Content Promotion

Now that you have your content executed, it’s time to book a vacation and relax, right? Don’t start packing your swimsuits and dreaming of piña coladas yet.

While the "build it and they will come" philosophy may have worked out for Ray, that’s not the way it works for content. It's estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each and every day. You can't expect that your audience will discover what you're putting out without a nudge of "hey, check this out over here." Even if you have an established brand with an engaged social following and subscriber list, you need to be using additional promotion to expose your content to your target audience (not just current customers) to drive referral traffic and conversions, as well as to gain social shares and links to demonstrate your brand’s authority.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the foundation of promotion strategies: discovering your audience online, qualifying prospects, and attracting them to your campaign with proper pitches and messages. We'll then delve into strategic ways to reach your audience through earned, paid, and owned media.

• Earned media refers to the type of publicity on websites that are not owned by the client and is gained organically via promotion efforts that are not paid.

• Owned media refers to promotion that’s performed on platforms that your company owns, such as your website, social accounts, etc.

• Paid media refers to pay-for-play promotion, which includes paid social advertisements, content distribution networks, etc.

Without promotion, whatever ground-breaking piece of content you’ve created likely won’t have a chance to reach its goals. Similarly, without properly understanding and leveraging your target audience for content, your promotion probably won’t even get off the ground.

Finding your audience and its influencers online

When thinking about content ideation, we talked about why it’s important to understand your audience in order to develop strategies and identify content opportunities that would be valuable to them. That point of view is also needed when it comes to promotion.

To find your audience online, start by reviewing the behaviors and pain points that you identified with the content strategy portion. Research where your customers hang out online. What forums are they using? What social channels do they gravitate towards?

Think not only about your audience and their behavior, but also the influencers who are impacting your audience. What publications or blogs is your audience reading? Who are they following on social media? What do they discuss within their content and social networks? Influencers can move the needle for your brand in a big way if you are able to engage them properly and get them to share your content.

There are several ways to do this, but a few tips are:

• Use a tool like Buzzsumo or Followerwonk to understand who is sharing your content and the content of your competitors from a social point-of-view, or Link Explorer from a linking point-of-view.

• Use advanced search operators s to search for the types of websites and blogs your customers may be interested in. (ex. “Wedding decor” AND blog)

• Identify a model influencer in your industry. Use this person as a starting point, then spiral out to find similar influencers. Who is in their network? Who does Twitter and LinkedIn associate as a similar account?

• Influencers don’t just have to be individuals, but they could also be topical publications and websites. For these, explore websites that Google considers related to an already targeted publication (ex. related:moz.com) to find more opportunities.

• Review websites that have referred traffic your way already. If this website is sending people who are interested in your brand already, they could be a good outlet to find more people from your target audience. You can use a tool like Link Explorer to identify sites that have linked to you, but you’ll want to take a look in a tool like Google Analytics to see the actual number of visitors referred.

Not every opportunity you find will make sense for your company, so you should put together a framework to help you and your team qualify prospects throughout the process. Here are some considerations when qualifying content promotion opportunities:

• Relevance to your brand and campaign

• Performance metrics - Does an individual influencer need to have a certain amount of engagement on their website or on social? Does a target publication need to hit certain engagement metrics? Should you be keeping mind a certain level of Domain Authority for each influencer's site?

• Aesthetic and perspective - Does the influencer, whether an individual or brand, align with your company and your approach towards the industry?

• Post timing - Does an individual influencer have a regular posting cadence? Have they been active in their content posting to this point? What about the same metrics for publications you’re evaluating?

Crafting messaging that resonates with your audience

Even though the content you’re launching should be pretty wrapped up at this point, you’re not finished with the messaging. Make sure communication to your audience and their influencers entices your targets and gives them enough detail to understand what you’ve created. Let’s talk through a few tips to get you started.

