Marketing Strategy Blog

Effective Content Promotion Strategies to Expand Your Reach

Content Promotion

Have you ever experienced the particular heartbreak that comes with putting hours and hours into creating an amazingly useful piece of content, only to have it reach a small audience? It’s incredibly frustrating, isn’t it?

If you want your content to produce results, craft an effective content promotion strategy to ensure that more of your audience actually sees it. The more individuals that see your content, the greater your brand awareness, site traffic, backlinks, and leads will be.

Too many content teams focus their efforts exclusively on content creation while ignoring content promotion. But if you want to achieve strong content ROI, it’s critical to include content promotion in your marketing activities.

What Is Content Promotion?

Just because you publish a piece of content doesn’t mean that it will be seen by a large number of your audience members. In order to get your content in front of more eyeballs, proactively promote it.

Content promotion is the process of making your content more visible and accessible so that people are more likely to see it and engage with it. It involves using various content marketing techniques and strategies to get your content consumed on a greater scale.

Content promotion can include sharing content via:

  • Email
  • Social media
  • PR
  • Your website
  • Partners
  • Content syndication
  • Paid promotion
  • Influencer marketing

Why Is Content Promotion Important?

Publishing high-quality content can generate game-changing business results. For example, Ahrefs increased revenue 10X over a two-year period largely through optimized blogging success. Stratabeat fueled growth for one B2B software client through content marketing and SEO, enabling them to grow from 50 to 250 employees within two years.

Merely publishing content, however, is not enough. To get results like these, content promotion plays a key role.

You should promote your content if you want to capture more business value from your content investments. If you want your content to produce conversions and leads, then it needs to be not only available but actually seen by your target audience.

The amount of new content published every day is staggering. There’s simply too much for anyone to see everything. And it’s easy for your audience to miss important, valuable content as a result. Beyond being visible, content promotion helps to ensure that your content breaks through all the noise.

Content promotion is also important for SEO purposes. The more that you promote your content, the more of your audience consumes it. This in turn leads to greater online sharing, further expanding your reach. All of this leads to more backlinks pointing at your content. High-quality backlinks is a direct Google ranking factor, helping to boost your Google organic rankings higher.

Content Promotion group meeting

The Benefits of Content Promotion

There are numerous benefits that come with content promotion, such as the following:

  • Get more value from your content: When you promote your content, you increase the chances that it will be seen by more qualified prospects. This, in turn, results in your content potentially producing a greater amount of value for your business, as outlined in the following bullets.
  • Reach a larger audience: One of the main benefits of content promotion is that it helps you reach a larger audience. When you promote your content, you’re putting it in front of more people who might be interested in it. And the more people who see your content, the more likely it is to generate leads and sales.
  • Get more website traffic: Another benefit is that it can help you get more website traffic. The more you promote your content, the more website traffic you’ll receive.
  • Improve SEO: By optimizing your content and promoting it to the right people, you can improve your website’s rankings in the Google SERPs. Effective content promotion usually leads to backlinks. These signal to Google that the content is valuable to readers and should be ranked higher in search results.
  • Achieve greater online sharing: Promoting content helps you to achieve a network effect, with more people sharing it with their networks, exponentially expanding your reach.
  • Boost brand awareness: Content promotion can also help boost brand awareness as well as brand perception. When you promote your content, you’re increasing the number of times prospects will encounter your brand. More brand exposure translates into increased brand awareness.
  • Generate leads: Leads are the lifeblood of any B2B business. Increased content promotion leads to greater reach, awareness, and traffic, which ultimately results in more qualified leads.

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16 Content Promotion Strategies

Content Promotion Strategies

Pre-Publishing Promotion

The promotion process often starts even before a piece of content is published. If you fail to promote your content before it’s published, it will reach fewer people and limit ROI for your business.

Plan Your Content Well In Advance

To successfully promote your content in the pre-publication stage, build a plan well in advance. This includes the title, target persona, primary SEO keyword, main topic covered, secondary topics, content distribution channels, promotional dates, and more. An effective way to nail all these details down is to create a content calendar.

Build Anticipation on Social Media

You can start promoting your content even before it’s published by building anticipation on social media. Share teaser images, quotes, or infographics related to the content. If your content includes original research, share some of the key findings. If the content includes insights by industry experts, share a quote or two.

You can also ask questions on social media to give you a sense of what topics you should cover in your content. This helps you ensure that your content captures what’s on the minds of your audience members, while also getting them more engaged.

