Content Promotion Strategy
(7-minute read)
Our content promotion strategy involves identifying our customer base, researching their online presence, and strategically delivering content to them.
Since the launch of our website and agency, the strategies utilized to attain our goals have experienced notable change.
Community content promotion was the main distribution channel we used to distribute content and attract visitors back to your website. The idea behind community content promotion is fairly straightforward: we create content, manually share your articles across social media channels, across those communities that already exist and contain your target audience. The advantage is that you'll draw the community, which is the target audience, back to your articles, blog posts, and video content, and it's free (other than manual labor).
When our content marketing company was launched in 2017, the industry primarily relied on community content promotion as its main strategy. By getting your valuable content in front of readers who would profit from it quickly after publication—within days—it helped increase traffic in the short term. By putting the content in front of people who might link to it, it also assisted in long-term organic traffic growth and benefited our SEO.
However, content promotion through social media channels and communities has been losing effectiveness. Here are a couple notable reasons.
The communities are experiencing an influx of low-quality content that is causing frustration for the managers and overwhelming the members.
Algorithm adjustments on social media platforms: Facebook and LinkedIn began to alter their algorithms to de-prioritize content that contained external links, driving businesses toward their paid advertisements rather than product discovery through their organic groups. Reddit also became more difficult to navigate and has monetized and pushed its paid content model.
Hard to Scale— Community promotion got harder and harder to scale as our agency grew.
These factors caused most of the results we're seeing across the landscape to plateau.
I spent my days and nights in Q4 of last year testing different channels in an effort to find other content distribution channels that worked (and could scale), as I realized that our agency was in danger if we didn't come up with alternative strategies for content distribution. I looked into a number of options, including purchasing email newsletters, Quora ads, and distribution services like Outbrain.
We decided to concentrate on these content distribution strategies this year:
Facebook ads for paid distribution
Search retargeting and Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads use exact match and sometimes phrase match when it makes sense
Programmatic Social and site retargeting
Email lists and marketing
Link building and SEO are long-term traffic strategies.
Community engagement (now a smaller portion of our service)
Let's talk about how these strategies have helped us and our clients. I'll:
Give a brief description of each of these tactics' strategies.
Share your inspiration for them
Share some of the outcomes we've already attained.
Why use such a variety of channels for content distribution?
We have always believed that both short-term and long-term traffic must be driven by a content promotion strategy.
When I was running the sales and marketing department for a Top 100 hospital, I interviewed a number of content marketing firms and was assured that they all promoted content. However, when I questioned them about their approach, they would typically say that they would produce social media updates to share on our company's LinkedIn company page or tweet out on our company Twitter account. They wouldn't hold themselves accountable to any actual KPIs like traffic or leads; instead, they would gauge their success using concepts like "brand awareness" or "social shares."
I never felt comfortable with that strategy because I didn't believe it would yield the desired outcomes.
Therefore, when we first opened our agency, we believed that we needed to identify channels that would generate results quickly and consistently, paving the way for long-lasting results.
We ultimately decided to concentrate on paid promotion, on-page optimization, and link-building as the channels to accomplish this. The benefits of pairing paid promotion with content creation include:
You are able to drive immediate traffic to the new content
It's incredibly economical; a click often costs between $0.15 and $1.00 depending on the industry (e.g. personal injury law in a competitive market can be more expensive)
Depending on the platform, we have a lot of targeting options
It scales as your content and needs change
Before you optimize your content for the long term, it's a great way to test how it performs with Google Analytics
Benefits of Paid Content Promotion
Paid content promotion is an incredibly effective way to increase viewership and traffic for your content. With paid promotion, you can target specific audiences and drive immediate traffic. It is also relatively inexpensive, with click costs ranging from $0.15 to $1.00, depending on the channel used. This makes it an economical option when compared to more labor-intensive strategies such as link building and SEO. When used in conjunction with organic growth tactics, paid promotion can be a powerful tool for increasing viewership and driving sustainable traffic over time.
Our Higher Buyer Intent Content pairs well with paid content promotion and drives traffic to your website. By creating content that focuses on addressing the specific pain points of potential buyers, you can ensure that the people visiting your site are more likely to convert.
To maximize effectiveness, target keywords related to your product or service and create content that answers questions about it in an authoritative manner. We use Google Adwords to focus on specific keyword phrases that are related to top of funnel and other keywords that are associated with lower down-the-funnel searches to promote this content and reach more potential customers.
Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger) and LinkedIn are perfectly viable methods for promoting content. Meta has removed many of the targeting options, but using first party data such as your customer and prospect lists allows us the ability to target those clients, plus we can use the data Facebook collects to create look-alike audiences.
Programmatic social advertising is a powerful tool that allows marketers to show high-performing targeted ads that were created on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to users outside the platform as they move around the web. Programmatic social advertising helps marketers reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in order to get maximum results. With its high degree of accuracy, programmatic social advertising can be used to effectively boost brand awareness and generate leads that eventually convert into customers.
Site retargeting allows us to retarget website visitors based on specific pages of your website that they have visited. Using our universal Pixel, we can retarget website visitors with specific messaging related to their activity.
Search retargeting allows us to retarget searchers based on keywords they search for. Traditionally, we have focused most of our efforts on Google since 93% of all searches through 2022 were performed on Google. That is now changing with Generative AI, as will our tactics.