Tailoring outreach

Unless you’re an “Inbox Zero” extraordinaire, you likely have pitch emails sitting in your inboxes right now, unread, that will be deleted faster than someone can say “Penguin penalty.” There are many guides about great outreach, so we’ll cover just the basics here:

• Tailor your pitches to the different audiences you’re reaching out to. What do they tend to write about? What do they geek out about on social? How does what you’re pitching connect to something they’ve already published?

• Stir up emotion with your pitch. We’re not asking these prospects to repost a dry press release. Bring excitement to the table and describe the huge opportunity your idea will address.

• Connect the dots for them. Your recipients shouldn’t have to think, "...and why does this matter for me and my readers?"

• Show that you’ve done your research. Don’t just look at their last blog post, but also take a look at some of their later content pieces that directly connect your content needs and theirs.

• Utilize clear calls to action within your emails, so they will know what the next steps is if they’d like to move forward.

• Make sure you take the time to find their name! Nothing says email blast more than “Hi there!” or “Dear sir or madam:”

• Keep your initial message brief — tell them what they need to know. You can always explain in more detail once you’ve got them hooked.

• Incorporate your company tone and style guides to these emails in order to be cohesive with the rest of your brand.

• Don’t neglect the closing statement, which has been shown to be effective for getting people to take action.

An important thing to highlight: most of the time the person on the other end will want something in exchange — in the case of journalists and publishers, it's often early access to information or some sort of exclusive, while bloggers might also be interested in freebies or special deals for their readers. Make sure you've read any submission guidelines they might have before you approach them.

Crafting paid messaging

Paid social allows for extreme granularity in targeting, and you should use this to your advantage as long as it makes sense. If you sell patio umbrellas, your messaging will likely be different in California where there’s sunny weather all year long, versus Michigan, where they may only see two months of patio weather.

Earned media promotion targets influencers and authoritative websites to forge a partnership that could manifest itself in several different ways: guest posts, contents, and much more. As SEOs, you’re likely most familiar with this type of promotion.

Influencer marketing

Influencers are the industry's experts. They're the folks who have already nurtured large audiences and have the megaphones to reach those audiences. They're the ones everyone you're trying to reach is already listening to. Developing relationships with these influencers is particularly effective for marketers who are still trying to build their own brand recognition and notoriety. Working with these thought leaders is also a strong catalyst for SEO campaigns because of their ability to put your content in front of the right eyes — people who are likely to share your content, visit your site, and eventually convert. If you've done your planning right, you can actually include influencer marketing as part of your content creation process.

Use the tips above and in this guide from Fractl on how to identify influencers for your brand. Once you've identified the influencers you'd like to reach out to, it's time to make the connection. This is an art within itself, and it's well explained in this evergreen Whiteboard Friday video from Rand.

Content partnerships: Guest posting, contests, etc.

Your content doesn't have to only live on your site. With content partnerships, you create unique content campaigns for another site with a related audience but a bigger reach. Some common examples of content partnerships are guest posts, contests or giveaways, and collaborative guides or assets. Despite the differences between these tactics, the primary focus of each of these should be to grow your audience. Working with third-party websites can yield great links passing on authority, but that should never be your singular objective. You should aim for these websites to attract potential customers who can impact your business.

Content partnerships have gotten a bad rap because of the way a lot of people were going about them — putting up whatever garbage content they could on any site with a semi-decent Domain Authority just to get links.

But partnerships (done well) can be a super-powerful tactic to build your authority and expand your audience. While guest posts, contests, and collaborative content can all be a similar process to set up, deciding which specific tactic to take depends on your objectives.

When you’re deciding who to partner with, focus on finding credible sites related to your industry that will give you your own byline. You can tell it's a good site if you'd be proud to send the link to your boss (and not just because it's a link). Then, write interesting and unique content that will encourage people to seek out more content from you.

One thing to keep in mind with any of these initiatives is to follow Google’s guidelines regarding paid links. As SEOs, many of us may have witnessed firsthand the pain of a manual linking penalty (you’ve at least heard enough about these on Twitter) to stay far away from any risks.

