You’ve gone through the effort of researching, writing, and editing a new post for your blog, and you want to make sure your audience recognises your efforts. Individuals who frequent your blog will notice a new post eventually, but what about those who are casual readers, only visiting your webpage now and then? What about those who have yet to discover your website? How do you reach them?
Answer: Through omnichannel content promotion.
Before we get into the “how-to” of omnichannel content promotion, we need to understand what makes content worth promoting and then identify where our target audience gets their information.
What Makes Great Content?
Great content achieves several things: It addresses your readers’ needs, it fills content gaps, it is quality content, and crucially, it is informative content.
Addresses Needs
By conducting a data analysis, you can see what type of content your readers enjoy the most. If your readers consume more content on a particular topic, it will be worth it for you to explore that topic more in-depth. Another type of analysis you can do is research what kinds of questions people have around the topics you focus on in your blog post. Use these questions as your headlines and write posts that answer these questions.
Fills Content Gaps
Perform a content gap analysis to see what the current content is missing. Take the topic you want to write on and do a Google search. Look at the first and second pages of results and take notes on each article you read. What did they address? What did they not address? Whatever those articles do not address is the “content gap,” and that is what you should focus your post on.
Quality Content
Quality content means that your blog post is written with no grammatical errors or typos. It should be easy to read, avoiding complex sentences that may be difficult for the reader to understand. Additionally, you will want to avoid all instances of plagiarism. There are some free online tools that you can use to help you check for grammar, spelling, and plagiarism in your work, such as Grammarly.
Informative Content
When you write, write to inform. Your reader should leave with a sense of understanding, having learned something new, especially if they found your content by searching for an answer. If your content doesn’t teach something, then it really can’t be counted as “great” content.
Understand Where Your Target Audience Consumes Information
You need to understand where your audience consumes its information. Do they mainly get it from different websites, either blogs or articles? Do they get most of their content from social media and, if so, which platform and what kind of content? Video? Infographics? Graphics? Photos?
Understanding how your audience gets its information will guide you toward the best way to promote your new blog post. Once you know 1) where your audience gets its information and 2) the preferred format of that information, you can use this information to your advantage. For example, if you know that your audience gets a lot of their information from Instagram and prefer shorter videos, you can post a video clip on Instagram that talks about your new blog post in short-form content.
Analysing your target audience, understanding their behaviour, and knowing where and how they consume information is all part of omnichannel marketing, and will yield the best results.
Omnichannel Content Promotion
Omnichannel means you use all channels to promote your content, focusing on creating a single, strong customer experience around your brand. The idea of omnichannel content promotion is the same: Promote your content across all channels, using the formats of content to which your readers will respond to the best.
Promoting Content by Email
If you have an email distribution list, use it! There are some strategies for promoting your content by email. First, you want to make sure you are sending your emails at the appropriate time to maximise your open rates and click-through rates. Studies found that weekdays work best if you’re promoting your blog posts by email. But remember that it is important for you to conduct your own research, because your readership may differ. Analyse the data you’ve collected and see when your emails are opened. Try sending your emails out during those times and see how it improves your open rates and click-through rates.
If you’ve noticed that your initial email has not yet been opened, you can send out a reminder email. A follow up email example subject line could be as follows:
Subject Line: Don’t Forget About Our New Post!
Promoting Content on Social Media
There are several social media platforms that you can use to your advantage, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. In other countries, you could also promote to social media sites like Tencent QQ, Viber, Ibibo, and Cyworld. To promote on social media, consider:
- On Facebook, use a photo and catchy headline
- On Snapchat, include a stat or quote, and include an option to “swipe up” to read
- On Instagram, include a link in the caption to the blog post; for the photo, include a stat or quote
- On YouTube, give a preview of the information that the blog post contains.
Promoting Content Using Paid Methods
You can use paid methods across various platforms—like Facebook—to specifically target the audience that would be most interested in your post. For this to be most effective, you want to make sure you have a solid understanding of your target audience so you know exactly what type of parameters you need to set, such as age, gender, location, and interests. That way you’ll be sure that the money you are putting into promoting this content will give you a good return on your investment.
Promoting Content Organically
When it comes down to it, few things beat organic promotion. Promoting organically comes down to making sure that your website and content are optimised, following best practices for SEO. You should already do this for all your blog posts. These include:
- Making sure the Title Tag is catchy, explains the content, and around 60 characters
- Keep your meta description to around 140 characters
- Have a descriptive URL, making sure that each word is separated by a hyphen; do not use “filler” words like “to” or “the”
- Have your headings identified by heading tags like H1, H2, H3, etc.
This little guide will help you get started on your omnichannel campaigns. A strong campaign will ensure that any post you create will spread far and wide over the internet, and give readers multiple ways to come back to your website.
Author bio:
Michael Habiger is a Marketing Specialist with over six years of experience in content marketing and marketing automation. Currently, he is Head of Marketing at Follow up Fred.
How Digital Ethos Can Help
Our content writing specialists at Digital Ethos hope you’ve found something valuable in amongst these top tips for skyrocketing your digital content creation.
For further expert insights, be sure to keep an eye out for our next installment of digital marketing insights, in which we will discuss the latest and greatest means of implementing an effective digital PR strategy.
If you’re interested in how your business could benefit from expert content marketing, or have any further enquiries, please do get in touch.