Competitor conquesting is an effective content promotion strategy that involves targeting customers of a competitor or direct competitors in order to acquire new customers. By targeting your competitor’s audiences, you can create content and promotions that present your brand as the superior option. This strategy can be used for both organic and paid content promotions. To maximize effectiveness, use keyword research tools to identify relevant search terms related to the competitor, then create content that answers questions about those topics in an authoritative manner. Additionally, you can also use geofencing technology to create a virtual area around your competitor's physical location, using Device ID to retarget people who have visited their store or showroom. I'll link to another article, as this is a pretty large topic.
Email marketing is another great content promotion strategy that can help you reach a large audience quickly. With email marketing, you can create personalized messages to promote your content and target specific people in your audience. You can also use segmentation to target different groups of people with tailored messaging and offers. Additionally, email campaigns are trackable, allowing you to see which emails generate the most engagement and conversions. This information can be used to optimize future campaigns for an even better return on investment (ROI).
It's relatively simple to get your content to rank for the terms you're targeting if you have the best content. This will ensure that the people visiting your site are more likely to convert. Make sure you have a good understanding of the buying cycle for your potential customers so that you can tailor your messaging accordingly. Finally, measure and track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as traffic, leads, and conversions to gauge the success of your efforts.
When attempting to rank for extremely competitive keywords, link-building gives us that added competitive advantage. It’s important to target authoritative sites in your industry when looking for link-building opportunities.
You’ll yield results in both the short and long term by combining paid and organic efforts.
Our Approach to Audience Curation
Step 1: Audience testing
We market to three different target markets:
Cold audiences (determined by demographic and interest targeting gleaned from client-sponsored customer research sessions)
Lookalike audiences: We upload customer lists to Facebook and create lookalike audiences based on a company's best customers, or we gain access to a company's pixel and/or install a universal Pixel
Retargeting: We frequently show our content to our target audience using a technique called Cross-platform advertising. Visit out article to learn more how this works.
Cold audiences help us reach net new prospects who might find the content valuable, lookalike audiences help us reach new prospects who are most like the ones who have already converted, and retargeting helps us reach prospects who may not have converted yet (and customers who are more likely to drive positive engagement towards our content).
The first month or two are dedicated to audience testing. To find audiences that interact with the content we produce, we may test a variety of cold audiences and lookalike audiences.
Step 2: Content Testing
We test different articles we've written to see which ones have the highest engagement and lowest cost, as well as to see which articles show conversion potential once audiences begin to demonstrate their engagement with our content.
We move those pieces of content into ongoing promotional campaigns after determining which articles have low cost (e.g., Facebook conversions) and are defined differently for each client, but typically a free trial signup, lead form fill, etc.; we then test new articles in an effort to find more winners.
We don't spend money on advertising if the articles don't do well. They might receive more traffic over the long term from SEO, social media sharing, or another channel like email marketing.
Step 3: Improve Creatives and Audiences
We optimize the creative (headlines, images, video, etc.) and audiences after determining which audiences and which articles perform well in order to further reduce costs for each of our ads.
Promotional Costs
The costs per landing page view, which are the primary metrics for cold audience campaigns and lookalike campaigns, range from $.60 to $1.00+ when we launch a new campaign.
Following the aforementioned steps 1–3, we can typically reduce the costs to between $.15 and $.30. But the price varies depending on the audience we're targeting; occasionally it's lower and occasionally it's higher.
Our SEO strategy and backlink building strategy for long-term content distribution
If you've been following our website for a while, you might already be familiar with our SEO strategy of going after Higher Buying Intent keywords.
If you haven't, we prioritize keywords with high purchase intent over those with high traffic volume.
This strategy was chosen because, on average, producing content around high-intent keywords results in conversion rates that are between 1 and 4 percent higher than those achieved by focusing on high traffic keywords.
I won't spend too much time on this for the sake of this post because the marketing strategy is covered in greater detail in these posts on pain point SEO and content ideation.
Our process is to produce content that is linkable and rankable
Our goal is to create top-ranking articles for our chosen keywords, which we achieve through a strategic approach to keyword selection and content improvement.
Our team carefully evaluates each article to ensure its uniqueness and quality before publication. This may include identifying a more suitable expert, enhancing the article's structure for readability, incorporating unique perspectives, and other considerations.
The procedures and structures for accomplishing this have been discussed in several articles on this website, but in summary:
Many marketers prioritize creating general overview content, while we take a different approach by choosing specific topics, keywords, or angles to target. This aligns with high-buyer-intent SEO, which favors medium- to long-tail keywords due to their specialization.
During the planning of the article, we conduct interviews with subject-matter experts to gather unique and valuable ideas, concepts, strategies, and details that differentiate us from competitors. These interviews typically involve a one-hour conversation with a single expert, which forms the basis of the essay's arguments.
To ensure the accuracy of our claims, we incorporate detailed information and seek input from experts in areas where we lack expertise.
What happens after we post a keyword-targeted article?
It is common practice to wait a few weeks before considering the need for link building for an article. This is due to Google's testing of the article's placement in search engine results pages and user engagement with the content.
Once an article is published, we utilize Ahrefs' rank tracker tool to track its performance and positioning over time by entering the relevant keyword.
