Content creation gets a lot of attention, but there’s more to successful content than simply publishing it.
There are steps you need to take minutes, hours, weeks and even months after it’s gone live to ensure you’re making the most of it. Firstly, you need to ensure your content gets seen, then you need to track levels of engagement, making changes if necessary. And finally, successful content should be reused in the future to keep it relevant and attract an audience all over again.
Should you be spending 80 per cent of your time promoting your content, compared to the 20 per cent you spend writing and publishing it? That’s the opinion of some experts and while the exact proportions may deviate a little, you definitely need a strategy for what happens after you hit publish.
There are lots of ways to promote your content and a strong approach is to use a number of them together in a targeted manner. Not only do you want lots of people to know it’s there, you also need them to be the right audience. These are significant elements to consider for your mix of promotional efforts.
Well-written content should be optimised for search, but it can take some time before Google crawls your website and picks up on changes. You can speed up the process by alerting the search engine to your new content, ensuring it’s indexed as quickly as possible.
Your social media followers should be made up of your target audience and are already engaged with your brand in some way. Create unique social posts for each of the platforms you have a presence on, reflecting the nuances of the channel and the formats that work best in these feeds.
All of the times you’ve collected contact details from customers and leads provide value at this point, as you can email them about your new content. Whether you create a standalone email campaign or include your latest piece in a newsletter, sending it directly to your audience’s inboxes will prove fruitful.
Other useful forms of promotion include posting in relevant forums, communities and social media groups. To make the most of these methods, it’s important to be properly engaged and not just showing up when you have something to shout about. Encourage comments and questions, making sure you respond to each one and engage with your audience.
You need a strong internal linking strategy for your website, directing readers to other pieces of content that are relevant to the one they’re consuming. Most marketers remember to link to older pieces of content, but the practice of retrolinking already published blogs and articles to a new one is often overlooked.
These internal links to your new content will benefit it in a number of ways. Firstly, the reader is signposted to it, but so is Google and other search engines, which see this content as more important due to these internal links. As Google is now focusing more on topics and how they interact with each other, these links play an important role in emphasising clusters.
Gone are the days when you published a story in print and it was either a success or it failed. The beauty of digital marketing is that content can be analysed to see how it’s doing and tweaked or changed if it isn’t getting the traction you’d hoped. Set up analytics right from the start to see your sources of traffic and how this new piece of content is performing compared to others.
Don’t be afraid to make amends to a piece of content once it’s been published based on the data. Improve the performance by including more stats, keywords, visuals or links. Take a different approach if the one you started with hasn’t captured the imagination of your audience. Sometimes even rewriting the headline and wording it as a question can have a big impact on engagement.
Even content that has performed really well can benefit from being repurposed. That doesn’t mean changing things immediately, but several months down the line. In fact, this can be a particularly beneficial strategy for those pieces of content that drove lots of traffic or resulted in increased engagement.
Instead of starting a future piece of content from scratch, go back and review the top-performing asset to see what’s still relevant. Update the stats and links or information that has developed since you originally published it. How you promote it this time is up to you. Some marketers decide to highlight the fact it’s a new and improved piece, while others will have changed it enough for it to stand on its own.
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