Content Promotional Strategies to Accelerate Your Business

INTRODUCTION

Consider this scenario: Imagine you are the founder of a business, and your team has meticulously crafted a ‘killer’ content strategy that you know is going to be the cherry on the cake. You are super confident that your plan is going to be a grand success and bring in more customers, thereby multiplying your sales and catapulting your fame in the industry.

To your immense surprise, you find that the ‘killer’ content strategy has not nailed the wall! You feel disappointed, start picking your team to work out new content. But what if we tell you that the actual problem does not lie with your content?! Without proper ideation, what if we tell you that your strategy has failed to tick a few checkboxes and has fallen flat by bringing in low traffic and fewer engagements?

The answer is simple—you need to know how to promote your content. Forget about marketing strategies for once! It’s time to identify your target audience and ensure your content matches their expectations. This might require a new approach, a shift in perspective. Let’s talk about content promotional strategies that can actually make the audience read and resonate with your content, thereby improving your ranking and achieving conversions.

WHAT IS CONTENT PROMOTION STRATEGY?

Content promotion refers to the process of distributing content through online channels, such as paid ads, SEO, social media, etc. The ultimate objective of a content promotion strategy is to resonate with your target audience so that they view your content, thus increasing visibility, boosting engagement, and driving sales and business growth.

Over 57% of marketers have identified ideating content as their biggest challenge, whereas a whopping 91% of them (B2B) have indicated content marketing as their go-to strategy to reach customers. All these data come down to a single point—content is the undisputable ‘king’ for any business to thrive!

WHY CONTENT PROMOTIONAL STRATEGY IS IMPORTANT?

As stated in the earlier paragraph, the main goal of a content promotional strategy is to induce an ‘audience’ to view the content, thereby increasing traffic and boosting sales. It is particularly important to all industries as it outlines the following:

Increases Content Visibility and Engagement

Your content is just a speck in the sea of content published every minute. To make your content stand out from your competitors, you need an ‘awesome’ content promotional strategy that will resonate with your target audience and carry forward your intended message.

Content promotion strategy not only helps you to identify your target audience but also paves the way for them to reach out to you by way of likes, shares, comments, and mere clicks. The rapport you build with your audience helps carve a niche for you and promote your business.

These tactics will bring traffic to your website, increase your search engine rankings, help you achieve potential sales, and maximize your profits.

Generate leads and conversions

Promoted content has a higher chance of reaching potential customers who are actively seeking solutions or information related to your products or services. By providing valuable content and promoting it effectively, you can attract qualified leads and guide them through your sales funnel, ultimately increasing conversions.

Builds Brand Awareness and Authority

Consistent content promotion can help establish you as a thought leader in your industry. As your content reaches a wide spectrum of audiences, it reinforces your brand’s presence and expertise, thereby building trust and credibility among potential customers. This increased authority can pave the way for more organic mentions, backlinks, and referrals.

CHALLENGES FACED BY BUSINESSES WHO DO NOT HAVE A PROPER CONTENT PROMOTION STRATEGY

Businesses that lack solid content promotion strategies face several significant challenges that can hinder their growth and success. Given below are some of the key issues that they may encounter:

a) Reduced Visibility and Engagement

Without an effective content promotion strategy, high-quality content may go unnoticed. This results in lower visibility and engagement rates, as potential customers cannot find or interact with the content that addresses their needs.

b) Wasted Resources

Inefficient targeting leads to wasted marketing resources. Suppose businesses fail to identify and attract their target audience accurately; they may end up spending more money on unwanted campaigns that do a half-baked job of identifying potential leads, ultimately resulting in poor ROI.

c) Poor Brand Reputation

Inconsistent marketing and lack of authenticity can damage a brand’s reputation. When a business fails to promote its content effectively, it risks missing out on identifying the needs of its target audience, which can eventually lead to distrust and negative perceptions about the brand.

d) Low Search Engine Rankings

Content that is not optimized properly always struggles to rank in search engines, thereby making it difficult for potential customers to discover the brand. Poor SEO practices can result in low or zero traffic or engagement, as search engines may depose content that lacks a proper strategy.

e) Lack of Measurable Success

Without a clear promotional strategy, businesses often fail to find accurate metrics that help analyze their performance. The absence of data makes it challenging for marketers to assess, qualify, and quantify the effectiveness of content efforts or identify areas of improvement, which can lead to stagnation in overall marketing performance,

f) Ineffective Customer Relationships

One key challenge that most businesses face is failing to build a ‘connect’ with their customers, which can happen with a poor content promotional strategy. Failing to resort to valuable feedback or engage with customers may hamper your business’s growth and raise questions about your customers’ loyalty.

g) Directionless Marketing Efforts

A lack of coherent marketing strategy often results in directionless results, where campaigns are disjointed and out of focus. This can lead to confusion among potential customers about the brand’s offerings and value proposition.

