The movie Field of Dreams popularized the belief “If you build it they will come,” but when it comes to effective content marketing, this is just pure fiction. Every content marketing effort needs a promotion plan to lure in the readers.
Regardless of what your content goals are, driving in the traffic is the most important steps towards achieving those goals.
In 2020, the set of challenges ahead content marketers are huge. Among these, the saturation is one of the biggest hurdles and numbers are simply staggering. According to IFL science, every minute 46,740 Instagram photos, 456,000 tweets, 3.6 million Google searches, and 600 Wikipedia pages edits take place. Also, according to Worldometer daily 2.5 million blog posts are published daily.
How To Compete For Readers?
With the growth of data and content, the storage size of gigabytes and terabytes are growing in more gigantic zettabytes. Clearly, just hitting the publish button after finishing content creation is no longer enough for content marketing. Just like the hunters of nature, you need to keep moving forward, constantly learning and implementing clever strategies to ensure that your content stands out and gets the recognition.
Today there is no much content on a reader’s screen that they are distracted all the time, if your content doesn’t engage them immediately, they will move on to the next cute puppy video. Consumer attention has become an invaluable tool as a marketing commodity. As a content marketer, your first step must be to know who your audience is to capture their attention. Once the brands are aware of who their customers are, the owned, paid and earned media can then be employed to reach them.
Remember that marketing is not the same as it used to be. According to several market reports, 79% of consumers act on the offer if they are personalized to reflect their past interactions with the brand. In the US alone, 88% of the marketers saw a measurable improvement in their results because of personalization.
What Readers Want & Don’t Want to Read
You cannot count on evergreen content anymore to get more readers. Start following the content marketing trends and best practices that tell you about the present choices of the readers. Often the mistake content creators commit is to consider the individual personas of particular customers instead of focusing on the content best practices fitting all audience.
Here are factors to keep in mind when promoting your content:
Keep away from prominent branding. Among readers, the resistance to being sold is growing stronger over the years, with each new generation having a greater resistance. In a recent article by Harvard Business Review, viewers are most likely to stop watching a video once a prominent branding logo is displayed.
Tell a story. Although automation and digitalization are predominant, people still connect to brands that reveal their narrative like stories. Your stories make your brand unforgettable.
Do make it personal. No reader wants to be lumped as just one of the trillions of internet users. You need to serve the right message to the right customers. According to a retail organizations’ survey by Infosys, 86% of consumers agreed that personalization has an impact on purchases.
Don’t discount on quality. It is better that you post quality content less often instead of fluff. Informative and valuable content delivers satisfaction and doesn’t waste readers’ time.
Invest in Content Promotion
Many content creators do not pay enough attention to the promotion aspect of the content marketing that causes them to lose on the potential of getting readers. It is not enough to just assume that people will find your content online. According to Moz, “Promotion is the step where most companies fail at content marketing.”
The reward in investing for content promotion is simple yet it is profound. You get a brand with fans and incoming revenue to show for it. Some of the ways you can up your content game are to repurpose your content for promotion on different channels. Here are some tips:
- Borrow stats and quotes from a post for infographics
- Create an email for the list using the introduction from your blog post
- Create a YouTube description from your blog copy
- Create instructional images and how-to illustrations
You see there are so many ways to repurpose a blog post for promotion.
How to Gain Reader Attention Fast
Optimize for a Keyword Phrase
Once you finish the content, redo it by adding a few keyword phrases that best represent the intent of the content. Alexa’s free Keyword Optimization Cheat Sheet is a resource you must check out.
Repurpose Content
As already mentioned, there are multiple channels, not the same content goes on all. As the content marketing guru, Neil Patel recommends pull out at least 20 snippets from your post and share it on social media over several weeks.
Target Different Audiences
Personalized content is a growing trend, which is why you need to revise content to appeal to differing demographics. If you can rework content for the different audience the right way, you might be to engage 72 per cent of consumers as Inc. Magazine says.
Get success with content promotion
You work hard to create content that is perfect for the brand and might appeal to the right audience, but still, you will need a number of readers to validate it. This is why you need to boost your content promotion efforts.
Blog posts can live on in so many forms, you can take it so many places, in so many formats. Every new prospect you send to your website is a potential opportunity for conversion. Why you must leave a chance to get readers and revenue when content promotion can help send potential customers right to the product or service.
At Contentsia, we offer you expert service for both content creation and promotion.
