Content marketing is without a doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies available today. But as great as content marketing is, the standard content marketing advice is almost always lacking one key and crucial ingredient, which is how you get people to actually see all of your amazing content.
Because content without promotion is not a whole lot better than having no content at all. And that’s why on today’s blog post, we’re talking all about the missing link in most content marketing plans, content promotion.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Well, when it comes to content marketing, content that doesn’t get read, heard, seen, or found, is deafeningly and soul crushingly quiet.
Because content takes work, and there’s no worse feeling than pouring your heart and soul into an incredible piece of value providing content only to have it reach no one, impact no one, and make you question this whole content marketing strategy.
Because when it comes to thriving with content marketing there are 3 key pieces to success.
- First, you need to be consistent, which means committing to a regular content creation and posting schedule.
- Next, you need to be strategic, which means ensuring that the content you’re creating is actually content your target market is looking for.
- And last, you need to be promoting. Which means ensuring that all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste, and your content ends up in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
And that’s what we’re talking about today. So here are 5 ways that you can be sure your content does just that, right people right place, right time.
Step #1
The first thing you need to do is get crystal clear about your target market.
Hopefully this has already been done as ideally your content should have been created with them in mind.
But whenever you do it, this step is vital in ensuring that your message doesn’t end up in the dreaded marketing wasteland and fall on deaf ears.
This happens all too common when businesses misidentify their markets and disrespect changing trends in consumer media consumption from traditional media like tv, radio, and newspapers, and towards more current and relevant media like social, email, and podcasts, just to name a few.
Step #2
The next step is to optimize your content which will give your content the highest probability of success.
While optimizing your content sounds like a complicated and fancy thing to do, it’s really as simple as making sure your content is easy to find, and easy to consume.
So in order to make it easy to find you want to be sure you’re using relevant and searched for keywords in your title, tags, and descriptions.
And in order to make it easy to consume you want to use short sentences, keep it casual and conversational, and if you’re creating video content then be sure to captions or subtitles for the parts of your audience who are going to be watching it on silent, or on their phones.
Step #3
Once your market has been sufficiently identified and located online, and your content has been sufficiently optimized, it’s time to double down where they spend their time online, and the odds are good that your content will benefit from at least one social media channel, and depending on your target market, maybe as many as 3 or 4.
But there’s no need to get overwhelmed or carried away, and your markets demographics should help make things pretty clear, pretty fast.
If you’re at a loss for where to start you really can’t go wrong with some combination of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram which will cover most businesses, markets, and industries demographics.
Step #4
Now that you’ve identified your market and shared your optimized content on the most relevant social media channel for your business and audience it’s time to throw a little gas on the fire and AMPlify it with paid traffic.
The beauty of paid traffic is that it takes whatever you have and makes it more of that. Let me explain. If you’ve got a piece of great content that’s getting good responses, positive feedback, and plenty of engagement, then adding a little paid promotion is only going to make it better and help it reach even more people.
But if you try to throw money at a lackluster piece of content, rather than great reach and responses, you’re likely get silence, diminished exposure, and to make matters worse, it’s going to cost you more as well, because paid traffic platforms like Facebook reward quality content with greater reach but punish the weak with higher costs.
So here’s the solution.
First, you obviously want to ensure you’re creating the highest quality content possible, but once it’s done and published, watch, measure, monitor, and analyze what content does well, and what needs a little more work.
Then boost the good content, but not the bad. When you do it this way you’ll get better results, faster, and for far less money.
Step #5
Alright, we’re moving through the list, so by now you’ve identified your target market, you’ve posted your optimized content to the best social media channel for your market, and you’ve put a few dollars behind it to help it gain some initial speed and momentum.
Well now comes the time to recycle, reuse, and repurpose.
You see when you create a piece of content regardless of what kind of content it is it opens the door for variations, modifications, and alternative forms of distribution.
This means if you have a blog post, you can read it aloud and turn it into a podcast.
Or you can break it down into talking points and turn it into a video. You could also turn it into a powerpoint or keynote presentation and post it on slideshare, or talk over the slides and turn it into a video presentation.
As you can see, there are a lot of different ways to repurpose and syndicate your content across other media options and channels giving you even more opportunities to connect with your customers and clients how they want to be connected with.
