19 Marketers share their Favorite Content Promotion Tactic

Content promotion is challenging but very important. If you don’t promote your content then its gonna get lost in the sea of articles that get published every day. So what content promotion tactics work the best?
Well here are 19 marketers working in the trenches sharing their favourite content promotion tactics:

Waqar Azeem, Content Studio

I think all of us have heard the phrase that “content is king” but not many talk about the queen which is the distribution part of it. And, the distribution methods really depend on the type of content you are trying to promote. If it is not a time-sensitive content then you need to have an evergreen campaign that shares the same piece of content with different captions and images multiple times over the year on your social channels. This is such a simple tactic which can massively increase the reach of your content. So, if you have multiple evergreen campaigns running for multiple pieces of content, just imagine the number of increased eyeballs your content would experience. Another good tactic to boost your content without paid ads is to create multiple small pieces of content in different formats. For example, if it’s a blog post, convert it into a video or multiple short videos.
Then turn in into a podcast, or create infographics out of it. Drip-feed all of this content to your social media channels and get the extra exposure your content deserved

Amanda Thomas, Konstruct Digital

We’ve all been there before. You spend hours and hours perfecting and refining what you think will be the best article written on a specific subject. You hit the publish button and wait for the shares, comments, and traffic to start roaring in.
Instead, you get crickets and wonder if it’s all for nought? If you build it, they don’t necessarily come.

Here’s an ultra-quick win to help get the ball rolling on your content promotion:

If you reference a brand or person in an article – reach out to them and ask if they’ll share. I find reaching out on social tends to work well, and person to person (rather than from brand accounts) is even better. But if you can’t track down their social profiles, you can always try a tool like hunter.io to find an email address. Alternatively, Buzzstream has a great tool for locating email addresses and social profiles.
Obviously, there are more sophisticated content promotion tactics out there, but I always like to start with the quick wins.

Jeff Gapinski, Huemor

From my experience, the most effective tactic right now is to build content around survey results.

The goal is to design a survey asking questions that your prospective clients want answers to.
Once distributed, amongst the questions you should have a question asking for any additional comments for possible inclusion, their email address, website, and name.
From those responses take a look at who contributed. Find the highest value contributions from a content perspective and cross-reference them with the authority of their domain. Reach out to these individuals and let them know that you’d like to include them in your content.
You can ask directly for backlinks for the post in exchange for including them, but we prefer to just include individuals without specific stipulations. More often than not, people are so excited for the free publicity that they’ll organically link and share the content.

Matthew Dobinson, Expert Cog

I like to run Facebook ads to my content in the form of a competition when people click on my competition ad, they are brought to a chatbot that gives them the URL of my content and asks them to share it and tag a friend in the ad post in order to enter the competition.
This forces my content to have a ‘viral’ effect and with enough ad spend it eventually gets traction. Pro tip: When you announce the winner’s message everybody in your list and offer a second competition, you can ask them to tag 5 people each in the comments or share a different piece of content. Depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Chris Sloane, Heaviside Digital

If I need to promote a piece of content – I’m going to make sure that I get it in front of the right people, and ensure as many of them as possible will see it. I’ve tried several methods, and have found that running a Facebook Ads campaign is the best way to do it.
Depending on the content, I have many different approaches I can take to get the right audience, from customer email lists to interest targeting to website visit lookalikes. Each one has its advantages and gives me confidence that not only will the right people see it, but they might share it as well and increase my reach. I can also get a sense of the actual engagement with the content to see if it is actually resonating with my target audience. If not, either the content or the targeting is off – and I can test that too with different testing.

As a bonus, I can also retarget engaged content consumers with offers for a relatively cheap cost.

Tarek Elqoulaq

One of my favourite content promotion tactics is reaching out to people or brands that I mentioned in my content, and just letting them know that I included them in it.
The main reason this works so well is that reaching out to someone to tell them they were mentioned in your content comes off as a very natural reason for interaction. It doesn’t scream that you want something back from them in return. 

Once you’re done writing your content, it’s as easy as gathering all the people/brands you mentioned and find the best email address to get in touch with them. In terms of the actual email to send out, I typically like to include in the subject line something along the lines of, “I gave you a shoutout”. When writing the actual message of the email, make sure it accomplishes three things:

1) Introduces yourself to them
2) Notifies them that they were mentioned in your content and an invitation to check it out
3) Requests a backlink or shoutout on their social media profiles (if their following is big enough)

Keep in mind that even if whoever you’re reaching out to doesn’t return the favour with a shoutout or backlink, at least you’ve introduced yourself and given them something of value. It can even create an opportunity down the line to reach back out to them for another content promotion campaign you’re running.

