In today’s world content is everywhere, and we consume more of it every day. It is key to engage with your audience, driving website traffic, and helping buyers with purchase decisions. That is why, with you in mind, we have created a content promotion checklist to make sure you are maximising your contents potential.
When it comes to creating content, it is always important to remember that you should focus on quality over quantity. Bloggers who write articles of 2,000+ words are far more likely to have strong results.
Before we get started let’s look at the two types of content promotion available.
ORGANIC CONTENT PROMOTION
This increases your content’s visibility and marketing effectiveness without paying money, examples of this include: Search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, word of mouth, promotion events or webinars, and influencer networks. Success with this method relies on consistent development and publishing of content.
PAID CONTENT PROMOTION
This allows you to promote content to a targeted audience group. Benefits of paid promotion include increasing content reach, attracting new audience members, and making more informed marketing decisions. To get started with paid promotion start by testing a small budget for your best performing content. The main options for paid promotion are search engines, industry specialist sites and social media platforms, each option will track your best performing pieces.
Our Content Promotion Checklist
We have created a 8 point checklist to help you ensure you are maximising your content promotion efforts.
1) Get Yourself Organised
Create a content promotion plan that tracks the type of communications you intend to use, schedule publishing dates and times, what platforms you will use and what target audience you will reach.
2) Determine who you are talking to
Use segmentation to divide your broad audience into smaller groups based on shared criteria. This results in a specific audience that can be more easily targeted by being sent custom messages. Sending the right message to the right people will dramatically increase the success of your content.
3) Create a customised message for each channel
Set the tone and general feeling of your message. You should aim to clearly communicate the value of your content, to do this try to include at least three key benefits to include in any promotional material that you create. Your message should also match the distribution channel itself. Social media may allow you to be more creative by using GIFS, photos, memes or videos whereas direct promotion through an email will follow a more straightforward format and be personalised to the individual.
4) Make sure you are trying new things and learning from them
Experiment with different content delivery variables. Possible factors to experiment with are the distribution platform, format; time of publishing and using paid promotion or an organic method.
5) Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward
Optimise your content to achieve maximum progress towards your goals.
6) Make sure to focus on one of three main areas to achieve the best outcome
The three areas to focus on are:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Conversion
Reach is the size of your potential audience. To increase your reach, you need to share your content as much as possible and encourage others to engage with and share your content. You could do this by sharing through your email contacts or social networks or by connecting with industry influencers. The key is to always be sharing with new people.
Engagement measures the number of interactions with your content, such as likes, comments or shares. To improve engagement, you need to think about your audience is going to interact with your content. Will they be interacting via a desktop or using mobile? What do you want them to do after viewing your content? Creating accessible content with clear action words for each platform used makes it easier and more enjoyable for your audience to engage.
Conversation rate will be measured differently depending on what you consider a conversation; these could be views, subscriptions, downloads, trials or purchases. To optimise your conversions, focus on capturing new leads with strong use of links and call to actions.
7) Remain patient!
Any new promotional activities you start or changes you make will take time to have an effect.
8) Analyse your results
Take a look at all your promotion channels, do any fall short or exceed your targets? Explore the performance of each channel and the best performing approaches to communicating your message. Based on your new insights, take note of your successes and the things that didn’t work well, incorporate your results into planning and enhancing feature campaign performance.
Remember that every piece of content is a personal invitation for each of your audience members to engage with you. The more effectively you promote your content, the louder and clearer your message.
For further insights and guidance, we invite you to explore our blog at 07hm.co.uk/blog. Here, you’ll find a wealth of information tailored to the needs and challenges of SMEs navigating the digital landscape. Additionally, if you have specific questions or need personalised advice, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email at info@07hm.co.uk or telephone on 01702 410663.
