Content Promotion
Internet is a crowded place and hence, it is important to promote your content from the day you start creating content to reach its audience. Planning content promotion is an essential task as you need to stand out in this crowded era of internet.
Social Media
Social media is a good and obvious start to promote your content. To use social media channels, you’ll need to plan a few things:
- Your social media channel selection. Which channels are you on, and which are most important for you and which one you want to use to reach out to your audience?
- A posting schedule for each type of content you’ll be promoting. To save time in creating posting templates, you can check out this website, Canva for pre-built posts templates.
- An understanding of social media analytics. Monitoring what works and what doesn’t will help you make the most of your time in the long run.
Follow this graphic as a reference, to help prioritize social media channels;
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still an efficient way to communicate and stay connected to your existing clients or customers while also promoting your business. It is effective when done strategically and thoughtfully.
Email marketing delivers 4,000% ROI. According to Campaign Monitor, it also 40 times more effective for customer acquisition than social media.
If you have a database which you can target to reach out to your existing audience, you need to develop a strategy to target the same. Plot out an email sending schedule.
This guide will help you select the best days and times to send e-newsletters.
- Plan an email content creation process.
- This consists of:
-
-
- Writing your email copy.
- Designing email templates
- Analysing the performance per email.
- Repeat.
-
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential that your content continues to gather organic traffic. On a basic level, don’t forget the following once your content is ready to be published online.
- Title tags. The blue links at the top of search results in the picture below are called title tags. They should be 70 characters or less and should include your target keyword.
- Meta descriptions. The descriptive text beneath the blue links in the picture below are the meta descriptions. They influence click-through rates. They should be 150 characters or less (but not too short).
There are also some other basic on-page SEO elements to consider. These include:
- Keyword targeting. Check if your content targets a specific keyword phrase?
- Latent semantic indexing. Does your content include terms relevant to your primary topic?
- Keyword placement within your content. Place your primary keyword in the URL, H1, and body content. Add secondary keywords naturally into your copy.
Outreach
Now that you’re creating high quality content every day. You’re posting to Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. You’re emailing your list of subscribers every time you publish a piece of content.
But there’s still no traffic.
Content marketing is important to reach out to larger audience with your content. It brings new visitors and linkbacks to your website. Hence, outreach is an important part of any content marketing campaign. Outreach marketing involves directly promoting your content to influential people whose audiences are like yours. The goal here is to get the influencer to share your content with their fans which will help increasing your exposure to the right kinds of people.
Whenever you release a new piece of content, reach out to your list of influencers. It should be part of your regular content marketing process. Outreach will take some time to build relationship. You might end up sending 50 to 100 emails until someone responds to your content outreach. Focus on relationships, not tweets, shares, or links.
Over the period, outreach becomes easier. Your influencers will begin to seek you and will value your relationship and content.
If you have any questions about outreach or content marketing, contact me now.
Step 4: Measurement, Analytics, And Reporting
Let’s say you’ve gathered an excellent team of talented content marketers. You’ve drafted a content marketing strategy, and you’re all working to execute on the plan. All these ingredients are necessary, to ensure successful content marketing.
Measurement of content marketing efforts comes at the end of the content marketing process framework. Good content marketing reporting shows your organization how your efforts are driving KPIs and making money.
Setting Up Analytics Tools
There are a lot of different analytics tools out there. Which ones you use will depend on the type of you’re doing. My personal favourite is Google Analytics which is near-ubiquitous for content marketers.
There are other analytics tools that you can explore depending on what KPIs or ROIs you want to measure.
- Piwik: This is another freemium alternative to Google Analytics.
- Heap: Freemium analytics platform that tracks without using tags.
- Kissmetrics: An advanced behavioral metrics platform (we use them heavily here at CoSchedule).
- Adobe Analytics: Enterprise-grade analytics platform.Next step is to determine when marketing reports will go out. Depending on the tools you use, you might be able to set this up automatically. In fact, this guide from Google covers how to setup monthly reporting automatically in Google Analytics.
- Let’s break down common content marketing metrics into a sensible schedule:
Establishing a Reporting Schedule
- Weekly / Monthly: Specific metrics connected to the performance of your doers.
- Quarterly: Higher-level summary of progress toward long-term goals.
- Annual: Very high-level goals.
In short, the more impact a goal or metric has on day-to-day performance for your team in the trenches, the more often those metrics likely need to be reported on.
Now plan your content process and get more organized! Need help with content marketing process. Contact me now!