence, etc., are major governing factors of buying behavior.
Whenever a person intends to buy any product or service, the first step is realizing the need. The need may be as small as buying a shirt or a big one like buying a car. For businesses, they base their marketing strategies on helping the buyers realize this need. After need recognition, the buyers look for information about the product.
This, in particular, is available in the form of reviews on social media and company websites. Search engines, blogs, and advertisements come in handy and help establish the brand’s credibility. After proper comparison, the purchase decision is made. Businesses that provide a sense of trust and security win in this phase. The purchase process needs to be convenient.
Most importantly, excellent after-sales service and experience get positive feedback and develop a long-term relationship with the client. People tend to get affected by the opinions of influencers. The reviews posted by them play a significant role in buying decisions. The followers tend to follow what the influences suggest. The views about a product or brand reach a wider audience as these influences provide genuine feedback about them.
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Set a Budget to promote content
Many content promotion options are available and worth exploring as you begin the journey. You may try some unpaid options before starting to pay for blog traffic. You need to set a budget for paid promotion, out of which a significant chunk needs to be directed towards social media as it is the fastest way to reach a qualified audience. You must strategize the kind of blogs you wish to post before going in for paid promotions.
It will help create the desired brand loyalty as the readers have tailored content for their consumption. The audience needs to be segregated as per their ages, interests, locations, behaviors, and genders. Setting aside a considerable budget may be difficult if a new blog. In that case, you may go in for unpaid promotions to start with.
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Importance of Comments
It is the comments section that displays the authenticity of a blog. Typically the comments section may be prone to spam links or generic comments. Therefore, you need to go for paid promotions that help genuine and meaningful comments. A valuable and relevant resource can work wonders.
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Content must be easily shareable on Social Media
The basic need of a good blog is great content. An effective content promotion strategy needs to have good content as its base. Once the content is of excellent quality, you need to share it across several portals.
The content needs to have share buttons inbuilt while posting. For example, you may incorporate a visible bar with share links that makes it easy for the reader to share the content.
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Optimizing of visuals for Sharing
Visuals are worth a thousand words. The sayings stay true even in today’s digital times. While promoting content with the help of social media, one must make sure that the size of the images is proper. You must be aware of the image cropping adopted by different sites. For example, Instagram displays a 640*640 pixel image, whereas Twitter will display a 440*220 rectangular image.
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Videos are always a better take
For content promotion on social media, videos are always a yes! Vertical videos are considered ideal for mobile phone viewing. It is the best for the brand’s storytelling. Go for short clips to highlight the posted content. For example, a quick short video about the article posted by an influencer is a great way to promote the content and persuade people to read the main article.
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Use Keywords Effectively
Before people start liking you, they will have to find you on social media pages. Therefore, your blog must be consistent on social media networks to make it simpler to find and like you. It is easy to attract consumers to blogs organically with the help of search engines. Target keywords will get you visitors, for the posted content and get you success. Also, focus on the tone and readability to ensure search-engine optimization.
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keep track of the Competitor’s Brand Mentions
Your content promotion strategy cannot be effective till you analyze the competitor’s brand mentions. So, first, you need to identify the backlinks established by the competitors. Then, you need to understand the coverage and the estimated reach of the content using paid tools.
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Use Email as a promotion tool
Social media has become of prime importance for promoting content. But the old-fashioned promotion tool is still not obsolete. You must include email promotion in the content promotion strategy. Individuals are still interested in receiving details through emails. Emails have a reasonable click rate as compared to other digital marketing options. You may also go for the newsletter swaps to exchange content features. Include the other content’s link in your newsletter, and they will include yours.
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Use all the available platforms
An effective content promotion strategy needs to be wholesome. If you have new content posted, then you must go all out and use all the available platforms at your disposal to share the post repeatedly. Don’t just use your account. You may also post the content on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn groups. The promotion strategy must have a well-chalked out scheduling and publishing strategy to perfect the reach.