The graph indicates the challenges faced by B2B content marketers face, if they do not have a proper content promotion strategy in place.

SETTING THE FOUNDATION FOR GOOD CONTENT STRATEGY

A business can’t flourish if the way forward is not clearly identified. The content field is a tough nut to crack. Unless you are able to articulate your thought process into what exactly you wish to achieve, it will be extremely difficult for you to navigate into the world of content, which will fail to boost your business the way you had envisioned!

The following pointers help you understand what you, as a business owner, need to do to create a good content promotional strategy.

Define your goals

Your business should be able to set out clear, well-defined goals for any content promotion strategy. Goal setting involves two steps, namely:

a) Identify specific, measurable objectives

When setting content promotion goals, it’s essential to make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of a vague goal like “increase website traffic,” a SMART goal would be “increase customer engagement by 35% within the next six months.” This approach provides clarity and allows for effective progress tracking.

But if you expect overnight success and start publishing content for all the wrong reasons, your business is bound to fail before it can take off! So, keep in mind that your goals are within reach, and you don’t go overboard during the planning stage.

b) Align promotional goals with overall business goals

Your content promotion objectives should directly support your company’s broader business goals. For instance, if your company aims to increase organic web traffic by 5% in the next three months, your content strategy might focus on generating high-quality leads or improving conversion rates. This can indeed change the perspective of your business goals.

Once your KPIs are clear, you can alter your content strategies to suit the needs of your buyers and promote content that actually resonates with your audience.

Know your target audience.

It’s imperative that, as a business owner, you are able to identify and understand your target audience before you start to promote content:

a) Create detailed audience personas

So, you have identified your goals. But how will you leverage your content to the right target audience? Have you understood what they actually want, and will your business be able to provide an answer to their problems? To understand your customer profile, you have first to ask yourself these questions:

• Is your product/service able to satisfy the needs of customers?
• Is your product/service able to understand customers’ pain points and offer the right solution to them?
• Can you audit your existing resources and understand the areas where you lack?
• Are you able to do a competitor analysis and analyze the gaps where you have missed and how they are able to outperform you?

Develop comprehensive profiles of your ideal customers, including demographics, interests, pain points, and content preferences. These personas will guide your content creation and promotion efforts, ensuring that you’re targeting the right people with the right messages.

b) Understand audience preferences and behaviors

What works for one business may not work for another. The process is going to be long, with plenty of trials and errors. Once you understand the platforms and the variations of content that they are truly interested in, you will be able to make informed decisions.

For example, 30% of your target audience may prefer ‘Facebook,’ and you will have to post content that appeals to your chosen audience. Your content will backfire if you try to churn out the same formula for audiences who prefer ‘Twitter.’ A few simple ways by which you can understand your audience’s tastes and preferences are:

• Conducting online polls and surveys
• Identify the type of content that they usually like to watch by checking out their purchase history and demographics, including their age, gender, location, income level, and interests.
• Do a thorough competitor analysis and try to fill the gaps of the missed pointers, etc.,

Research how your target audience consumes content, which platforms they prefer, and what types of content they engage with most. This information will help you tailor your promotion strategy to reach your audience effectively.

How do you audit your content?

Every piece of content you publish must be audited to determine whether it’s working or needs improvement.

a) Analyzing top-performing content

You should identify which content has been the most successful in terms of boosting engagement, bringing in conversions, and increasing footfalls to your website. Auditing your content will allow you to gain valuable insights that will be of the utmost importance to future audiences, thus crafting content promotion strategies based on what works best.

b) Identifying gaps and opportunities

You may think that writing and publishing content in all platforms is sufficient, but hey, it’s not. Not all content is successful when it comes to measuring their effectiveness. You have to learn to refresh your content constantly every time, and this might be challenging. How can you do it? By conducting a content GAP Analysis.

