Marketers work countless hours to plan, create and design their content. However, when it’s time for promotion, many fail to find success.
While HubSpot reports that 82% of marketers actively use content marketing, only 31% of B2B marketers reported their organization was extremely or very successful with content marketing during 2021 according to B2B Content Marketing, and promotion is a big part of that.
Part of the promotional challenge is successfully combining organic results with paid ads on search engines, social media and other websites. Read on to find out how you can combine organic and paid tactics to reach peak content promotion success.
Importance of Content Promotion
In today’s digital age, content is king. It is the backbone of any successful online presence, be it a website, social media account or blog. But more than simply creating great content is required. If you want your content to reach its full potential, you need to promote it.
A brilliant creative agency in Mumbai states that content promotion is increasing visibility and driving traffic to your content through various methods such as SEO, social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.
There are several reasons why content promotion is so important. First and foremost, it helps to increase your visibility online.
The more people see your content, the more likely it is to generate leads, conversions, and revenue. Content promotion can also help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your industry.
By consistently producing high-quality content and promoting it effectively, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and attract a loyal following.
Another critical aspect of content promotion is search engine optimization (SEO). Get the help of the most efficient digital marketing company to get high-quality content.
Your website and content are optimized through SEO to appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
When your content is optimized for SEO, it is more likely to be found by people in keyword research related to your industry. This can significantly increase website traffic and, ultimately, more leads and sales.
Lastly, content promotion can help to build relationships with your target audience. You can establish trust and build loyalty by engaging with them on social media, email, and other platforms. This can lead to repeat traffic, higher conversion rates, and, ultimately, more revenue.
Getting Organic: How-To Tips
To achieve effective organic promotion, marketers must grow and leverage their audience.
Assuming that you’ve already done a massive amount of research around buyer personas and pain points before creating your content, it’s now time to use that research to support your promotional goals. Here are some ways for you start:
1. Build Influencers
If your company has been around for a while, good news! You probably already have a built-in influencer base. Based on your research, who would be the best fit to represent your business as a customer?
If you can’t quite get there based on your current customer profiles and information from your sales team, use a tool like BuzzSumo or Followerwonk (free trial versions available) to find the users who are best suited for content promotion.
Ask them to act as brand ambassadors and share pieces they find useful. Some companies pay for influencers, but there are pros and cons to this. It is recommended considering other forms of compensation such as exclusive access to products or services, invitations to events or attractive deals like samples or free trials.
In either case, you can expect high performance. Statistics show that for every $1 marketers invest in influencer marketing, they get $5.78 back.
2. Spend Time on Your Blog
Your blog is your brand’s best shot at achieving organic success. When you invest in a wealth of high-quality content that’s published on an ongoing basis, Google is sure to notice.
Have a look at some tools and templates for successful blog posts and put some time into SEO for your blogs to make sure they rank. And don’t forget to engage with your influencers on your blog (via the comments section) as well.
3. Keep Your PR Team Top of Mind
Your content and PR teams (or tactics, if it’s just you) should be closely knit to ensure content promotion success. Here’s how you can grow your PR success organically:
? Use Followerwonk and search for journalists, as well as the publications you’re interested in and the keywords related to your topic. ? Once you know who to target, get their attention using a well-honed pitch and exciting story ideas. ? Once you’ve secured a journalist/story, don’t stop there, keep going to maximize your outreach!
Also consider guest blogging to extend your reach and build up some quality links. Download our ‘Ultimate Guest Blogging Guide and Toolkit’ to get started.
4. Spend Time on the Right Social Platforms
Marketers must determine which of the many social media platforms are right for their business. The ‘spray and pray’ approach doesn’t work. When you’re on too many networks, you lose sight of your goals and risk over-saturating your audience.
That being said, experimenting with new(er) platforms (especially visual ones such as TikTok, Pinterest and Instagram), can prove incredibly valuable for organic content promotion.
Email Marketing and its Role in Content Promotion
Email marketing is essential to content promotion, allowing businesses to reach their target audience and promote their content directly.
By building an email list of subscribers, businesses can send targeted and personalized emails to individuals who have shown interest in their brand and content. This increases the chances that the recipient will engage with the content, leading to increased visibility and traffic.
Email marketing campaigns can also be automated, allowing businesses to quickly send regular newsletters and updates to their subscribers, keeping them engaged and informed about new content.
The Role of Paid Advertising in Content Promotion: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads
While organic content promotion techniques such as SEO, social media, and influencer marketing can effectively drive traffic and increase visibility, paid to advertise can also play an important role in content promotion.
In this section, we will discuss the role of paid advertising in content promotion and provide an overview of some of the most popular platforms, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads.
