There is something very special about the content you write for your business, blog, website or any purpose. It introduces you and your business to the right audiences with a backdrop of the message you want to communicate with them.
In other words, your content presents you to the people who have never been exposed to you or your brand. Your audience reads your words, gauges your sentiments and tries to understand your ideology.
That’s precisely the reason why your content can be considered as a reflection of your brand and what it stands for.
Therefore it is really important to create and manage content that can draw user’s attention and maintain for an impressionable period.
In this article we will try and look at some of crucial ways that can promote your content to the right audiences and help you gain some traction in your area of market influence.
1. Find the Influencers
As a content professional,try and reach the right influencers for promoting your content. Tell these influencers about the topic of your content and request them to contribute to the topic.
Sites such as Buzzstream and Buzzsumo are few of the available tools that can help you find the right influencers. Type in the topic and you’ll have a list of available influencers in the concerned category.
In case you own a blog post, include the quote (written by the influencer) in the post and incorporate the link of influencer’s website and social media accounts.
This provides you with 2 very specific benefits:
- You and your brand get exposed to a totally new audience
- Your content gets validated on being shared by an Influencer.
2. Use Visuals
According to a survey, Facebook posts with images generate more likes than the average posts. Same goes for tweets with images and posts with images on LinkedIn too. This is because images, videos and infographics are easily understood and do not require a lot of time to read through.
Even a simple featured image makes your content more visually appealing while providing a visual context. So, visuals are important for your content strategy. Try and use some images amidst your content.
This will help you get some more views and will hook your audience to your content.
3. Embrace the Headlines
You content’s headline is the most important aspect of your content presentation. And it is not only because the headline is the first thing your audience sees.
Your headline can help you throw in some wit, some taste and some color to your content. It is a kind of a first impression your brand or blog or business has on the customers.
Smart marketers usually dabble with multiple titles so that they can test the efficacy of the head tag. See what words ring with you customers. Do they lean towards a wittier copy or do they want straight up no nonsense informational articles.
Also, for different social networks, different sort of headlines might work. As twitter only provides few words limit for a tweet. On Facebook, you can post a longer content. You might want to assess the audience and the limits on each platform to see what works best for you.
4. Customize Everything
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” . Seeing the current trend in content marketing, many brands are customizing their content as per specific markets. The overwhelming trait of generalized content has been thrown out of the window to make way for different sects of content based marketing.
For this each platform needs to be tailored to the type of users on it. And that means curating the content, the images, the presentation and even the basic element of information. The context remains the same, but the presentation is wildly different.
This is important because each platform caters to different requirements of your users. Pitching the same content to different audiences will portray you as insincere in your marketing effort. And you don’t want that.
5. Pay Way
By basic advertising many brands ensure the promotion of their content to a wide spread market. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram provide a particularly curated manner of advertisement to the right audiences on the basis of their clicks, likes and shares.
6. Newsletter
All content marketers maintain an email list, to notify the subscribers about any new articles or an offer.
Newsletter subscription is one of the basic and most used ways to promote your content online. Create a thread of articles related to each other. Form a successive thread where the articles in a package can help solve a problem that your user faces (or might face). These threads will help you post some non performing content among the high performing ones.
Also a newsletter presents a collection of articles to your audience. You can even create little nuggets of information that present the crux of the articles. That’ll entice your users into reading the entire article.
Tips: Companies often rely on automated content, but it is proved that automated ones reduce the customer engagement. So, writing a personalized email is surely time-consuming, but it increases the likeability of customer engagement to the core.
7. Use Google+
Google+ like other social media networks provides a cohesive network of influencers and professionals. Apart from that, Google+ is integrated into Google search and that helps your content to be easily read and shared. Also, there is a disproportionate number of content enthusiasts and marketing professionals active on Google+.
So that really provides an incentive for you to market your content on the platform. These kinds of promotional activity will increase the reach of your content to a wider audience base.
For including other people in the comment, type a plus (+) and their name. As soon as you start typing after the plus sign a dropdown box will appear with all the names of your connections.
8. Make use of Communities
Get into a community. That is essential for the promotion of your content to select audiences. Think about it, in a community, your content will be read and shared by people who have similar interests and similar personas (that’s the reason why they’re in a community).
These kinds of communities also provide with an unexplored pool of customers who will probably associate with your brand. One more benefit of sharing content on these communities is that their members are usually really active. These people are essentially the ones you want to target. Once your idea/product resonates with them, they can act as your brand advocates to further organic advertising.
9. It’s good to Ask
As a marketing professional, you must try something more than just to drop the links. You should always strive in to make sure that your targeted audience is in conversation with you on a constant basis.
Being a blogger or a business owner, always try to engage more and more customers with your content by requesting feedbacks and asking questions.
You can glean more information about your customer’s requirements by asking them directly. Also, it’ll make your customer feel more privileged and special. Assess your customer’s requirements by asking them in a clear and collected manner.
Since, we all know that social media is a platform meant for people and not for the business, so, every effort from your side should be to engage more and more people.
10. Personalize Everything
Personalize your emails, comments, posts and any other content related activity. For this you’d need to ascertain your customer’s personas. Once you understand their persona, you’ll be able to appeal to their inner most instincts and needs.
Once you do that, it’ll be fairly easy to coax a purchase from them. But you need to be sincere and methodical in this approach. Do not come off as creepy or inaccurate. Don’t make your ‘guessing’ evident to your customers.
We’ve learnt that Content is a pivotal part of any brand’s marketing strategy. Your content is your words, your sentiments and your ideas. That’ll be visible to your customers after which they’d probably understand your product better. It is up to them to relate your brand with their requirements. Before they do that, ensure that your content is top-notch, relevant and personal to your customers.