B2B firms are investing a great deal of time and resources on content marketing to attract and engage prospects and leads. In fact, 70% of B2B marketers plan to create even more content in 2017. But one of the keys to success is getting the content you’ve created in front of as many people in your target audience as possible.
So now that you’ve worked hard to create great content, it deserves to be read. What are some ways to increase your current reach? Here are 5 simple ways to consider.
It’s a bit of a misconception that creating client-centric, valuable and magnetic content is all that is needed to attract an audience. The truth is, even the best content still needs to be marketed and promoted. People aren’t going to just simply find your content because you’ve created it; you must market your marketing!
Simply promoting a blog post or white paper on your social channels once isn’t sufficient. The transient nature of online and social media means you’ve got to find multiple ways to get the word out and keep the word out. The “inbound” effect of content marketing still requires the “outbound” benefits of promotion.
A few tips to help with promotion:
Today search engine optimization is much more about creating quality content and much less about technical prowess. However, there are still basic on-page best practices for SEO that are essential for ensuring search engines find your content and serve it up to end users.
In fact, failing to optimize your blog posts and landing pages for search engines could cost you a lot of traffic and missed opportunities with potential clients. Here are some SEO best practices to follow:
For additional tips, check out this helpful visual guide for SEO on-page best practices from Moz.
Regardless of the size of your company, your employees represent a phenomenal opportunity to increase the reach of your content marketing. Each and every employee has their own social network, whether on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or another social platform.
While there may be some overlap, each employee’s network likely represents a different audience than you’re able to target with your corporate social media efforts. So why not take advantage of this? Enlist your employees as content ambassadors and dramatically increase the social media reach of your content marketing efforts.
Encourage employees to:
To aid with content distribution, marketers are increasingly looking to paid amplification as a way to boost their content marketing reach. With the organic reach of many social platforms on a sharp decline and the growing desire to get in front of larger, more targeted audiences, paid amplification (e.g. sponsored content, social advertising) can be a valuable tool.
While essentially a “pay for play” proposition, social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have developed sophisticated platforms for paid amplification. Other networks like Pinterest and Instagram have rolled out paid marketing products as well.
The point is — if you want to expand your reach on social media, paid amplification is becoming more and more necessary. Here are a few tips on getting started:
Email marketing is often treated as a promotional channel — to promote the company not the company’s thought-leadership content. But when it comes to increasing the reach of your B2B content marketing, email can be a powerful driver. Instead of using your email messages to sell, use it to share your interesting content.
Whether in the form of blog subscription emails, drip nurturing campaigns, or even targeted messages promoting relevant content to a specific segment, email can be a recipe for increasing reach and driving both traffic and engagement. Here are a few ideas:
Don’t leave the marketing out of content marketing! You can’t simply create great content, sit back and wait for it to attract the masses. Simply put, content creation requires content promotion in order to increase reach. Hopefully these 5 examples will help you in your endeavor.
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