One of the main advantages of paid advertising is that it allows you to reach a larger audience in a shorter time.
With paid advertising, you can target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, which can help to increase the chances of your content being seen by the right people. Allow a creative agency in Mumbai to help you with your paid advertising.
With Google Ads, you can create text, image, and video ads that appear in search results, websites, and mobile apps.
Google Ads allows you to target specific keywords, demographics, and interests, and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This makes it cost-effective to increase visibility and drive traffic to your content.
Facebook Ads is another popular platform for paid advertising. With Facebook Ads, you can create text, images, and video ads in the news feed, in the right-hand column, and in stories on the Facebook platform.
In addition to these platforms, several other paid advertising options are available, such as Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and YouTube Ads. Each forum has unique features and targeting options, so it is essential to research each to determine the best fit for your business and your content promotion goals.
A leading digital marketing company states that paid advertising can be a valuable tool to drive immediate results, but organic promotion is essential for long-term success.
Combining Paid and Organic Tactics
Instead, add in paid campaigns that complement and support the success that you’ve already seen from the organic side. If a piece of content doesn’t work well in organic promotion, paid advertising probably won’t save it. It’s still likely to be your lowest performer.
Organic vs. Paid
Though many marketers use an organic-only approach to promote their content at some point, most end up realizing that they will only achieve the results they want through paid promotion.
For example, if you rely on solely organic posts on Facebook, you’ll eventually realize the network is now ‘pay to play’. The average social media user spends 95 minutes a day on social platforms and is exposed to many of content every time he/she logs in.
You can’t expect your brand to break through the noise with organic posts. Whether your purpose is to grow your audience, create loyal social media followers or favorable actions from highly targeted audiences, combining paid and organic tactics for SEO and social media will get results.
Paid Social Media Tactics
In addition to your organic efforts, here are the ways you can funnel money into social media promotion:
- Facebook offers two options: Facebook Promoted Posts, which allows marketers to boost the reach of their otherwise organic posts and Facebook Business (Ads) which gives you the tools to carefully target individuals by region, job title, industry and more. Learn how much these ads really cost here.
- Promoted Tweets is Twitter’s paid promotion machine. This cost-effective method helps marketers use Twitter to reach targeted audiences according to specific demographics and targeted criteria. You can set the maximum amount you are willing to spend and easily track and monitor the performance of your campaign.
- Instagram & Snapchat: These ‘newer’, visually-focused social media platforms are the perfect fit for B2C content. Read our guide on Instagram Ads here, and check out our Snapchat Ads walkthrough.
Like any paid marketing channel, paid promotions through social media can deliver the type of marketing results you need, if you’re using the appropriate platform for your audience.
Find the ones that are right for your business and you’ll easily increase conversions for content marketing success.
Balancing Organic and Paid Advertising: Tips and Best Practices
When advertising your business, it can be challenging to strike the right balance between organic and paid methods.
While organic advertising, such as social media posts and search engine optimization (SEO), can be a cost-effective way to promote your brand, paid advertising, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, can be a great way to boost your visibility and reach a larger audience quickly.
Here are some tips and best practices for balancing organic and paid advertising:
Set clear goals
Before you begin advertising, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.
Do you want to boost website traffic, create leads, or raise brand awareness? Once you know your goals, you can develop a plan for using both organic and paid advertising to achieve them.
Use organic advertising to build trust and credibility
Organic advertising can be a great way to build trust and credibility with your target audience. By regularly posting engaging and informative content on social media, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and earn the trust of your audience.
Use paid advertising to drive conversions
Paid advertising can be a great way to boost your visibility and drive conversions quickly. By targeting specific demographics and interests, you can reach a larger audience and increase the chances of generating leads or making a sale.
Track your results
To make the most of your advertising efforts, it’s essential to track your results.
Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, conversion rates, and the success of your campaigns. This will help you identify what’s working and what’s not, so you can make adjustments and optimize your strategy.
Test and optimize
Feel free to test different approaches and optimize your campaigns. Try other ad formats, targeting options, and messaging to see what works best for your business.
Following these tips and best practices can strike the right balance between organic and paid advertising and achieve your business goals.
Side notes
Most companies spend a lot of time creating content, thinking that if they build great content, users will find it, engage with it and move down the sales funnel; but this almost never works.
There’s so much noise dictating that your great content will never get the attention it deserves.
To achieve content marketing success, build your brand by creating and promoting valuable content organically first, then add paid promotion where it makes sense to achieve your content marketing ROI goals.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract customers. The key is to know how to use content effectively at all stages of the funnel to drive sales.
DMI’s Professional Diploma in Search Marketing will help you create the right content for the right people and cover areas such as SEO, search analytics, data visualization and search strategy.
