Creating high-quality content is important but only a small part of the overall content marketing plan. Ensuring that your content reaches the right audience is equally if not more important than the creation part.
Companies starting out with Content Marketing wrongly assume that punching out the odd tweets and posts for their newly minted content will somehow magically drive traffic or generate engagement. The reality is that such random and deprecated attempts mostly end up throwing resources down the drain, but even more disturbingly, turn Content Marketing into the fall guy.
To get the most from Content Marketing, your promotion capabilities need to be as thoughtful and planned as your content research, ideation, development workflows, and the like. Smart Marketers typically do this with the help of formal promotion plans that include a detailed account of tactics across paid, owned, and earned media. Some of these apply to every piece of content produced while others are larger branding/PR activities that involve promoting the brand as a whole, rather than individual content items.
In this post, we focus on owned media promotion and outline 3 tactics that should be deployed as part of every Content Promotion plan.
Tactic #1 – On-page keyword optimization
Channel – Corporate blog/Public-facing product/service pages
Notwithstanding all the changes in Google’s search algorithms and the importance of external links, on-page optimization is still key in ensuring that Search engines can easily find and index your content against the right set of keywords. Doing your homework in terms of selecting the right keywords pays up big time. From competitive intelligence on organic keywords to find out the keywords that are the easiest to improve rankings for, Marketers today have a plethora of tools to ensure that the content is properly keyword optimized for organic discovery by search engines.
Tactic #2 – Email newsletters
Channel – Email marketing
Email marketing allows you to build one-on-one conversations with your target audience. Simply compiling all your posts (Organic+Curated) into a single newsletter that gets automatically sent out on a weekly/fortnightly schedule can be a highly effective tactic to tap into the right audience with the right messaging.
Tactic #3 – Content amplification
Channel – Owned social media profiles
Marketers routinely use Social Media promotion tools such as Hootsuite to post links to content they create or curate across multiple owned social media profiles. What is missing though is a consistent content amplification strategy that creates and promotes the right kind of content format for the right channel.
For example, most Marketers would simply stop at creating content in raw text format, posting it on their blog, and then putting out a couple of tweets or Facebook posts with article links.
For optimal reach, however, content production workflows should be modified so that all raw seed content is also reproduced in other formats such as infographics, PDF documents, slideshows, videos where applicable, and so on.
Further, technology automation needs to be built in so that this re-purposed content is automatically posted to the right channels based on an intelligent schedule that optimizes reach and engagement. Even without technology,
Marketers can easily use Marketing Calendars to create manual task entries for the creation and promotion of amplified content although this approach cannot possibly scale as content volume increases.
The current state of owned media promotion
As outlined above, most Marketers lack a coherent strategy to optimize and maximize owned media reach. Content amplification embedded formally as an intrinsic part of the overall Content Marketing strategy is a rarity even amongst the most sophisticated Marketers. The ones that do pass this maturity scale threshold typically do not use technology to automate the promotion of content to the right channels.
Summary
With the ever-increasing proliferation of social media profiles (both generic and niche), Marketers have a unique opportunity to capture a new audience for their brand through consistent publishing of authoritative content that provides readers with enhanced content experience.
This is done by ensuring that the content format is optimized for a specific channel (e.g. a Slide deck for Slideshare, Infographic for Pinterest, and so on). A holistic owned media promotion plan would move beyond simply posting article links on Facebook and Twitter to providing comprehensive details of which specific channels would be activated, with what content format and at what schedule.
In the world we envision here at Syptus, a technology-driven owned media promotion plan would use robust technology to
- Automatically generate requests for seed content to be produced in multiple formats based on an automated analysis of content inventory
- Automatically push each to the right channel without manual intervention based on a rotating approach where the system keeps track of last channel exposure of each message
- Auto-generate posting text based on a manually supplied set of variants
But of course, this will only take care of uni-directional posting and still needs to be supplemented with concerted human intervention to identify and cultivate conversations generated by these automated posts.
