100 simple, powerful ideas to promote your SAAS startup's content marketing in 2019?? ??

You've been told that content marketing is the key to inbound lead generation for your SAAS startup. The game-changer. The key to doubling your startup's MRR while building unimaginable awareness and authority.

So you get busy producing: white papers, long-form blog posts, tools, infographics, podcasts, listicals, quizzes, surveys, events, and webinars. Powerful (and often expensive) content precisely crafted for your buyer personas, and for every stage of their journey, from generating early awareness through to closing a sale and pocketing the ￡￡￡￡.

Then you enthusiastically hit 'publish' on your masterpiece and... nothing.

Ouch ??

The golden rule of content distribution

With content marketing, you need to spend at least as much time promoting and distributing your content as you spent creating it.

This is not a case of 'create it and they will come'. Unless you have a sizeable established audience across multiple platforms, you're going to have to be a little bit more inventive to turn your content marketing into new customers.

If this struggle feels all too familiar, read on for simple, actionable and effective tips you can use to distribute your content.

Who the hell are you?

Hey, I'm Olly. Over the last five years I've helped London's SAAS startups generate 1000s of leads through maximising the reach and effectiveness of their existing content, and creating and executing wide-ranging, objective-driven content marketing strategies.

Every audience and piece of content is different, but below I've detailed some of my key takeaways from 100s of content and distribution tests with clients like SeatPlan, Clayton, CharlieHR and Ferly.

Each idea listed is a simple experiment, either organic or paid, to build relevant audiences and generate leads through your content efforts.

How distribution fits into your content marketing strategy

Before we dive in, let's step back a bit. It's important that you remember that content distribution should be an inherent part of your broader content marketing strategy. So, before we get to the tips, here's five very important things to remember when first implementing a content marketing cycle into your business.

First, set objectives. How many leads do you want? How much are you willing to pay for them? Content marketing should be a measurable marketing activity. Don't expect instant results, but a cycle of content marketing should ultimately deliver marketing qualified leads into your business's sales funnel. Be realistic, but measure.

Second, know your audience, deeply. Your buyer personas should be created, regularly refined and deeply detailed. You should be intimately familiar with these people: the challenges they are currently facing, how they like to be talked to, and the communities and platforms they frequent. With everything you publish ask "what's in it for them?".

Third, look back. You might not know it, but you've probably run some content experiments already. These could include your startup's previous social posts, newsletters, CRM emails, social status updates, meetup conversations, blog posts, replies to outbound sales emails, and customer support tickets. Review their performance, identify those with strong engagement, and expand and iterate on those messages, angles or insights in new content.

Fourth, start! Publish something. Anything. Just start.

Fifth, measure. Review how each piece of content performs for your audience. Adopt a mentality of publish, review, refine. Double down on the content headlines, formats and themes, and distribution methods that work for you, and iterate or kill those that don't.

Deep breath... let's go

Write about the right things, in the right way

1. Identify content that is performing well for your buyer persona and offer a new take on the same subject.
2. That includes reviewing any content you've previously published first.
3. Create content to build awareness of your brand, to educate your buyer persona and help them with decision making, and to close the sale.
4. Explore different formats: long and short-form blogs, public Notion boards, ebooks and white papers, infographics, podcasts, tools surveys, link-round ups, testimonials, and decks.
5. Think! How can I share more value in the most unique, effective or powerful way?
6. Engage influencers and communities early on, quote them in your content. Ask them to share later.
7. When publishing a survey, include a newsletter opt-in.

Leverage your existing platforms

1. Schedule posts promoting the content across your social channels: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.
2. Add the link to your social profile bios.
3. Pin these posts to the top of your social profiles.
4. Re-work and re-post the best-performing promotional posts regularly.
5. Try new angles promoting the same content. Try excerpts, stats, or testimonials.
6. Use video assets [screen records or animations] to increase click through rates from socials.
7. Promote the content in your newsletter.
8. Then add it to your next three newsletters too.
9. Send it to people who previously attended your webinar or events.
10. Promote the content to your Intercom users.
11. Add it to your website footer or menu.
12. Add a popup overlay or slide-in with a CTA to download or view it, across your website.
13. Add text links from your best performing content directly to the new content.
14. Pin the content to your top of your blog.
15. Add a CTA across your blog into the content.

