3 Smart Strategies for Promoting Great Content

To succeed with content marketing, you need top notch content.

This might mean incredibly comprehensive blog posts, well produced videos, or other media like infographics.

So having great content is the first step.

But ultimately, it's really only around 20% of the battle. The other 80% is promotion, and that part is even harder than the content creation itself.

It's a crowded online landscape out there.

There's more content on the internet than any one person could consume in an entire lifetime.

Statistically, a lot of that content may have never once attracted a single reader.

The “build it and they will come” mentality doesn't work with online content. You need to hustle to get your content out there and get eyes on the page.

Otherwise, even a Pulitzer-worthy piece of writing can sit unread for years on end.

So let's assume you've already got some top notch content.

What now?

Well, you need to get people to actually read that content. There are a lot of ways to do this.

Some are essentially free, like sharing your work in a relevant subreddit or in a Quora answer.

But ultimately, you should also consider putting some money into paid promotion.

In a recent post from Search Engine Land, the author presents three effective and affordable strategies for promoting your content.

Strategy 1: Double listing

Playing the long-tail SEO game is particularly powerful when you can double the amount of owned real estate on a search term. If your piece of content ranks highly already, create an ad for the same term so that you dominate the search engine results page (SERP).

Remember, search volume and audience size are not as valuable as targeting highly qualified leads. If you know a keyword converts well for you in organic search, target it with paid, even if the search volume is low.

The more focused your content, the better able you’ll be to alleviate your audience’s pain point(s) and convert them into customers.

Strategy 2: Build an audience with Gmail Ads

Gmail boasts over 1 billion active monthly users.

With that stat in mind, it makes sense to take full advantage of their advertising opportunities — especially considering it only takes a few minutes to set up a Gmail ad.

One way you can build a highly qualified audience on Gmail is by providing free and valuable content to people receiving emails from your competitors. They’ve already gone out of their way to find content similar to yours, so snatch them right up and show them how you can do things better.

There are two ways you can do this:

1. Go broad and target keywords that are associated with your competitor. Gmail will target anyone using those keywords within the body of an email, so anyone who is talking about or sharing your brand. (Note that this method will no longer be available by the end of the year.)
2. Get granular by simply adding the URL domains of your competitors. A note of caution: If you add keywords on top of domains, AdWords will treat your targeted domain as a keyword.

Strategy 3: Remarket through custom messaging

Remarketing provides a second chance to reach interested users, which can turn bounces into leads. According to paid search expert Larry Kim, a user is about 15% more likely to engage with a remarketing ad than they would a new display ad, even if they’ve seen the same ad 6 times before.

When remarketing, use different pieces of content based on the stage they are at in the funnel.

For example, if a user bounces on the landing page, send them a remarketing ad with different messaging and a different value proposition.

If a user hits the sign up page but doesn’t fill out the form, use a remarketing ad to remind them to fill out the form because they will get XYZ benefits from your service.

If a user gets to the final confirmation of a form but does not convert again, offer them a discount through remarketing.

You can learn more about how to get more traffic to your company's best content over at Search Engine Land.