Content Promotion: What It Is and Why It Matters
Content promotion, or content amplification, is about making your B2B marketing content more visible and accessible to your brand’s target audience. Find out how a new study shows that content promotion is more important than ever in establishing trust and solid business relationships for your brand.
I spent quite a bit of time this week poring over analytics. These weren’t statistics about the performance of actual B2B content items.
Instead, I was looking over how various promotional tactics to draw attention to content had actually performed. In other words, I was evaluating content promotion.
Content promotion, or content amplification, is about the strategies and tactics B2B content marketers use to increase their content’s visibility and reach. The content itself includes blog posts, white papers, case studies videos or webinars.
Content Promotion - Drawing Attention to Content Items
Content promotion refers to the ways your team draws attention to those content items and ensures people read or view them. When you think about it this way, creating B2B marketing content to promote your brand, and then having to promote the content itself, might seem like a lot of effort.
You’d be right to conclude that. In fact, Converge’s 2023 B2B Content Promotion Report found that the number one content promotion challenge for B2B content marketers was a lack of time.
Only 35% of those surveyed said they were spending enough time on content promotion. Asked what stops them from devoting more time to promoting content, 82% of respondents said it was lack of time due to other tasks.
Teams of Between One and Three People
That comes as no surprise when we look at the size of typical B2B content marketing teams. Teams made up of between one and three people represented 44% of those surveyed.
A further 33% of respondents were one-person shops. B2B content marketing teams remain very small, and they outsource a lot of their content creation work.
Every respondent said they used social media as an organic channel to promote their brand’s content. That was followed by the brand’s website at 79% and email at 77%.
Website and Email Promotion Fell, Social Media Rose
Interestingly, both website and email promotion fell, while social media rose in terms of usage. LinkedIn was by far the most popular social media channel, with 98% of respondents using it for content promotion.
X, or Twitter, suffered a major drop from last year, falling from 86% to 67%. Apparently, the controversial management, branding and feature changes there have affected the confidence of B2B content marketers.
Facebook also fell noticeably from 64% to 51%. Apparently, B2B content marketers increasingly view Facebook as primarily a B2C advertising platform, that only works for brand recognition, if at all, for B2B messaging.
Instagram and TikTok Saw Substantial Increases
Meanwhile, Instagram and TikTok both saw substantial increases in use. There seems to be a growing realization that very short videos work well on these platforms for brands to promote content to a younger B2B target audience.
When it comes to paid content promotion, two channels were dominant. Every respondent reported paying for social media advertising.
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In second place, 71% of those asked said they pay for search engine advertising. Only a minority of respondents used any of the other paid advertising options, such as email ads, banner ads or sponsorships.
Most Respondents Had Less Budget Than They Needed
It’s been said that “you can do anything with enough time and money, but nobody has enough time or money.” The survey was a case in point since, as well as feeling pressured about the lack of time, 53% of respondents said their budget was less than they needed.
When asked what their goal was in promoting B2B marketing content, the top answer (81%) was brand visibility. The other two goals were lead generation (77%) and user engagement (67%).
User engagement showed a huge jump year-over-year, from 35% to 67%. This seems to reflect a growing, if old-fashioned, realization that trust is the foundation of all business relationships.
Shift Toward Relationship Building in B2B Content Marketing
This trust-based approach is part of a broader shift toward relationship building in B2B content marketing. In an era where potential clients may review as many as a dozen? content items before ever speaking to anyone at your company, content now plays a larger role than the sales force in sparking those relationships.
Most B2B content marketers (77%) measure the results of their content promotion work. The key performance indicators (KPIs) they use the most are traffic (88%), conversions (82%) and social engagement (80%).
Interestingly, SEO rankings, like search engine rankings or domain authority, dropped sharply from 64% to 51%. I’m sensing a growing realization among B2B brands that when they create excellent content, search engines will find it without them resorting to SEO tricks and tactics.
Content Promotion Has Positive Impact
The good news is that when asked the broad question of whether content promotion had a positive impact, an impressive 88% said yes. So, while the lack of resources may frustrate those surveyed, they seem to feel the time and money they manage to devote to amplifying content is well-spent.
All these numbers tell a story. We can seen that brands are realizing that content promotion is a critical part of their B2B content marketing strategies.
We can also conclude that the time-honoured view of marketing as establishing trust has become more important than ever in today’s B2B marketplace. As the role of content within the buyer journey expands, successfully promoting that content has become vital for your brand.
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