Every single click or view that your content gets takes you a step closer to a conversion. A conversion in this case does not necessarily have to be a customer. It could mean getting a solid lead or a subscriber to your newsletter too. Whatever your goal, the best way to drive more engagement with content is the same – effective content promotion. Having a well-planned content promotion strategy for your blog makes sure that your blog posts reach as many relevant people as possible on multiple channels. Content distribution and promotion not only help expand your audience base but also give you multiple contact points with your existing audience.

Without a content promotion strategy, your worthy blog posts are missing out on the attention they deserve. But what is a content promotion strategy? How do you plan one? What channels do you use for content promotion? We’ll talk about it all in this post.

• What is a content promotion strategy in marketing?
• Why do you need a strong content promotion strategy for your blog?
• How to approach content promotion for your blog
• Preparing for the promotions pre-publishing
• Blog content promotions on publishing day
• Blog content promotion post-publishing
• Bonus tips for effective content promotions

What is a content promotion strategy in marketing?

A content promotion strategy is a well-laid-out plan to distribute and promote your blog posts on multiple channels, both organic and paid. There are various ways you can promote your content, such as on social media platforms, through content syndication platforms, pay-per-click ads, and more. Though content promotion looks like a post-publishing activity, planning your content promotion strategy should ideally start before you even get to creating the content.

Partnering with the best digital marketing companies can significantly enhance your promotion efforts, ensuring your content reaches the right audience effectively.

Why do you need a strong content promotion strategy for your blog?

Having a content promotion strategy for your blog is important because there is immense competition. There are a hundred other marketers and brands producing content on the same topics as you are. Publishing the content on your blog alone and expecting results is a waste of your efforts. Every time you publish a blog post, only your blog subscribers would be notified. And for a new business or a small business, that is just a handful of people.

To effectively manage this, a solid content workflow is essential for ensuring your content reaches a wider audience. If you have aced SEO, your blog might appear in relevant searches, but that takes a while and grabbing the top ranks isn’t easy. The best chances of getting your blog content in front of more people is by proactively distributing it on more channels.

A strong content promotion strategy can help you –

• Expand your reach with your content
• Tap into the audience base of influencers and others who share your content
• Build connections beyond your blog and website
• Build a presence on multiple platforms while offering value to the users
• Generate brand awareness through content
• Organically drive more traffic to your blog
• Start a conversation around your blog content
• Get the pulse of the audience for future blog content ideas

TL;DR here’s a video with all the key takeaways from this blog post.

How to approach content promotion for your blog

When we talk about blog promotions, many marketers often limit themselves to just sharing the blog post on social media. 90% of bloggers drive traffic to their blog by promoting on social media. But social media is still one of the least effective channels for blog promotion, if the stats below are to be believed.

Source: Orbit Media

If you really want to make an impact with efficient content distribution and promotion, you have to think beyond the usual.

Ideally, the blog promotion process should be divided into three stages – pre-publishing, publishing day, and post-publishing.

Preparing for the promotions pre-publishing

Prepping for the blog promotions should ideally start before the content is written and published. Once you have decided what topic you wish to write on, you can start creating a buzz around the blog post. Many of these activities can also support your content creation for the article.

Here’s what you can do as part of the pre-publishing stage.

1. Ask questions related to your topic on social media

On your social media channels, you can create polls or simple surveys around the topic you are writing on. Social media users generally engage with polls as they are not very time-consuming. People also want to know what the results would be, generating a sense of curiosity among your target audience.

Many of these responses may actually be valuable, and you can use them in your content, quoting the respondents. This gives you more substantial content and the person quoted would be obliged to share your post once it is published. So you’re hitting two targets with one arrow.

2. Gather inputs from thought leaders and influencers

Another way to ensure that your blog post gets more shares after it is published, is by sharing inputs from thought leaders and influencers in your industry. There are two advantages of this. First, your audience would find the content more credible and trustworthy if it shares opinions and inputs from real industry experts.

