11 Promotion Tactics To Include In Your Content Marketing Strategy

You’ve slaved away over your site’s content marketing pieces – don’t let that effort go to waste by failing to give your creations the promotional bump they need to get found!

Promoting your content isn’t nearly as fun as creating it, but it’s a vital part of content marketing success. And since there’s no “one size fits all” promotional approach that will suit all businesses, I’ve compiled 50 expert tips on different strategies you can use to get your content seen. Read on for suggestions from some of today’s top marketing experts, as well as techniques drawn from my own experience in digital advertising:

On Your Site

Proper content promotion begins at home! Before you even start thinking about things like social media marketing or PR, there are a few actions you’ll want to take on your website and to the content you produce to make content promotion as easy as possible in the future.

Make your social sharing buttons prominent

Generating social shares is one of the primary channels by which content promotion occurs. So how do you expect your audience to take the crucial step of posting your content pieces on their favorite social sites if they can’t find your social sharing buttons? If your website or blog’s current theme doesn’t prominently feature social sharing buttons, look to tools and plugins like Share This or Shareaholic to get the job done.

Improve your headlines

If you look at Upworthy’s success, it’s easy to see how important content headlines have become. An interesting analysis by HubSpot’s social media scientist Dan Zarrella validates this assumption. After reviewing more than 2.7 million blog articles, Zarrella found that 16.7% of web pages actually receive more social shares than they did clicks, effectively proving that people don’t always read what they Tweet. Take advantage of this effect by making your headlines as effective and as eye-catching as possible.

Your Marketing Plan

Once you’ve covered the basics on your website, it’s time to get down to the business of content promotion. But what belongs in your plan? Any of the following strategies – plus the social media marketing techniques described in the next section – should play a role:

Get active with guest posts

It’s no secret that guest posting is a powerful way to promote your brand and your content, but what many marketers get wrong is following the mistaken belief that you need to post on high volume sites to ensure visibility. Instead, consider a recent HubSpot case study, which follows Bamidele Onibalusi, a writer and blogger who was able to secure 60,000 new visitors from search traffic alone in just six months of publishing 28 quality guest posts on medium-sized blogs.

Submit your content to online communities

Sharing your site or your individual content pieces on online networks like Inbound.org or Growth Hackers is a great way to get noticed by new readers, and to build valuable backlinks as well. Certainly, the specific communities you’ll want to post to will depend on your particular industry, but finding and maintaining a presence on one of these sites can be a huge source of traffic. Just be sure you balance self-promotion with actual community engagement – nobody likes a community spammer!

Social Promotions

Now, let’s get into the real meat and potatoes of what most people think about when discussing content promotion – your social activities! Having a piece of content “go viral” on one of the major social networks represents a huge success for any business, but it all starts with the techniques described below.

Up your posting frequency

I’m going to assume that you’re already posting your new content pieces to at least Facebook and Twitter, in addition to any other social networks where your audience is active. But are you posting frequently enough? Take the advice of Leo Widrich, who recommends posting at least 5-10 tweets and 1-4 Facebook posts daily, primarily between the hours of 8am and 8pm.

Post images separately on Facebook

If you copy and paste a link to one of your blog posts into Facebook, the resulting message will contain a small preview image – good, but not eye-catching enough to generate maximum viewership. To really capture attention, try uploading your images separately and adding relevant content details to the picture after the fact. You’ll be rewarded with a large image post that’s nearly impossible for your followers to miss.

Example: When I Work

Promotional Tools

In these days of seemingly limitless new products, the use of promotional tools can, in effect, become marketing strategies themselves. The following ten tools all deserve to play a role in your content marketing efforts:

Snip.ly

Snip.ly boasts an impressive user base of companies like Hubspot, Outbrain and Social Media Examiner, and allows you to attach a call-to-action to every link you share. It’s a great way to retain traffic to your own web properties and content while sharing other’s updates, in addition to helping you convert this traffic into subscribers and customers.

Flauntt

Flauntt’s tagline – “Get More People Sharing Your Stuff” – says it all. This Twitter tool offers incentives that encourage members to share the content pieces posted to the system by others. If your Twitter referral traffic has been lower than you’d hoped, this simple program could get the ball rolling.

Active Outreach

If you’ve exhausted the content promotion methods and tools listed above, you aren’t out of luck – there’s a whole world of additional active outreach options out there that draws on traditional offline marketing techniques to generate digital content success. Here are just a few you can try:

Deploy traditional press releases

Despite their past use as a link spam technique, press releases aren’t dead. The key, though, is to only use them when you have something legitimately newsworthy to share – say, for example, the launch of an educational minisite or other “above and beyond” content piece. When you do encounter these milestones, draft a press release and target it only towards the niche publications or websites that are most likely to be interested in featuring your launch.

Give StumbleUpon’s paid discovery feature a try

Not quite ready to dip your toes in the native advertising pool? Give one of the original paid content promotion methods – StumbleUpon’s paid discovery system – a try. As a rule, the service’s bounce rates on inbound traffic tend to be enormous, but if you feature the right type of content, you can use the system to get eyes on your pieces and increase their odds of going viral.

Sign up for HARO

HARO stands for “help a reporter out,” and it’s a great way to get your brand’s name featured in a wide variety of publications. Once you’re enrolled, the service sends out daily messages in which reporters share the types of experts they’re looking to interview for their posts. Respond to an invitation if your skills and experience match up, and you could see yourself quoted on top publications like the New York Time and ABC News.

For 39 more promotion tactics for your content marketing strategy, click here.