Identify Potential Collaborators

Collaborating with others in your sphere can be an effective way to reach a larger audience. You can collaborate with partners, or even other bloggers, podcasters, or YouTubers. For example, if you’re writing a report about the business impact of particular social media platform, you could reach out to influencers on that platform and ask them to share their insights. When it is actually published, the odds are good that the influencers will share the content piece with their audiences.

Forge Partnerships

A final pre-publication content promotion strategy is to forge partnerships with other brands that share something in common with you but are not direct competitors. For example, if you sell CRM software for lawyers, you could partner with a company that offers marketing automation for law firms. You could then work together to create a webinar or article that is valuable to both of your audiences. When it is published, both of you can work together to strategically promote it.

Launch Day Promotion

Once you publish your content, get busy promoting it to ensure as many qualified prospects see it as possible.

Post It on Social Media

The first step is to post your content on social media. This is a no-brainer. But it’s important to do it the right way. Use compelling images and engaging headlines that will get people to click through to your content. Also include a compelling description of what the content piece is about, as well as one or two key pieces of enticing information.

For broader distribution, get employees and partners to like and engage with the content within the initial few hours of the post going live. This helps spread the post to those individuals’ personal networks, expanding your reach quickly and easily.

Post It on Social Media

Make Social Sharing Easy

Related to the above point, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content across their social media channels. The easier you make it, the more likely they are to do it.

To make social sharing easy, include share buttons at the beginning and end of any online content piece. You can also include share buttons on landing pages for gated content.

Make Visuals Shareable

If your content includes important visuals, such as infographics or data visualizations, make sure those visuals are easily shareable. Include share buttons with images, as well as a snippet of HTML code that people can copy if they want to display an image on their own website. Within the HTML code, include a line of code that links back to the original post. This is an effective way to build backlinks to your site, which can boost your SEO results.

Leverage Employees

Your employees are some of your biggest advocates. They can help promote your content to their personal networks, which can help expand your reach significantly. Encourage them to share your content on social media and in any other forums where they participate.

Email Signature

Make Use of Email Signatures

Email signatures are often an untapped resource when it comes to content promotion. Employees can use their email signatures to promote your company’s latest whitepaper, playbook, blog post, research report, event, webinar, podcast, or video. Simply include a link to the content piece (or landing page in the case of gated content) along with a brief description. This is a great way to promote your content to anyone your company is doing business with.

Notify Collaborators and Those Mentioned

If you collaborated with anyone or mentioned any industry experts in your content, make sure to notify them when the content goes live. If you have a good relationship with a particular individual, you can ask them whether they would be willing to share the content on their social channels. Chances are they’ll be happy to share it with their networks. This can help expand your reach even further and get your content in front of new audiences.

Distribute to Your Email List

Your email list is an obvious distribution channel for any content you publish. Take the time to write a compelling email that will encourage people to click through and read your content. You can also segment your list so that you’re only sending the email to those who are likely to be interested in the specific topic.

Reach Out to Influencers, Bloggers, and Partners

If you want to get your content in front of even more people, reach out to influencers, bloggers, and partners. Ask them if they would be interested in sharing your content with their audiences. This can help to expand your reach significantly and get your content in front of new, targeted audiences.

Of course, you need to have a good relationship with these individuals before you can ask them to share your content. Better yet, collaborate with them in the creation of content. To that end, make sure to nurture these types of relationships instead of treating them as transactions.

Repurpose Content

Don’t just publish content and then let it sit. Repurpose it into other formats so that you can get even more value out of it. For example, say that B2B blogging and B2B SEO are key engines of your marketing. If you publish a long-form optimized blog post, you can then turn that blog post into an infographic, a SlideShare presentation, video, or even an ebook. This allows you to reach different audiences with your content and get even more mileage out of it.

Syndicate Your Content

If you want to reach a wider audience, consider syndicating your content. This involves publishing your content on other websites and platforms in addition to your own. Of course, you need to be strategic about this and only syndicate quality content. But if you do it right, it can help you reach a whole new group of people with your content.

Content Sharing

Share Your Content Within Relevant Groups and Forums

Relevant online groups are additional places to share your content. However, to succeed with groups and forums, you need to do more than just share your own content. You need to be actively engaged with the community and build up a reputation as someone who shares valuable, relevant information first. Only then will your content be well-received.