Shaurya, Attention Always

One of my favourite ways to promote a piece of content is to email everyone who has been linked in the article and let them know that we have linked to them. Every webmaster knows how important links are to rank on Google.
In the same email, I ask them if they can share the article on their social media. Thanks to the principle of Reciprocity as outlined in the book “influence”, people share it 90% of the time.

For example, When I made a post about generating SEO leads – https://raventools.com/blog/seo-leads/ which had the same format as this one (an expert roundup), I emailed the 20 experts featured to share it on their social media. Most of them did. As a result, the post got more than 150 shares online due to the ripple effect of the initial content promotion the experts did.

This content promotion tactic does not only help you get social shares but also Links as you are able to establish new relations with people by doing them a favour.

Kevin Dam, Aemorph

Guest Posting! It allows for great control and choice. We’ll create a skyscraper piece of content and split it into chunks before reaching out to pitch different chunks to different sites, which will all link back to the skyscraper.

Deepak Shukla, Pearl Lemon

My top content promotion technique is social media sharing. I will write outposts with a ‘call to action’ to comment for a link/page/etc.
The posts are spaced to be better viewable on mobile, sprinkled with emojis to grab attention and have a thought-provoking question to help push for comments and engagement. 

For relevant posts, other industry experts are tagged to help drive their followers to the posts as well. This is done on both Facebook and Linkedin. Another content promotion strategy I use is newsletters. I will create a landing page and do some promotion for a newsletter I write and build them into automation. 

The newsletters contain relevant links and links to landing pages and deliver the relevant URLs directly to the email list. The combination of these techniques has proven to drive traffic to our sites and help push to certain product pages.

Mazen Aloul, WebQuest

My favourite way to promote content is to include relevant influencers in the piece and ask them to help promote it once it’s published. You don’t need to be writing an expert roundup to have influencers. Adding industry experts not only add expertise to your article, but it’s also a great way to build long term relationships with them. 

Michael Costin, Local Digital

My favourite content promotion tactic is related to video content on YouTube.
As we all know, it can be tough to drive views on your YouTube content organically. And a video with only a few views kind of looks like it has been sitting there gathering cobwebs, and the implication is the video is no good or not interesting, despite how much effort you may have put into it.

So, an effective way to get the ball rolling with a new video on YouTube is to run some ads to drive some views and engagement on it. I like to make sure the ads are targeted to people that are relevant for the video, by using a combination of keyword targeting and in-market audiences. Then, just a small budget of $5 per day can generate some decent activity on the video, enough to have it on its way.

Matt Diggity, Diggity Marketing

My content promotion strategy is focused primarily on email marketing and social media. On the email marketing side, new content pieces are emailed out to my list subscribers.  This list is grown via lead magnets and capture forms, fueled by cold and retargeting ads.
Monday morning US time seems to be the sweet spot for the SEO niche for email promotion.

On the social media side, I post a teaser and link to the content in:

• Industry groups
• My brand’s Facebook page
• My personal Facebook wall – making sure to tag businesses and influencers who were referenced in the content itself
• My Twitter feed – likewise tagging relevant people

These days I’m doing my best to repurpose content to get exposure on other promotion platforms.

For example, instead of just creating a textual article for a website, we’ll create a 5-10 minute video version for the YouTube channel, expanding the reach.

Chris Porteous, My SEO Sucks

My favourite tactic is to look for content gaps in the competitor’s strategy. Most subjects have been covered to death. However, doing your research well helps you discover that your competitors are possibly not covering niche relevant content.
Implementing this strategy requires some effort, but is a straightforward practice for the most part. First, you need a strong buyer persona (this is something that you should already have handy). Research the keywords that could be of interest to this persona and see if there’s an excellent idea left unchecked by the competition.

When you find it, write about it using the appropriate keywords. Long-form content is the best option in this case, as you want to become the point of reference. It will certainly rank well, giving you an edge against your competitors. You’ll also have well-research and unique content that they don’t, and they will need to do some legwork to catch up.

David Bell, Diving Bell Creative

We’ve been seeing more clients wanting to incorporate video content into their content strategy – either as standalone content or to support a blog.  Since there’s a higher cost associated with producing quality videos, clients want to see results right away.  As a result, we’ve started doing more Facebook advertising to promote that blog/video content.  To do it in the most cost-effective way, we started seeding engagement metrics.  Higher engagement = lower CPC.  

How do we boost engagement rates? We share the content with people who are already engaged with the brand – Facebook followers, or custom audience made of site visitors.  The ads themselves often will have a callout asking people to comment on the post which increases engagement.  Once we are seeing some traction with the ad, we change up the copy and broaden the targeting to lookalikes or other audiences we want to target.   It’s a tried and true method that helps keep the clients happy and makes us look smart.

