How to get the best return on your Content Marketing investment

Optimising your content for SEO is important and, over time, can generate great returns. But in the short term, promoting your content is the fastest way to get eyes on your work. Whether you spent hours yourself researching and crafting your content, or you paid to outsource it, you want your content to generate leads, warm up prospects, and increase brand awareness!

Consistency is key when it comes to sharing your content, and the best way to keep yourself accountable is with a schedule. The number one tip is to share your content more than once.

Remember. Just because YOU’RE seeing your content 3 times when you post it 3 times a week doesn’t mean everyone else is. Most social posts only last a few hours before they get lost in the stream. Which means if you post in the morning, the members of your audience who only check at lunchtime will miss it. Likewise if you only post once at lunchtime, the evening-commute readers will miss out.

Here’s how to promote your content multiple times without being annoying.

• Schedule your content 3 times over a week or two. Make sure you choose different days and times to capture more of your audience. Change up the caption so it doesn’t look repetitive on your feed.
• Send your content to any expert sources you’ve referenced (or tag them when you post it). They’ll probably share it, it’s great publicity for them too!
• Run paid promotions. Facebook has a great range of demographic targeting tools you can use.
• Send out your content to your email list.
• And our personal favourite: repurpose your content!

7 easy ways to repurpose your content

Repurposing your content is a great way to maximise your return on investment. Rather than just publishing a blog, sharing it once on socials and forgetting about it, repurpose it!

Create instantly share-able snippets! If you want something done, make it as easy as possible. Rather than hoping that readers will copy and paste a quote they like, share it, and include a link, you can download this?WordPress?plugin?that adds instant click-to-tweet functionality. If you don’t use WordPress, you can also try out?ClickToTweet’s Basic application?(it’s free).

Create spinoff content. If you have a high quality, popular piece of content, revisit it and see if you have more to say on the topic. You could create a ‘sequel’ for it, or expand on individual points within the article. Don’t forget to link internally so that your users can easily move from one to the other!

Turn it into a mini-email series. If you’re creating spinoff content already, why not use it as an automated email sequence to capture people’s email addresses?

Turn it into an opt-in ebook. Repurposing great content to get more leads will never go out of style. Turn it into an opt-in ebook if a mini-series isn’t your style!

Convert it into another format. Got a great blog post? Turn it into a Slideshare, social media graphic, youtube video, or infographic, and share it on your social stories! You could also summarise the blog and share it on LinkedIn as a native post, which tend to perform better than posts with links.

Pitch it out as a guest post. Guest posts are a fantastic way to get more eyes. Don’t pitch a duplicate of your current content. Instead, think of an adjacent topic or a different perspective you can offer out as a guest post. Don’t forget to link back to the original piece and drive traffic to your site!

Pitch it out as a podcast. Congratulations, you’ve got material that your audience loves! If you’ve got your own podcast, make an episode about it! If you don’t, reach out to popular podcasts in your field and pitch yourself as a guest speaker on that topic.

This blog post is the final post in our 3 part Content Marketing Series –?Part 1: Content Marketing 101?and?Part 2: Content Marketing Strategy?are now live!