When focusing on your promotion strategy for any given piece of content, don’t forget the channels that your company controls. While these tactics will most likely be seen by people who are already following and interested in your brand, these people may already be big brand advocates who’d want to share your new resource.

Social media

Simply because your content is right for a particular audience doesn't mean they'll see it in the course of their day. That's where social media comes in.

If your content and social teams are closely aligned, then you're already creating the kind of content they want to share. Social is a great way to expose your own content to audiences who may not read your site, but who could find it interesting. It creates an opportunity to engage new people with your content, encouraging them to share, visit your site and, eventually down the line, convert.

Always remember to repurpose content so that it can be shared in the best way possible across different channels. You want to put 100% effort into writing 280 characters for Twitter, so that your content has the best chance of being noticed.

Email marketing

Email marketing can be a great way to make your audience aware of content you produce that may be valuable to them, accelerating the brand-building process.

Keep in mind that if the email marketing team is separate from the team that created the content, you’ll want to have a quick powwow to make sure they understand the content, who it’s targeted to, what pain points it’s addressing, etc. You want to be cohesive across all aspects of a content campaign, no matter the channel.

Paid promotion covers a wide variety of tactics from paid search to display ads, paid social, and content distribution networks. Tactics like these are often grouped together under the umbrella of "pay-per-click" (PPC) advertising. While paid media may not be under your purview as an SEO, having a basic understanding of paid promotion capabilities can significantly help you strategize a successful promotion campaign — even if you won’t be running it. In this section, we’ll be going over outlets that we’ve seen content promotion success with, not every paid opportunity that may exist.

Be sure to define your audience before you get started; that targeting will help you get more bang for your buck.

Also, before you do any paid promotion, you must identify your budget. Within any channel, you can spend as much or as little as you'd like. Knowing how much budget you have to play with overall will help identify which channels on which you run ads and which targeting approaches you take.

Paid social media

We all know that no one has better data on us than the social platforms we frequent. We also spend huge amounts of time there. So in a lot of ways, it makes sense to portion out some of those ad dollars for content promotion on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever else your audience frequents on the Internet.

Most of these platforms let you customize who receives your ads in very targeted ways, which can be a huge bonus. Looked at a stroller for a friend's baby shower? Prepare to see an ad for it on Facebook. Checked out a cute coffee table? It might show up in a promoted tweet.

In some cases, you can even upload email lists or use conversion pixels to create lookalike audiences that mirror the interests of the people on your existing list, or who have viewed your content.

Content distribution networks

Whether you realize it or not, you see the results of content distribution networks all the time. They're the reading recommendations often found at the end of articles all over the web in sections labeled "if you like this, then read…" or "you might also enjoy..." These placements are usually paid, which means that your content, too, is eligible for this kind of distribution.

Some of the advantages of content distribution networks is their large reach and the ability to target your content, specifying what types of audiences you'd like to see it. A big disadvantage is that some pretty spammy-looking content creators use them. You've certainly seen a headline like this: "Doctors don't want you to know about this one amazing trick to reverse aging!" However, if you’re providing valuable content with an honest, straightforward title, your content could stand out as genuinely useful.

Display ads

Sometimes referred to as banner ads, display advertising allows you to put ads (in a variety of media formats) across the web using an ad server like Google Display Network (which shows AdWords ads) or Facebook's Atlas (which uses Facebook's targeting info to place ads across the web). While the traditional use of display advertising is for remarketing (targeting people who have visited your website or used your app while they browse other websites), it can also be utilized for content promotion.

If the competitive site ranking above you hosts display ads, create a campaign specifically targeting this and other top-ranking websites to get visibility on your own content. If the guide that you created kick’s the top-ranking one’s butt, channel that in your ad messaging and watch the traffic to your resource increase.

You've got the content goods, and you have a plan for getting them seen by the right folks. But how do you know you're hitting the mark? Head to Chapter 9: Content Analysis and Reporting to find out.

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.