Paid Promotion

You can also promote your content through paid channels. This can be an effective way to get a lot of eyeballs on your content quickly. If a piece of content is time-sensitive, paid promotion can be particularly effective.

There are a number of ways to go about paid promotion. You can use PPC platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. You can also partner with influencers to have them promote your content to their audiences.


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Content Promotion Tools

Gratefully, you don’t have to do all your content promotion tasks manually. There are a number of content promotion tools that streamline and even automate various processes.

Content Discovery Tools

Content discovery tools allow you to see content similar to yours that is getting a lot of social shares or attracting a significant number of backlinks. They also allow you to find which influencers share related content with their audiences, which then allows you to reach out to them when the time is right.

Some powerful content discovery tools include:

  • BuzzSumo – With BuzzSumo, you can see which pieces of content are being shared the most across all social media platforms. You can also see who is sharing the content and create outreach lists based on that information.
  • Ahrefs – Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to see which pieces of content are getting backlinks and social shares, what keywords they are ranking for, and a general estimate of how much traffic those pieces of content are generating. Like Buzzsumo, you can see who is sharing what content as well.
  • Mention – Mention is a tool that allows you to see when your brand, competitors, or any target keywords you’re tracking are mentioned online. This is useful for finding people who have shared related content.

Social Publishing Tools

Social publishing tools allow you to publish content across multiple social media channels at the same time. They also allow you to engage with followers from a single, unified platform. As you would imagine, this can save you significant amounts of time and effort.

Some social publishing tools include:

  • CoSchedule – CoSchedule is another all-in-one platform that allows you to publish content, stay on top of your content calendar, engage with followers, and more.
  • SproutSocial – SproutSocial is an all-in-one social media management platform that includes features like scheduling posts, social listening, reporting, and contact management.
  • Buffer – Buffer is a somewhat simpler social publishing tool that focuses on making the publishing process as easy as possible. You can schedule social posts months in advance and even let Buffer determine the best time of day for each post to be published.

Email Marketing in meeting

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools allow you to capture email addresses and send out automated emails at predetermined intervals. They also allow you to segment your audience, create multiple automated nurture sequences, and more. You can use email marketing to stay in touch with people who have shown an interest in your content or brand in the past.

Some email marketing tools include:

  • ActiveCampaign – ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation solution that includes not only email marketing, but also a CRM, landing page builder, and much more.
  • Reply.io – Reply is an all-in-one sales engagement platform that works seamlessly with popular CRMs, including HubSpot and Salesforce.
  • MailChimp – MailChimp is one of the most popular (and affordable) email marketing tools on the market. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, including automation, segmentation, and templates.

Outreach Management Tools

Outreach management tools make it easy to find organizations to reach out to and to keep track of your outreach efforts. They also often come with features like automated email sequences and templates, which can save you time and effort.

Some outreach management tools include:

  • Pitchbox – Pitchbox is an outreach tool that allows you to find publishers, influencers, and bloggers in your niche, track your outreach efforts, and automate follow-ups. They offer numerous outreach templates that can be customized based on your objectives.
  • Buzzstream – Buzzstream is another outreach tool that allows you to find and contact influencers, automate follow-ups, and track your progress. They also have a feature that allows you to see which influencers are most likely to respond to your pitches.

Email Discovery Tools

Effective content promotion requires outreach to those you think would be highly interested in your content. To do this, you often need to find the email addresses of specific individuals. Email discovery tools make this process easier.

Some of the best email discovery tools include:

  • Hunter.io – Hunter.io is a tool that allows you to find the business email address for almost anyone and to validate if it’s a working email.
  • FindThatEmail – FindThatEmail is another tool that allows you to find email addresses. It’s similar to Hunter.io, but it also offers a reverse email search feature. This can be useful if you have an email address but you’re not sure who it belongs to.

Email Validation Tools

Email Validation Tools

One of the challenges of email outreach is ensuring that you have the correct email addresses. This is especially challenging if you have a long list of addresses and need to verify each one. Email validation tools make it possible for you to verify email addresses in bulk and keep your email lists clean.

Email validation tools include:

  • NeverBounce – NeverBounce is a tool that allows you to verify email addresses in bulk. It integrates with most major email marketing platforms and promises that 99.9% of your emails will be delivered. It can also validate email addresses in real-time as they are being collected or entered into a CRM.
  • ZeroBounce – Zero Bounce boasts email validation, A.I.-driven email scoring, and powerful deliverability tools, including email validation with 98% accuracy guaranteed.