B2B firms are investing a great deal of time and resources on content marketing to attract and engage prospects and leads. One of the keys to success is getting your content 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.
1. Promote, promote, promote
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:
- Promote your premium content (i.e. eBooks) on your social channels regularly
- Pull snippets or quotes from blog posts and use for tweets (include link to post)
- Include older, evergreen blog posts in your social media publishing rotation
- Leverage influencers, syndication and calls-to-action
2. Optimize your blog posts and landing pages for search engines
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:
- Include a descriptive URL that includes primary keyword (<90 characters)
- Create an accurate title tag that includes primary keyword (<70 characters long)
- Create a unique meta description that includes keywords (<150 characters long)
- Use the primary keyword in the page headline and secondary headlines
- Keyword optimize ALT tags and image file names
For additional tips, check out this helpful visual guide for SEO on-page best practices from Moz.
3. Make your employees content marketing ambassadors
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. And 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:
- Share every blog post, eBook, webinar, etc. on LinkedIn
- Like, retweet and comment on social posts
- Create discussions on LinkedIn groups using your content
- Promote content during face-to-face and email interactions with prospects
4. Leverage paid amplification
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:
- Set an initial budget and experiment with different platforms and options
- Target a very specific audience using LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content
- Use Twitter’s Promoted Tweets or Facebook’s Boosted Posts to expand reach
- Try a content recommendation platform such as Outbrain or Taboola
5. Don’t forget about email marketing
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 tosell, 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:
- Set up a blog subscription and send subscribers regular blog updates
- Revamp your eNewsletter to be more content marketing oriented
- Develop lead nurturing drip campaigns for all premium content offers
- Use evergreen blog content to fuel drip and triggered email campaigns
- Promote new premium content to relevant segments of your existing contact list
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.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Simple Ways to Increase the Reach of Your B2B Content Marketing
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