Marketers often perform content gap analyses in digital marketing to understand why a particular piece of content is failing to deliver the intended results. The following few pointers ought to help you understand the basics of GAP analysis:

• It enables you to assess content that is underperforming. Any content that fails to bring engagement is a lost opportunity.
• Research the list of keywords and perform a competitive analysis to understand what you’ve missed.
• Prioritize high volume keywords to rank according to search volume, relevant to your business, etc.
• Update content regularly by creating new content to fill out the existing gaps and republish them.
• Perform the GAP analysis at least once in six months to determine if your business is steady or stagnant.

Measuring Success

Effective measurement is the key to fine-tuning and improving your content promotion strategy. The term measuring means quantifying and evaluating the outcome of your content. This process allows you to determine the effectiveness of your content promotion strategies and figure out ways to improve, if any.

a) Tracking your KPIs

KPIs, otherwise known as Key Performance Indicators, quantify the performance of businesses or individuals by creating set parameters to help them achieve their objectives. Choose KPIs that align with your strategic objectives

Given below are some of the best practices for monitoring KPIs for content creation:

• .Achieving ROI in terms of sales or customer subscriptions
• A track on new leads and new people who have signed up on our website
• Driving traffic to your website and calculating footfalls per day.
• The time spent by customers who read your content (Also known as Retention Time)
• Measuring the engagement rates after you publish new content online.

b) Use analytical tools to measure your progress

Certain tools help in measuring the progress of your strategy by providing comprehensive insights and pain points. These tools allow you to collect, segregate, process, and visualize data, thereby making it easier for you to measure your overall performance.

c) Adjust strategies based on data insights

Data-driven decision-making is crucial for optimizing performance and achieving desired outcomes. By analyzing the insights gained from your KPIs and analytical tools, you can make informed adjustments to your strategies.

d) Continuous Testing and Optimizing Content

The world of content promotion is an ongoing process with no end. To stay at the top of the pool, you must experiment with your content as and when required. You should also optimize your content by testing with different content formats, ways by which you promote content, and the methods that you use to track metrics.

CONTENT PROMOTION STRATEGIES THAT ACTUALLY WORK

Creating quality content should always be of the utmost importance when you are trying to accelerate growth. There are plenty of ways to promote your content effectively. We have picked out the ones that work best.

Here we go:

Social Media Marketing

The world has gone digital, and so should we, especially if we believe in the power of social media. Social media is one of the most exciting ways by which you can promote your content. With a wide array of platforms, all you need to do is figure out which content works the best and where. Here are a few ways that can give you a general idea about how you can leverage and promote your content effectively:

a) Select the ‘right’ social media channel

Wanting to promote your content on social media may seem easy, but it’s not! How can you go about identifying the right channel for your business? With content overflowing on each channel, spotlighting your content may seem arduous.

But don’t worry! You can declutter and single out your content by way of a few well-placed strategies, like researching your target audience’s most preferred channel. Every social media platform has its own set of algorithms.

Plan out your content promotional strategies so that your content reach all channels using an interspersed mix of visuals, infographics, videos, reels, carousels, and static content.

 

b) Focus on Engagement

So, you have curated a wonderful content promotional strategy and have leveraged all the social media channels. Are you congratulating yourself for the job done?! Surely you are mistaken! Merely posting on social media is of no use. You must also engage with your target audience regularly by:

• Replying to your audience’s comments promptly
• Taking an active part in conversations
• Organizing Q&A sessions by encouraging your target audience to reach out to you
• Use fun posts such as memes and gifs to pique their interest in your offerings.

c) Using relevant hashtags

Every content that you post on social media needs to have relevant hashtags. These hashtags play an important role in helping your audience to find you easily. Always use hashtags to promote the content that you are trying to publish on the social media platform. Hashtags should be used as a tool to provide additional information about your post.

For instance, if you are posting on Instagram, you can add a mix of prominent hashtags and some of your own. Adding more than 3-5 hashtags doesn’t mean that your content gets distributed evenly. Most marketers often think that the more hashtags they use, the more engagement they will get. In reality, overstuffing your content with more hashtags can bring you more harm than intended.

Email Marketing

Social media is not the only way to apply content promotional strategies. Once you have captured the interests of your target audience, the best way to retain their interest is through email marketing. And for that, you need to have an extensive contact database as your marketing tool to craft a ‘killer’ content promotional strategy.

With a compelling heading and a catchy CTA (Call to Action), you can easily win over your customers and build a loyal base via email marketing.

There are many things that you can do to attract your existing customers, bring in potential customers, or for those who are still in the deciding stage. So, here is what you can do once you get your personalized list of subscribers:

• Offering sample/free products
• Loyalty programs
• Contest announcements and giveaways
• Newsletters and interesting snippets about your business
• Exclusive information about your upcoming products/services and many more.

