We always focus on content creation as the most important part of marketing our products and services online. However, most companies fail at content marketing due to a lack of appropriate strategies. Content marketing isn’t only about creating useful content and posting it online.
According to Hubspot Academy, “content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Internet is a very crowded place, and while you might have amazing content, there is still a lot of content that is already available. You need to put a great deal of effort from day one.
In this blog, we will reflect upon some free techniques that you can use to market your content to your audience in an effective and efficient way.
Building an audience
When you create content for your audience, you go through brainstorming and prioritization phases. If you have sorted your content and segregated its target audience, you’re already off to a good start.
Some of the key tools that might help you market your content better are:
Influencer marketing
Influencers are industry experts who are experienced in generating and nurturing large audiences, and have the clout to influence those audiences. They are the ones who are listened to closely by your target audience. Networking with influencers is an effective way for marketers to gain brand recognition.
For influencers, both high social authority and a high number of followers are good. However, social authority can be more beneficial than large amounts of followers. It indicates that the influencer has an engaged audience rather than a passive one.
You can reach out to specific influencers through a tool called Buzzstream. Once you fill in your information with specific keywords, it generates contact information for people related to those niches. This will help you connect with the influencers and ask for suggestions, advice, or even quotes to include in your writings.
You can add the influencers’ websites and social media account links to your blog as payback and request them to share your content once it is published. This will increase your market exposure and increase the credibility and reputation of your content and brand.
Comment marketing
Have you observed irrelevant or promotional links commented under blogs and social media videos? These tactics are mostly ineffective and the comment usually gets zero recognition. In extreme cases, it can even get you banned from sites that keep an eye on posted comments.
This is why you need to focus more on effective ways of being visible. Instead of being too obvious and posting links everywhere, search for people who are writing interesting things correlated to your content. Converse with them in the comment section, but do not mention your product, services, or your content.
The key purpose of comment marketing is to establish yourself as someone who is interested & knowledgeable in a certain topic. This will build your reputation and will help you gain followers in the long term.
Guest Posting
For content marketing, it is not necessary for your content to be visible only on your website. Through guest posting, you can create content for other websites with similar target audience but with higher reach. Guest posting is useful when you want to gain authority, qualified traffic to your site, relevant links, motivated leads, and their conversions.
You need to search for websites that have good page authority and domain authority and start commenting on their posts to build a relationship with them. Pitch the editors of those websites with exciting blog post ideas that are relevant to their sites.
If you want to try guest posting, find websites with credibility and relevance to you. Publish unique, relevant, and interesting content that will make readers seek you out.
Outreach / PR
Another avenue for promoting your content is Outreach and Public Relations, whose foundation lies in relationship building. In both of these cases, you find out what the writer or reporter is actually interested in and carefully tailor your pitches to make sure you send relevant information to them. This will encourage them to write good things about you in return.
When networking, Twitter is the most reliable source for finding people you want to target. For Twitter, Followerwonk is a great tool to search for influencers, journalists, writers, or even hashtags related to what you are writing about.
Once you know who you need to target, you need to work on your pitch.
Journalists and writers want to touch subjects that are new and exciting, rather than something cliche and reposts. They will appreciate you valuing their time and putting some thought into the transaction and what they will be getting out of it.
Social media marketing includes more relationship building than just straightforward promotional activity. Content and social media teams work together to create relevant and interesting content they can readily share.
When promoting your content on social media, you need to choose the right channel for your product/services. Some content will market readily with Twitter, however, some will go perfectly with Facebook. You should know your audience well enough to know where they would want to see certain content.
Post your content at the right times with social media management tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Buffer. These tools work with the built-in analytics in social media to give information on what day(s) and the time your target audience is active.
Although hashtags are overused nowadays in social media posts, it can be one way to get eyes on your content. Follow hashtags that might be relevant for your industry and include them in your posts.
These are the ways in which you can market your content by building an audience for which you do not require money. Besides these, there are also paid resources which can promote your content on social channels.
Hopefully, you now have all the information you need to get your content out into the world to the widest audience possible.
Need more tips and tricks to promote your content?
Call us or fill out this form today to book a free 1 hour consultation with our experts.
