Everybody is familiar with the premise of a billboard in the desert, right? No matter how beautifully designed it is, or how compelling the message is, if nobody sees it, there is no value. When creating marketing content, you don’t want to build a billboard in the desert. Follow these tips for getting your content in front of the right audiences.
Create a content distribution plan
For every piece of content that you create, you should develop a list of channels through which it will be shared. Representative channels for sharing content include:
- Email marketing
- Online newsroom
- Blog
- Social media
- YouTube
- Periscope
- Snapchat
- Blab
- Partner marketing (e.g. association newsletters, etc.)
Your plan should detail which platforms you will be sharing your content through and when, as well as which of your target audiences are being reached through which channels.
Share often
HubSpot reports that 76 percent of monthly blog views and 92 percent of monthly blog leads come from old posts. Your content promotion strategy should include pushing out your most popular blog posts of all time on social media – so long as they remain relevant to your target audiences – as well as revisiting content that is once again timely. For example, nonprofits send annual appeal letters every year so a blog post on annual appeal letters has relevance at least once during each calendar year.
For new blog posts and additions to your online newsroom, sharing content multiple times is critical, as is repackaging it. For example, if a post on your b2b blog offers insights into five trends impacting your customers during the upcoming year, each trend can be the focus of one tweet and so on. If you developed a landing page on your website with a checklist for clients pertaining to recent regulatory changes, you’ll want to share the content heavily both when it’s new and when the compliance deadline is approaching.
Augment with sponsored content
It’s no secret that organic page content on Facebook has a more narrow reach than it used to. Or that as more companies and causes create content, the competition to grab online audiences’ attention continues to rise. Hence, there is a time and place for sponsored content in your content marketing strategy.
On LinkedIn, for example, sponsoring content can help to get your thought leadership in front of people with specific job titles and functions. This is a valuable way to tie your marketing content to your lead generation process and support your sales process.
On Facebook, the ability to target friends of people who like your page allows companies and causes to get their content in front of like-minded audiences.
Sponsoring content on social media is often an economical addition to an online marketing program as the ability to narrowly define an audience and set your budget ensures dollars are being spent on serving the right information to the right audiences.
Make content easy for others to share
Social sharing widgets should be a staple on your blog. And, making your tweets short enough that others can easily share them without having to condense your content to fit within the 140-character limit should be a best practice that you follow. Ensuring your email marketing is also shareable is another way to help broadcast your content to a wider audience.
While creating compelling content is key to engaging online audiences, ensuring your content is consistently being broadcast to your networks is equally important. As noted early on in this post, it doesn’t matter how great your content is if the right people aren’t seeing it.
Inbound marketing strategies help companies tie marketing to sales with dynamic strategies for creating and sharing content. Download our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing today to learn how to maximize the value of your online marketing content and leverage thought leadership to help drive sales.
