There’s one part of content marketing strategy that we don’t talk about enough: content promotion. After you’ve found a freelancer and they have helped you create a bank of great content, it’s time to distribute it — and that often means paid promotion. 

Not only is paid content promotion necessary, but it is also an important and often cost-effective way for start-ups and other new businesses to build an audience and find customers.

Why content promotion is important

When you’re just starting out, it’s hard to build an audience — especially in a supersaturated content market. While 77% of internet users report reading blogs, there are also roughly 7.5 million blog posts written a day. Breaking through the noise often requires your marketing team to do more than just set up a social media profile and push your content out. Putting together a paid distribution plan can help you reach beyond your current supporters and find untapped audiences.

Think of content promotion as a customer acquisition strategy for the top of the funnel. 

Introducing people to your brand through great content can lead to them following you on social media, subscribing to a newsletter, or taking other down funnel actions that get you closer to a conversion. Bringing new people to your website also gives you the chance to retarget them further down the line with more ads, even if they don’t give up their information upon a first visit.

Types of content promotion

The good news is that there are many types of content promotion for marketers to mix and match — choosing the channels that are right for their content and budget. Let’s explore some of those types of content promotion:

Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is often the entry point for many companies trying out digital advertising for the first time. Google Ads makes it easy for newbie advertisers to get in the game and easily target users who fit a specific profile. Most social media platforms offer similar features.

Influencer outreach 

Reaching out to influencers in your industry can be a great way to spread the word about your content. For instance, sending a report you created that has new and interesting stats to someone who talks about your industry can be a great way to get extra publicity. Or you take things a bit further, and fully adopt an influencer strategy — asking influencers to feature your products in their videos, recipes, or whatever content it is they create. 

Public relations (PR) 

Have a new report? It’s time to start pitching the report to the media. PR may be “old-fashioned” at this point, but it’s still an important part of getting eyes on your content. But PR outreach can also help you build backlinks to your site — an important part of SEO. As more media outlets cover your company and your content, the more links will be out there on the web, just waiting to be discovered by readers (and indexed by Google).

Social media 

We don’t have to lecture you about the importance of a robust social media presence — but promoting your content via social media is more complicated than just pushing it to your page. Advertising on social media can be quite inexpensive, and very effective. I worked with one company that boosted one of their blog posts on LinkedIn — specifically targeting people at one company — and the emails started pouring in.

Email marketing 

Email marketing never goes out of style and is a great way to reach out to the people already in your sphere. But when you’re constantly trying to sell them something, your emails can quickly become white noise. Break it up with content recommendations, and let them know when you have a new piece of content they may find useful. 

Syndication

Syndication isn’t just for Seinfeld. You can use tools like Taboola or Outbrain to recommend your content to people across the web — even on some of the biggest sites on the web.  

Budgeting for content promotion

Content marketing experts have often promoted an 80/20 split of your budget — putting 80% of your budget into promotion. I’ve already railed about why I think this is a terrible idea unless you have a huge budget, so I won’t go into that again. But you should put a significant portion of your budget behind promotion — especially early on. 

If you’re just testing the content promotion waters for the first time, we suggest sticking to PPC and social media promotions. There are plenty of experts who can help you with PPC and social media advertising, but it’s also relatively easy to DIY. This is especially true for social media, where you can target people by (depending on your platform of choice) location, interests, company, whether they are connected to people in your network, etc. 

Spending just $500 on promoting your content on social media and PPC can reap huge rewards. You’ll pay for clicks, but also achieve increased brand awareness through impressions you don’t have to pay for! 

Consider putting 50% of your overall content marketing budget behind the promotion. Once you build an audience, you may be able to dial back the spending and let your followers help spread the word through engagement and evangelism. Or, you’ll be able to transfer that budget to new, more ambitious forms of promotion — like influencer marketing or syndication.

Making the most of content promotion efforts 

Before you start putting money behind content promotion, make sure you have a plan. I can hear you saying, “What do you mean by ‘have a plan’?” Start by picturing the content marketing funnel. 

Your content and social media posts bring people into the top of the funnel, but what do you want those people to do once you’ve got their attention? Follow your page? Subscribe to a newsletter? Come into your store? Contact your sales team?

Whatever action you want that customer to take, the reality is it probably won’t happen right away. You need a plan in place to keep delivering them informative content and retarget them with offers that remind them to reach out — all the while moving them deeper into the funnel. And you have to design your content to do some of that work.

Every blog post should have a Call-to-Action (CTA) that leads people deeper into your web of content. Ask them to download a whitepaper or sign up for your newsletter to get more insights delivered to their inbox. Even just suggesting another blog post can help build more trust with an individual user. Never miss a chance to deepen your relationship with a potential new customer. 

Retargeting users who have taken that initial action of clicking on one of your ads can go a long way toward staying top of mind. But rather than spamming them with deal offers, continue to suggest relevant content from every stage of the funnel.

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