Dan Christensen, Averse Pest Control

As the in-house marketer of a local pest control company, sometimes it takes real creativity to get traction online, especially in an industry that most people think is boring. The content that is on the website has to be extremely relevant, informative, actionable, and entertaining. “The whole shebang”, in essence.
Many people like to bag on “boosted” Facebook posts, but that’s only because it seems “beginner-ish”, however, we’ve found it to be extremely successful in promoting ourselves in our local area. 

For just a few bucks we can expand the reach of our content to people who are potential buyers. Not only does this tap into people who will buy right now, but it gives us great exposure to those who are not quite ready to buy (exactly what a local company needs – more touchpoints). 

We’ve been using replug.io for some time now, and it allows us to easily target those who have landed on our site, leading to a much higher conversion rate than with using a cold targeting approach.

Charlie Morley, Movement SEO

My ‘favourite’ content promotion tactic is whatever is most relevant and targeted to the client or website I am working with at that time. How you aim to promote the latest blog post for an international eCommerce store with a presence in many different countries is going to be extremely different to how I would go about promoting an offer that a local supplier of goods is running for example. 

Working with a small manufacturing company in Australia recently we had to step offline in order to enhance online presence and reviews. After successful projects were completed I worked with the client to produce promotional ‘content’ that could be given or mailed out to their customers which we hoped would lead and motivate them to leave positive reviews online. This saw a large increase in the number of positive reviews within Google, boosting local SEO performance in the process. 

This bespoke approach to offline communications may be hard to scale for larger websites but it is still possible. While working with an international eCommerce store we were able to increase Trust Pilot reviews by including a simple byline in emails asking repeat customers to leave a review if they were happy with the service or purchases they had made. 

Austin Cline, Sitemap

Promoting an article to a cold audience is hard and can be expensive to get traction. One strategy our agency has had tremendous success with is to reach out to any person or company mentioned in our article through email, Twitter, or LinkedIn to let them know about the article. If they like it, we encourage them to share it with their network. This puts our content in front of a relevant audience and gives it a great boost.
Of course, we’re all interested in getting great backlinks. If they have a website, I will include a note in the message and ask if they’d be willing to put a link to the article as well. Sometimes we’ll include a particular page or post where the link might be most helpful. Again – way easier and cheaper to secure a backlink this way.

We’ve had great success using this tactic and encourage others to try it out!

Wyatt Mayham, Mayham SEO Consulting

My favourite solution that I have found converts the best for promoting content ensures you #1 have something worth promoting, and #2 reaching out to websites that have shown interest in the content in your vertical before. I’m going to use surveys and studies in this example specifically for Multiple Sclerosis because that is the last campaign that I have worked on and what is top of mind for me.

When you first start working on a campaign and know you have a great piece of content, I usually start with a google advanced search to find bulk opportunities. When setting up the campaign in this example I will google search “Multiple sclerosis” + “study” and “multiple sclerosis” + “survey” to surface websites who have written about Multiple Sclerosis studies before. Now I have a list of people who are already interested in this and have written about it before. Google news usually surfaces some of the best results here. I will then scrape these opportunities and run Hunter.io to find all the relevant contact information and import these into Pitchbox for outreach. 

In your pitch, make sure you explain why you stand out over every other similar piece of content. In my example, we had surveyed more users with multiple sclerosis then even some clinical trials. That is something that will catch the eye and get someone interested. Even asking them “Is there anything else you would have wanted us to ask in this survey? We do them fairly frequently so if you ever want to collaborate or contribute to the questions next time let us know”. That is now adding a bit of personalization to an already awesome piece of content. Also, you have now created a relationship with this person if they respond back which will end up as another link later down the road. 

If you are promoting content that is a cookie-cutter version of other content, I would go back to the drawing board before starting your content promotion.

Skyler Rees, Ardent Growth

One of my favourite content promotion tactics for law firms is to take the newly minted piece and throw a few ad dollars behind it targeting people who are likely to engage on social and coupling that with some enticing copy. The ad spend gets it in front of the right demographic and their own engagement helps it get additional reach. 

If you know your content as a decent search volume (or a high-intent one) you can always run some additional paid search ads to get it in front of the right people at the right time as well. In the realm of marketing for law firms, if you know your content has decent search volume (or a high-intent one), you can always run some additional paid search ads to get it in front of the right people at the right time as well.

I encourage people to also shoot a 30-second video to accompany their ads on social and on search ads (if they’re running YouTube ads). It dramatically increases the CTR and reduces your overall CPC.

I know paid advertising isn’t always the most fun or ingenious way to get additional traffic but there’s a reason why paid advertising has been around for so long: it works.

Nick Malekos, LearnWorlds

Author Bio: Shaurya Jain is a Digital Marketer specialising in inbound marketing. He loves to dabble with new technologies.

Farwa Anees

Farwa is a Digital Marketer who likes to share her insights and experiences via writing. She likes to test and experience new eras in marketing and share them through blog writing.