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Take the help of the Influencers for Content Creation and Promotion
A compelling community that has evolved in the social media space is that of the Influencers who create an everlasting impact and help increase the content’s reach. For instance, you work in the gym space, specifically Pilates. You identify a celebrity influencer who follows the Pilates routine daily. The informative and actionable content posted by her on her handle or incorporating her quotes in your blog post can be of enormous help.
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Incorporate expert Quotes to improve sharing of content
Everyone cannot be an influencer but can still help in content promotion. You can include quotes from an expert in your blog post and email them the content going live. They can share your content through their social media platforms. They can re-tweet the link of the post mentioning them.
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Make it a point to include links to the previous blogs
Remember to incorporate links to previous blogs written by you. If you are creating similar content, it can be enriched by the previous blog links. Don’t let the previous blogs disappear in the past. You must keep these linkable materials ready. Add valuable and relevant links to enrich your present blog. It is a great idea to lure the target audience as they click another piece of content simultaneously. It will increase engagement, drive traffic, and generate a bond of trust.
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Conversation is a must
Content can never be one-sided. An excellent content promotion strategy needs to have people sharing the creation and engaging with the content actively. Invite the audience to participate in surveys and get them involved with the brand. Have a question/answer session and invite feedback.
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Use of Communities
A lot of online communities present in the digital space help to reach out to the target audience that may not be possible otherwise. You can share the content here and build backlinks. The community you wish to engage with depends on the type of industry you wish to target. Various niche sites help you with valuable content engagement so that you can reach people interested in this sector. However, beware of content spammers. Genuine engagement will help you gain a respected presence.
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Get your Network right
It is not that just the outside world of content communities, influencers, and social media can help you promote the content. Many in-house connections within your organization can be of great help too. The content must be at the disposal of every employee of the organization to actively share it. The advantage is that staff within the organization will also have followings relevant to your field as this is where they work.
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Go in for Paid Ads
You must include low-cost efforts for the promotion of the content. Start with sharing the posts on social media to make the content far. Then, go in for paid ads and invest some money on pay-per-click ads run by Google and other social media platforms. It is a great way to promote ebooks, new content, or videos. Always check for insights and projected growth before investing the money.
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Choose the correct time for Content Promotion
Sending an email at midnight when the target segment sleeps will definitely not get you much traction. Choosing the right time to promote the content makes a huge mark in content promotion. Say you need to promote a new e-book. You have an Instagram following that will help you in your content promotion. To start with, you will schedule some posts at high-traffic times.
Next, you may re-share the details at a low-traffic time. Try sharing at a time when your audience is the most active. Starting a live video can be another excellent feature to promote content. You can stream a live video to attract your audience. You may have a live question-answer session and let them seek expert guidance.
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The Content Promotion Strategy needs to be unique
The timing to post needs to be planned in advance. First, you need to engage with good content promotion tools. Then, you need to look for the best strategies to reach a specific audience. Getting a content promotion strategy right is critical. Finally, take into account the target demographics. For example, if you wish to target teenagers, platforms like Instagram Reels or TikTok are the best.
If the target audience is older adults, emails and Facebook are good distribution channels. But, again, a well-planned strategy will help properly distribute and promote your content.
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Make timely changes in the Content Promotion plan
Last but not least, you must keep in mind that the content promotion strategy needs to be flexible. The creation and promotion of content in today’s age need to be flexible. If you observe that specific podcasts or videos perform better than others, you must make more of such content. If you observe that you get a better engagement on Twitter for your blogs, then you must channelize more energy towards this medium of promotion. To reach the best distribution process, you need to work on basics and analyze the performance data.
Conclusion
Content is the best way to establish yourself, your brand, or your organization. It is a valuable source of entertainment and information. It helps you connect and engage with the audience and build trust and loyalty. However, creating quality content is just a start point. You need to couple it up with excellent content marketing strategies and be flexible in what you do. Setting the motive right and using the tips mentioned above can help you garner the desired results.
