We talk a lot about creating high quality content here on Get There, but one thing we haven’t discussed much (until now) is the importance of promoting that content. You can create all the white papers, videos and podcasts you want, but unless you have a sound promotional plan in place to get your content in front of people, it won’t be worth the time it takes to develop.
You should put just as much time into developing a promotional plan for your content as you put into developing the content itself.
Here are xx elements to consider including in your promotional plan:
- Where will your content live? Are you creating a landing page, placing your content on your blog, emailing it directly to people who sign up to receive it? The location and accessibility of your content will have a major impact on how you promote it. Consider how your plans for deploying your content will impact the way you talk about it and who can access it.
- What is your message? You should be able to boil down every piece of content you create into one core message that explains exactly why people should care about what you have to say. Let’s say you’ve created a white paper that focuses on the performance implications of cloud computing for large organizations. Your core message is likely the fact that could computing can improve productivity and collaboration for large teams. Make sure you know this message like the back of your hand and commit to baking it into every promotional tactic you utilize.
- Who are you trying to reach? We suggest developing a few target audience personas to describe the kind of people you hope will consume your content. Then, when it comes time to actually promote your content, imagine you’re speaking directly to these people.
- What tactics make the most sense for our content, message and audience? The tactics you choose to promote your content should be determined in large part by earlier decisions about structure, messaging and audience. Here are a few of our favorite content promotion tactics and notes on the situations that they make the most sense for.
- Influencer outreach and guest posting – Ask influential bloggers to promote your content on their sites before it goes live to the general public. This works well for content topics that are already buzzed about among niche audiences.
- Email marketing – send a series of emails to a subset of your list to build excitement up to the release of your conetnt. This works well when you have a piece of content that you want to release via email to a list of loyal subscribers.
- Social media promotion – build excitement for your content by “teasing” its release on your social channels. This works best when you can easily identify an interested community online (say, through the use of a hashtag) and then promote your content directly to them. Using a combination of organic social media promotion and paid social ads makes this tactic even more effective.
Do you put as much energy into promoting your content as you do into creating it? Tell us why or why not in the comments.
Featured image via: Writeaholic
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