Leverage your team and network

1. Keep going. Reach out to your team on Slack and encourage them to post it on their own social channels, and engage with the company posts - share, like or comment.
2. Have sales and marketing reach out to your relevant prospects, leads and customers with a link to the content.
3. Have your whole team add a link to the content in their email signature.

Share in relevant communities

1. Don't stop now. Create a Notion CRM detailing all of the communities your buyer persona may visit.
2. Consider Subreddits, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Slack channels, Hacker News and Quora.
3. And specific communities that are relevant to your persona. Try Indie Hackers, Product Hunt or google '#niche communities' to get started.
4. Share your content with those groups - but don't be a dick.
5. Reply to 10 relevant posts with advice and link to your content.
6. Leave a comment on 5 relevant Medium posts and gracefully link to your content.
7. Reach out to professional or members' organisations who may share the content.

Engage influencers

1. Create a Notion CRM detailing all of the influencers your buyer persona may follow.
2. This might me YouTubers, Podcasters, Bloggers, LinkedIn or Instagram influencers.
3. Introduce yourself to them and ask them politely to share the link with their audience.
4. Make it easy for them - link them directly to a post they can easily share or re-post.
5. Even better, get them to contribute to the content FIRST! Their case study, idea or opinion being included increases the chances they will share it with their network when published.
6. Retweet and share influencer social posts that mention your content.
7. Identify new influencers to follow and reach out to using BuzzSumo.
8. Why not send influencers and clients a physical copy of your white paper, or a hand-written invite to your webinar? They might share it on their social channels too.

Repurpose

1. Take key insights, facts or case studies out.
2. Repurpose them as social posts and new content forms.
3. Example: blog post featuring 5 highlights from your webinar, newsletter blast detailing results of a survey, recreate a long-form site blog as an infographic, record a video deep-dive of your how-to guide.
4. Refine content over time - increase clarity, add new case studies, remove out-dated info, highlight best comments. Iterate and re-share.

Show them the money

1. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google and Quora that is...
2. If your content is performing well, boost it with paid promotion.
3. Start small. Try a three-day campaign spending ￡15 on each platform.
4. Compare CPC, time-on-site and email sign-up conversion from paid acquisition.
5. Then test different creatives on the best-performing platforms.
6. Increase spend on the best performing platforms and creatives.
7. If you're struggling to get influencer support for free, consider paying for activity.
8. Measure the performance and compare to other paid sources of marketing.

SEO

1. A long-term benefit of content marketing.
2. Implement on page and off-site best practice.
3. Or build for search, use tools to identify high velocity, low competition keywords, and create around
4. Research people linking to competitors and ask them to link to your content.
5. Identify articles already performing well in search, and continue to optimise them.

Get users to share

1. Add a visual and text call-to-actions to share the content.
2. If it's a web-page include sharing links for Twitter, Linked, Whatsapp and Facebook.
3. Valuable, insightful and effective content is more likely to get shared. Yeah, that's the hard bit.

What next?

?Add me to LinkedIn to see more SAAS marketing ideas for top of the funnel, and conversion. Please also like and share this post if it was helpful to you.

?? Coming soon: Want another 50 ideas? Download my handbook '100 Simple, Powerful Ideas To Promote Your SAAS Startup's Content Marketing' which includes case studies from London's market-leading startups like Clayton, CharlieHR, and Ferly. Simply join my First100 newsletter and I'll send it to you ??

??You need help. Book a free, 15 min marketing advice call with me during which we can discuss your most pressing marketing challenge.

??Leave a comment. Have you created a piece of content you want to promote but you don't know where to start? Post it below and I'll suggest 3 ideas specifically for you.