Here’s the scenario: You are a marketing manager and spend a significant amount of your time conceptualizing, creating, and promoting content for your business. You are utilizing all of the right channels- email marketing, influencer marketing, social media, blog posts, etc. Despite your best efforts, your engagement is stagnant, and you just can’t seem to hit your goals. It looks like you’re doing everything right, so what’s the problem?
If you find yourself relating to the first paragraph, there may be a few crucial mistakes that you are making when it comes to your promotion strategy. Although it appears on the surface that you’re using all the right strategies, there are some extra steps you can take to ensure your promotional plan is top notch. It’s time to stop letting your efforts go unnoticed. Here are 7 tips that you can use to improve your content promotion strategy.
1. Know your buyer personas
The first step to promoting your content is to know who your target audience is and who exactly you are trying to reach. A buyer persona is a detailed, fictional representation of who your ideal customer is. These personas should be based on extensive research of your customer base, along with some educated speculation. If you are new to personas, try to start out by defining 3-5 different personas for your business, and remember that you can always add more to your list over time. A good buyer persona should include the following elements: a short bio, personal and business background info, hobbies, demographics, goals, challenges, and motivators.
Once you have your buyer personas defined, it will make creating and promoting your content much easier. It’s very important that before you create your content, you have in mind exactly what personas you are targeting, or you risk your content not performing to its potential. If you can ask yourself these questions about each of your personas before creating your promotional plan, you are much more likely to reach the right audience who will benefit the most, and in turn, get the greatest return on your investment.
- How and where do they consume content?
- When and where are they most active?
- What content will they benefit from?
- What messaging will resonate with them?
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2. Set Smart Goals
SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Setting SMART goals for your promotion strategy will help you create realistic goals that you can track and analyze, while still holding you accountable. Try to think about it this way. If one of your goals is to increase your engagement on social media, which goal sounds better?
1. Increase engagement on social media
2. Increase engagement by 15% on social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn) by the end of Q2 by providing valuable content to the right audience.
The second goal is the obvious choice, and it is utilizing the SMART strategy. By using the SMART strategy, you are setting your goals up for success by having a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, setting a solid timeline, and clearly tracking and analyzing your progress.
Determine your SMART Goals Here!
3. Differentiate your Social Channels
You probably are using several social channels to market your content to your audience on a weekly basis. With the automation tools that we have today, it’s become easier than ever to publish the same content and messaging across all channels with just the push of a button.
Although tempting, this strategy isn’t going to deliver the most value to your audience. It’s likely that your audience will vary across channels and will be looking for different types of content from you. In order to leverage your marketing channels, you should consider what type of content will resonate with your audience on each of your social channels.
For example, maybe you’ve found that your younger audience is more likely to engage with your content through Instagram, so you cater to them using visually appealing images, current trends, and messaging they can relate to. This type of differentiation across your channels will allow your different audiences to receive a greater value.
4. Experiment with Content
Have you set SMART goals and defined your buyer personas, but you still aren’t sure the exact strategy that is going to provide the most value for your audience? If you don’t have a lot of previous data to base your promotional strategy on, experimenting with your content can help you to find what works, what doesn’t, and if there are any holes in your content.
A few variables that you may want to try experimenting with are: time of day you post, how often you post, what platforms you use, copy, and content type. Try to choose one variable to test at a time in order to have the most clear results. Don’t worry if not all of your content is performing how you would like, because it will still help you to understand what does not resonate with your audience, so you can adjust your strategy in the future.
5. Track Engagement Across Channels
You can think of tracking your engagement across social channels as the second step to experimentation. What good will it do if you experiment with your content, but don’t keep track of the results?
After experimenting and testing different variables of your content strategy, you’ll find patterns of certain things that worked well, and some that, well, didn’t perform so great. It’s a great idea to keep your results organized in a spreadsheet or document so you’ll be able to easily analyze and come to conclusions about your findings.
Once you’re able to see clear patterns, you can update your promotional strategy to curate a well thought out promotional plan that is based heavily on your own data and what your audience wants to see.
6. Perform a Content Audit
Performing a content audit for your business may seem like an overwhelming task, but when done right, it has the power to take your promotional plan to the next level. A content audit is the process of analyzing and categorizing all of your past content and evaluating how it performed.
This will help you determine the quality of your content and show what worked in the past and what could’ve been done better, in terms of the goals that you have set for your business. Once you have completed your content audit, you can use it to track trends in your past content and start building your promotional plan based on your analysis.
7. Repurpose your Content
Remember that one blog post you had that really took off and had your audience engaging like crazy? Well, good news- your best performing content doesn’t have to be one and done. If your audience likes the content you create in blog form, chances are they are going to find it useful in other formats as well.
You could turn your well-performing blog into a youtube video, an Instagram post, or even a webinar. Not only does this save you long hours of coming up with new content for your marketing channels, but it also allows you to give your audience different forms of content that resonate with them, which will lead to building trust.
Improving your content promotion strategy doesn’t have to be a difficult task. If you can implement these 7 tips into your strategy, you are sure to build a promotional plan that resonates deeply with your audience and ultimately gives you a great return on investment.
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