Secondly, including contributions from industry experts and influencers urges them to share the content as it is equal publicity for them too. You can, thus, tap into their huge following as well.

3. Link to other authoritative and relevant blogs

By adding statistics or valuable information from other blogs and linking out to them in your content, you are gaining more allies for content promotion. If you have given a backlink to someone, you can also reach out to them asking to share your content once it is published. They may or may not oblige, but in most cases they would be more than happy to share as your success would build authority for their links too.

4. Add images and graphics

One smart way to make content promotions easier post-publishing is by adding lots of relevant images and graphics to your post. Images and graphics are easier to share on social media. You will not need any new creatives for content promotions if you already have a few good infographics, charts or similar assets within your content. Remember that a blog post is an excellent way to promote your brand identity, and you can add your creative logos to make the audience remember the brand.

Here’s an example from our blog on building a content creation process.

This infographic summarizes almost everything that we discuss in the blog post. We used the same image to promote the post on platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, etc. where images garner the most attention.

When creating content on Narrato, you can create your own custom graphics for your blog posts, using the Canva integration on the platform.

5. Add Click to Tweet buttons within your blog post

To make social sharing easier for your readers, having Click to Tweet buttons is imperative. Pick some of the quotable content, statistics, facts or figures, and add them with a Click to Tweet (for which you might need a plugin on your CMS).

Here’s an example from the Content Marketing Institute blog.

It is also a good idea to have other social sharing buttons on your blog, in case someone finds a post very useful and wants to share with their network. Making it easier for them increases the likelihood of them actually sharing.

6. Add internal links to and from your older blog posts

Content promotion can be done within your blog too. Something as simple as linking out from an old, high-performing blog post can help drive more traffic to your content. Not only does internal linking build authority in terms of SEO, but it also directs readers from your old posts to newer ones.

Blog content promotions on publishing day

This is probably the kind of promotion that most of us are familiar with. These are the content promotion tactics that we use immediately after a post goes live. There are different activities involved at this stage too.

7. Social media posts

There’s a reason social media is the most preferred channel for promoting blog content among marketers. It is one platform where you can reach thousands of users at once. According to recent stats, 4.62 billion people use social media now. So finding your target audience personas on social channels should not be that difficult.

But promoting on social media does not just mean sharing the blog post on social media. There is so much else you can do. Every blog post you create is a treasure trove of valuable content. You can create multiple social media posts from it.

We at Narrato, for instance, create one social media post for each section of our blog posts. You can have an introductory post that summarizes the article in a more digestible format – and this goes out immediately after publishing. The remaining social posts can be smaller summaries or key takeaways from each section, that you can post at regular intervals.

You should also try and repurpose your blog post into different formats for social. Here’s an example from our LinkedIn feed.

For our blog post on 50+ content marketing statistics, we created carousel posts and videos using the key statistics from each section. This also drives more engagement as you are giving your audience a visual representation of the blog post content that is easy to consume. Don’t forget to add the link to the blog post with the post or in the first comment.

8. Email newsletters for content promotion

Email marketing is another great way to promote your blog content. You must already have an email list for your business. All you need is to ensure you have kept away spam form submissions, and you can reach out.

Every time you publish a new blog post, you can create a newsletter on the same theme and share the key insights from your blog post in it. Keep the newsletter short but comprehensive and encourage recipients to read the full article with a strong CTA at the end.

With email newsletters, as always, you have to make sure that your subject line is catchy and compelling. Also ensure that you personalize these emails for more impact.

You can create and save a template for your email newsletters on Narrato. That way every time you create a new blog post, all you have to do is add content to the newsletter template without having to worry about structuring your emails.

Apart from the email newsletter, you should also email any collaborators, influencers, partners or anyone you’re linking out to, who may be interested in reading and sharing the post.

9. Influencer marketing

If you know any influencers in your industry, you could collaborate with them for a cross-promotional campaign. While someone may be willing to promote your post without any perks if it’s valuable enough, you’re more likely to get success with a cross-promotion offer. If they agree to promote your blog post on their social media channels, you can share some of their content as well.