Content Optimization for Search Engines (SEO)

Did you know that optimizing your content helps you reach out to a larger and more relevant customer base? A recent study conducted by Google revealed that 53% of people in the U.S. say that they research products on search engines before purchasing to ensure they are making the best decision possible. The logic is simple – the higher your content ranks on Google search engines, the more customers are likely to click and engage.

Before we get into the finer aspects of SEO, let us first understand the three types of SEO that are readily available:

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO involves extensive use of keywords, meta descriptions, content headers, internal linking, page speed, and more. On-page SEO focuses more on writing useful content that is of high quality, adds value to the business, and is able to rank high in SERPs.

Off-Page SEO

This type helps popularize your content by creating backlinks on prominent websites. By adding backlinks to credible websites, your content will rank higher in search engines, leading to higher click rates and engagement.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is more about SERP crawl bug issues, page speed, responsiveness, and other finer aspects of ensuring that your corresponding content is search-friendly.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is one of the quickest ways to rank your content higher in search engines. Paid advertising consists of how you pay search engines to promote your content – the process is called bidding, and the more you bid and outgrow your competitors, the more chances you get to rank your content in the first top ten rankings of the search engine.

The competition will be fierce, and you will have to keep up if you want to be in the top box. Here are a few ways to leverage paid ads for your business:

Using Pay-per-Click Advertising

This is one of the most effective methods that allows you to display ads on search engines and other channels. The USP of pay-per-click is that you get to pay only what the customers have clicked to view your ad.

One of the biggest advantages of PPC ads is that your content gets noticed instantly, thereby creating a brand awareness that helps you assess your returns on investment (ROI). Try using extensive keywords that can help maximize the success of your business.

Experiment with social media ads

Social media ads offer multiple advertising options to entice your target audience. Advanced targeting capabilities based on interests, behaviors, and demographics make it easier to connect with potential customers.

Various ad formats, such as image ads, video ads, and carousel ads, provide creative opportunities to engage users. These ads help you define your campaign objectives and categorize the placement of ads for specific goals such as lead generation, sales, visibility of business, etc.,visibility of business etc,.

Retargeting visitors

This method allows you to display ads for existing customers who have visited your website previously. For instance, a customer may have visited your website but not purchased anything. Social media ads play a crucial role by popping up continuously to customers who have visited your website or have previously been acquainted with your brand.

The key benefit of social media ads is to re-engage customers who were previously interested in your brand and your offerings. This can increase your brand’s recall value and result in higher conversion rates.

Monitor your ad’s performance

Paid ads also involve continuous monitoring of your KPIs, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and ad costs, to ensure that your objectives are precise and clear. This helps you keep track of your performance, determine whether your campaign ads resonate with the target audience, and find ways to improve if they are not at their best.

You can use A/B testing to check the effectiveness of your elements, such as meta descriptions, keywords, image creatives, and CTAs. At the same time, monitor your bids, ad spends and allocated budgets to review and refine your parameters, which will help ensure the overall success of your paid ads.

Influencer Partnerships

It’s not just about how you promote your content. Who you promote your content with plays a significant role in helping you reach your customer base. And that’s where influencer partnerships come into the picture. Influencers play a major role in making or breaking any product/service, and this holds in all cases.

If you want a good social image, you will have to work with collaborators, otherwise known as influencers, who will team up with your brand to market your offerings on your behalf. These influencers will have loyal followers, and they help build meaningful relationships with your customers and help promote your brand using their knowledge and expertise.

How will you know which influencer can help generate leads for your business? Understand that there are four types of influencer partnerships based on followers, namely:

• Nano influencers who have 1-10k followers
• Micro-influencers who have 10k -100k followers
• Macro-influencers who have 100k-1 million followers and
• Mega Influencers who have more than 1 million followers

Your objective is to choose an influencer who will add value to your business. Based on your budget and the content you wish to promote, you can select the right influencer for your brand.

Content Syndication

Do you feel that your content is not getting the projected likes and subscriptions, even though you followed the strategy to the ‘t’? If that’s the case, then all you have to do is promote your content through a syndicate.

Content syndication refers to churning out published content to bigger websites to maximize customer engagement. This method allows your content to reach a wider audience base. You can syndicate any form of content, such as blogs, podcasts, videos, social media posts, and more.

