If you’re a content marketer, I know the countless hours you spend on planning, creating and designing your content. It takes time and effort. However, when it comes to promotion, it doesn’t always succeed. PointVisible states that only 22% of marketers feel that their content marketing efforts are successful. So, if content promotion is where most companies fail – what can be done?
The biggest challenge is combining organic results with paid ads on search engines, other websites, and social media. Below we’re sharing ideas on how you can combine organic and paid tactics as a way to find promotion success.
First things first, you need to grow and leverage your audience – it’s the best way to reach an effective organic promotion. Keep in mind that you need to have already done your research on personas and pain points. Once you have, you can create your content based on the research that properly supports your goals. Here are ways to do just that.
If your brand has been around for a while, you might already have your stash of influencers. But if you haven’t, it might be time to do a little research. It really doesn’t hurt to find some influencers that best represents your brand. But if you can’t get there based on your current customer profiles you can use a tool like BuzzSumo or Followerwonk (free trial versions available). These can definitely help you find users who are perfect for content promotion.
The best way to go about this is to ask potential influencers and ask them to share things they find useful. Now keep in mind that some companies pay for influencers, but there are pros and cons. If that doesn’t sit well with you, there are other forms of compensation. Either way, you can expect good results. In fact, research shows that for every $1 a marketer invests in influencer marketing, they get $6.50 back.
When it comes down to it, your blog really is the best shot at reach organic success. When you spend time on high-quality content – Google will notice. Besides, you’ll have incredible content to post on your social media too! You can take a look at on How To Start A Blog if you need some tips. The main takeaway, don’t forget to engage with your influencers on your blog too.
Your content and PR team should go together like milk and cookies. This is especially true if you want to ensure the success of your content promotion. Here’s how you can grow your PR success organically:
One of the most important things is to figure out which social media platform is best for your brand. But it needs to be something that you make sure to focus on. If you’re on too many platforms, you could lose sight of your goals. Which means you might over-saturate your audience. You might even want to look into experimenting with new(er) platforms – like Instagram and Pinterest. These two platforms can be incredibly valuable when it comes to organic promotion.
Instagram can generate up to 58 and 120 times more brand engagement than Facebook and Twitter. But you don’t want to forget non-traditional social networks, like industry forums and publication sites like Medium.
Granted the tactics above are a great way to organically reach your followers, but once you start dabbling in paid promotions you shouldn’t continue to use them. It’s always best to combine both tactics in order to succeed. It’s a good idea to add in paid campaigns that support the success you’ve seen with an organic approach. If a piece of content doesn’t work well organically, paid advertising won’t see anything exciting. Let’s take a look at organic vs. paid.
There are a lot of marketers that use an organic-only approach to promote their content. But most end up figuring out that they can only get specific results through paid promotion. So if you rely solely on organic posts on Facebook, you just might take advantage of their “pay to play.”
In fact, the average social media user sees more than a thousand types of content every time they log in. So you really can’t expect your brand to rise above the majority of organic posts. Thankfully Moz found that $1 a day in Facebook awareness ads increases your audience by 4,000 people or more. Therefore if your goal is to grow your audience, create loyal social media followers or increase actions from a highly targeted audience – your best bet is to combine both paid and organic tactics. It’s really the best way to see results.
Like any paid channel, paid promotions via social media deliver the marketing results you need. So if you’re using the right platform for your audience you can definitely get the success you want. But you need to find the platform that is perfect for your business. Once you do, you’ll easily increase conversions for content marketing success.
Ah, content syndication. This is a time-tested promotion tactic that is highly effective. The theory behind it is, instead of hoping users find the content on your website you should push that content out to the websites they visit most. If you’ve done your PERSONA RESEARCH, you at least have some idea of where your target customers spend their time online.
Content syndication lets you publish a piece of content on a different website for others to share, access and post comments on. Whenever you do post on another website make sure that you include a link back to the original site it was posted on. As far as pricing goes, there are options for every budget – so it doesn’t matter if your company is small or large.
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, really is the key to success. Retargeting (as Google Adwords refers to it) are ads that are shown based on a user’s activity on your website. After the user visits your site, a cookie is set in place and you are now able to target them on other sites with relevant ads. Retargeting is done through third-party networks like the Google display network and AdBrite. There are perfect when it comes to reaching users on millions of sites. Below are seven types of effective retargeting:
If building your brand is important to you, retargeting is one of the best ways to meet that goal. Cookies really are an effective way to make sure that everyone who reads your content doesn’t forget about your brand. With the Google Display Network, you can reach 84% of your visitors 10-18 days out of the month, across five different sites. That’s pretty huge whenever you need to build your brand.
Yes – there are advantages and disadvantages to using one or the other. So let’s take a look at that.
There really is a lot to consider when it comes to balancing your content promotion efforts. That’s why it’s best to weigh your options and find what works best for your brand. Paid tactics can really widen your reach and if you find the right mix of paid and unpaid – you’ll reach even more. As with most things, it all comes down to striking the perfect balance. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.
