Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

“Content is king.”

This statement has been uttered by many a digital marketing expert. And it still holds true to this day. Content in its many forms is constantly utilized in business. This is especially true in terms of advertising products and services.

It’s interesting to note that the terminology related to content adverts is as varied as the methods themselves. Yet despite this, more than a few important terms are lumped together or are simply not used properly.

Content Marketing vs. Content Promotion

There’s some confusion between content marketing and content promotion. People have used these terms interchangeably. A business can certainly do both, but it’s important to know what the differences are between the two.

Content marketing attracts, engages, and retains an audience by creating relevant content mediums, including articles, videos, and podcasts. It helps a brand build authority and stand head and shoulders above the competition.

A company may employ content marketing to establish expertise and keep its products or services top of mind. 

Meanwhile, content promotion is when you distribute blog posts and other resources either on paid or organic channels like PR, pay-per-click advertising, social media, email marketing, and syndication. 

Content promotion fosters engagement by promoting a company’s content assets to target buyers. At its best, your articles and videos will grab peoples’ attention. 

Content Planning vs. Content Strategy

Content planning represents the structure used by your company to determine which content initiative to execute and when to do it. It involves the creation of processes and workflows. 

The content plan prevents issues that may arise in content marketing by doing the following:

• Ensuring content is unique and relevant

• Accounting for the resources at hand

• Optimizing every piece of content

• Keeping a content calendar on schedule

A content strategy is a high-level vision for content utilization. It informs the creation, publication, and governance of content. This type of strategy guides future content development in the delivery of a specific business objective. 

Writing a Winning Content Promotion Plan

As with any digital marketing strategy, there’s a method involved in creating content. Just like you do keyword research for a Google Ads campaign, you’ll also need to go out there and learn what types of content would suit your audience. 

But of course, it isn’t just about research. There are steps involved in creating and implementing a successful promotion plan.

Planning

How do you start making a winning content promotion plan? 

Research. Lots of it. You want to be able to understand your audience from the inside out. The more insight you have into the people buying your products, the easier it will be for you to develop targeted messaging. 

You’ll notice that when you invest in intelligence and structure, the smoother and more effective the rest of your campaign will be.

Defining Audience Types

The audiences that could potentially share your content are grouped into three distinct categories. 

• Collaborators. This can be a different but related business that you can partner with to create the content. Or it can be asking an influencer or a respected member of the community for feedback about your brand and then including quotes from them. 

• Promoters. This group comprises journalists and bloggers. Also, business owners who are willing to share your blog post with their followers.

• Amplifiers. This section of your audience will be reading and maybe even criticizing your articles or posts. Amplifiers will share your content based on personal interest, such as establishing their credibility in a field.

The audience type you engage with will have an impact on your timing. If you want to work with an Instagram model with over a million followers, then you need to begin reaching out early.

Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

Conducting Research

Have you determined the audience types you’ll be leveraging for content promotion? Then the next step is to do some research to find out what messaging will resonate. 

Say you run a dropshipping business on Amazon and are looking to introduce a new product to your audience. In addition to getting hints on what kind of messaging will stick, you should have a solid idea of the following when you do research.

• How do your outreach targets interact with content?

• What incentives can your business offer targets to encourage them to link or share?

Suppose you intend to gather data using formal research methods, such as surveys, interviews, or proprietary data analysis. Give yourself and your team at least a month to prepare and get all the data sorted out.

List Building

Persona development leads directly to list building. Lots of marketers and business owners think it’s an onerous task. 

However, list building is a crucial step in the content promotion plan. You need to make sure you’re methodically adding prospects. 

A well-organized list ensures that all outreach activities will progress as smoothly as you’d expect. The likelihood of major snags in your processes will also be diminished.

List Size

How do you know if you already have enough prospects on your list?  For this, you’ll need to review your segmentation. Start by thinking about your promotion goals. What’s your ideal content engagement scenario and how do you plan to measure indicators (e.g., likes, shares, retweets)?

Refer back to previous content marketing campaigns you’ve sent to similar segments. Once you’ve got that, determine your target outreach list by dividing your goal links by your success rate.

Scheduling Promotion

The week before your content launch is bound to be the busiest time in your promotion cycle. It’s usually when you’ll shore up your lists and get buy-ins from key influencers. It’s also the time when you would schedule announcements and begin preliminary outreach.

Pretest Content

The last thing you want is to have problems on launch day. You can avoid this by pretesting content. 

How does it work? Essentially, you show your content to individuals with relevant experience. These experts should be able to improve on the information you’ve presented or add to it.

Pretesting content is also a great way to get the aforementioned buy-ins from those sought-after influencers in your community. 

You can choose between two approaches when giving people a “sniff test” of your content.

• Targeted approach. You put together a list of relevant influencers whom you can reach out to for thoughts/feedback. By doing the target approach, you’re essentially doing outreach even before your content is even published. It is certainly a more complicated way to do pretesting, but you’ll be able to filter more errors and potential problems and have enough time to correct them before going to launch. 

• Volunteer approach. This is easier because it only involves finding volunteers by posting on your social channels. Doing so lets followers know that you’re about to drop new content, and are looking for reviewers. Obviously, you have less control here. Still, there’s the possibility of increasing exposure and shares without dramatically increasing outreach costs.

Get Excited for Launch Day!

The launch of your promotional campaign is when you see the benefit of putting that content plan together. But more importantly, it’s also when all that hard work will be tested.

If you followed the process above, you should already have all the pieces in place. So you have every reason to expect the day will go relatively smoothly. If chaos happens, it will be the kind that’s organized.