The benefits of syndicating your content are:

• Increased customer reach will help expand your content to a larger audience and boost your brand’s visibility.
• Republishing your latest and most popular pieces of content on prominent guest sites such as Medium, BlogSpot or LinkedIn can help you get the maximum engagement.
• Syndicating your content can help build backlinks and eventually increase search engine rank.
• Content syndication is one of the core aspects of lead generation.

Cross-Promotional Activities

Cross-promotion refers to collaborating with one or two businesses for mutual benefit. Any two or more companies can cross-promote their offerings to reach their target audience. For instance, if your business is in the fintech space, you can cross-promote your services to payment gateways and banks and vice versa.

You can cross-promote other businesses by way of joint webinars, podcasts, marketing events, etc., by offering complimentary products (merchandise) or sponsoring the products to reach a combined audience.

Repurposing Content

Have you ever wondered why certain pieces of content did not reach your targeted audience? The content may not have been appealing enough for your audience. The solution to this type of scenario is to repurpose your content to a different format so as to match your audience’s wavelength.

To put it simply, the process of repurposing content into an alterable format is called content repurposing (content recycling). This involves changing and rewriting old content to a form that suits the tastes and preferences of your target audience. For example, if you feel that your carousel post is not getting targeted engagement, rewrite and convert the same post as a video or a reel and watch your engagement grow.

Here are some key benefits of repurposing your content:

• It helps increase your content to go viral as you adapt it to different formats.
• You can not only attract an old audience, but repurposing can help bring in new people to your brand, thus widening your target base.
• By creating multiple formats of the same content and publishing them on different sites, you can cut down costs, as you are just reusing the same content everywhere.
• Your content remains fresh and evergreen in the minds of your customers, as they can view the same content on every platform.

Interactive and Visual Content

Start publishing content that keeps your customers wanting more! How can you ensure that your content lingers in people’s minds? By bringing in interactive content. This subtle art of adding key elements that encourage your audience to participate is called interactive content. Polls, quizzes, image comparison slides, hover animations, and clickable hotspots are some of the best examples of interactive visual content.

According to a report, 88% of marketers say interactive content is effective at differentiating their brand.

The benefits of using interactive visual content are multifold. Here are a few to highlight:

• Using creative visuals, you can capture the interest of your audience to participate, ask questions, and collaboratively come to a solution quickly.
• Interactive visual content is one of the most powerful tools for gaining higher conversions.
• Easily gather data about your customers’ tastes and preferences.
• By creating engaging content, you can achieve your business goals easily.

Now that we have discussed all the content promotional strategies, let us take a look at the top content promotional tools that can be used to boost your business.

TOP CONTENT PROMOTIONAL TOOLS TO USE

Irrespective of the content promotional strategy that you have used, your content cannot promote itself without proper content promotional tools. Each tool has been carefully researched based on its functionality, user experience, scalability, and how well it provides support to businesses.

The tabular column below gives an overview of the best content promotional tools that you can use to elevate your business.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

We have reached the end of this blog. As a business owner, all you need to know is how to leverage your content to suit your target audience and what strategy you need to use to promote your content, as we’ve listed quite a few tools that can be used to promote your strategy.

1. Stay Consistent in your efforts.

Promote your content regularly to increase visibility and boost engagement

2. Measure and analyze your content.

Evaluate your content by tracking its effectiveness to identify what works and what doesn’t.

3. Stay updated about current trends.

Content is an evolving field, and you will have to keep yourself aware of the latest trends and plan your strategies accordingly.

4. Experience and experiment.

Try experimenting, and don’t be afraid to take risks.

5. Quality is Paramount

Ensure that creating high-quality content is of utmost importance as it helps reach your target audience. By combining these, you can build a great strategy to promote your ‘killer’ content online.

CONCLUSION

This blog brings out the best strategies and tools that you, as a business owner, can use to accelerate your growth in the digital landscape. Rather than stick to one plan, it is always advisable to use a multi-faceted approach that provides the advantages of various channels and strategies. As a B2B industry, you will have to ensure that one-size doesn’t fit all.

To ensure that you get the perfect marketing data, you will have to figure out who your target audience is. These, put together, can help scale your business by reaching your target audience, amplifying your brand’s voice, bringing out more conversions, and, ultimately, spearheading your sustainable business growth.

In the end, it’s all about continued efforts and perseverance. Success doesn’t happen overnight. Review and filter your strategies regularly, and you can watch your business grow gradually. As you implement these strategies, keep in mind that focusing on building relationships with your audience is the crux, as this will be the stepping stone for any business to achieve long-term acceleration and success.