Try and strike a deal that suits both parties. You could increase your reach many folds with this promotion strategy.

10. PR and communities

While the content is still hot, it is also a good idea to invest some effort into PR and community outreach. Press releases may not be feasible for each and every post. But if you are publishing something very valuable like an original research report, a survey report, or something similar, it deserves the added publicity from a press release.

For all other blog posts, you can do community outreach. Find and participate in communities that have your target audience and share excerpts from your blog posts on relevant threads. There may be a lot of questions that your blog post can answer, so use these opportunities, answer the questions, and share the link if someone wants to learn more.

Platforms like Quora, Reddit, Digg, and others can be great for such outreach as well.

11. Slideshare and YouTube

This might a little extra effort, but repurposing your blog posts into slideshows and videos can have huge benefits. Turn the key takeaways from your content into an engaging slideshow for Slideshare and convert the same into video content for YouTube. Both these platforms have their own unique user base and anyone who discovers your content on these channels may land on your blog too.

Blog content promotion post-publishing

Content promotion does not end with the publishing day activities. For successful content marketing that keeps driving results for you long into the future, you have to keep your blog posts alive in the eyes of your audience. This means promoting your content at regular intervals, consistently.

Here’s how you can promote content as an ongoing effort.

12. Ongoing promotions on social media

Remember the multiple social media posts we created from the blog post? Sprinkle them across your social media channels, separated by a few weeks/ months for ongoing promotions. Bringing your content to the limelight every once in a while is sure to attract some new visitors to your blog. Your social media following increases over time and new users can find your quality content through the ongoing promotions.

13. Guest posting on a similar topic

Guest posts play a huge role in link building for your blog. But they can also be used as a long-term content promotion tactic. Create a guest post for another site on a topic similar to your blog post. In the guest post, you can link to the original blog post you’re trying to promote. Not only will this build authority for your blog but will also drive traffic from the other site to your post. Just make sure the content on the guest post is not very close to your blog post, to avoid plagiarism penalties.

14. Content syndication on different platforms

Once the post has been published on your site and has lived its course, you can syndicate it to other platforms to gain a new audience. Medium can be a great place to syndicate your blog posts, as it has a huge user base and many people do follow Medium. Another good channel could be LinkedIn, with the LinkedIn Pulse feature that lets you publish long-form articles on the platform.

Reposting on these platforms does not create issues with plagiarism on Google, while you can redirect new readers to the original blog post.

15. Retargeting with automation

Audience retargeting works with content marketing too. If a visitor to your blog engages with a particular post, you can use automation tools to retarget them and suggest other related blog posts they might be interested in. Retargeting can be done either through triggered emails, based on their actions on your blog or user behavior. Or you can also retarget with pop-up recommendations on the blog itself.

Here’s an example of how Content Marketing Institute does it.

Bonus tips for effective content promotions

Here are a few key points to keep in mind for successful content promotions.

• Be clear about your goals with blog promotions. Determine whether you’re looking for lead generation, creating brand awareness or acquiring customers. This will influence your promotion strategy too.
• Segment your audience appropriately to ensure that you choose the right content promotion channels. Targeting can be much more efficient if your audience segmentation is right.
• Make content promotions an integral part of your blog content strategy, and not an afterthought. Plan promotions right from the beginning for flawless execution.
• If your content caters to a highly specific target audience, you can give QR code marketing a shot. This involves generating a QR code for your content and strategically placing it at locations that see a lot of traffic from your target audience. This does a great job of bringing an offline audience online and consuming your content.

Summing up

If done right, organic content promotion strategies for your blog can yield nearly the same results as paid promotions. All you need is an understanding of who you are targeting and where you can find them. Dividing your content promotion efforts into pre-publishing, publishing day and post-publishing stages should give more structure to your plan. Try it out, and soon content promotions will seem effortless to you.