Making Your Internet Promotion Strategies Work for You
There’s a lot of discussion these days about the importance of developing a good content marketing strategy, and creating top-quality content for SEO purposes and to give your audience a great experience with your business. You probably also hear a lot about how important it is to inject regular, fresh, relevant content into your site as part of your strategy.
And all this is quite correct – without good content your customers are less likely to engage with your business, and your search engine rankings are more likely to fall flat. But good content is not enough on its own. Along with your content marketing plan, you need to put some work into your internet promotion strategies to ensure your customers notice your content, and engage with your business.
Content needs to lead to engagement
What is really required for a content marketing strategy to work – to get the results you want – is engagement. Essentially, successful content is relational. And in this day-and-age of automated everything, the relational aspect of marketing is more important than ever!
Unfortunately what seems to so often happen is that content is posted, it’s promoted a bit, some people might engage with it for a short time, and then it’s time to start the next content project.
So with all the competition on the internet, how do you create content that actually yields results? Basically, you need to amplify your content – that is, turn up the volume and get it on the right frequency, so that it doesn’t get drowned out and forgotten about.
Tips for creating content that engages
Your audience should always be your starting point for creating good content. Think about what they want and need to make their lives better. Don’t be afraid to ask them what they think – for instance through surveys, and / or email questionnaires.
Once you have produced relevant content that meets the needs of your audience, it’s time to make sure your audience knows about it, and to build a community where people like your content, comment on it and share it. Here are a few simple promotion strategies to get you started:
- Make sure your posts have attention-grabbing headlines. They should be clear, concise and information-rich, not vague or cryptic in any way or too long and wordy. They also need to convey the gist of the content to follow and not mislead in any way.
- Share your posts on social media, adding a couple of lines that will get the attention of your target market. Make sure to share on the channels most relevant to your audience, and to time your posts according to when your users are most active. Also consider segmenting your audience into relevant groups when sharing different material.
- Send out an email newsletter with attention-grabbing teasers for your content. Include links to the content on your site, to make it easy for people to engage.
- Engage with your audience. Respond to comments, and answer any questions or requests for information. In this way you help to build up an online community, where your business gets to show its ‘human’ side. A strong community also brings people back to your site again and again.
- Revamp your most popular content to engage a different audience – create a video or webinar from written content, or package blogs into an e-book.
- Make it easy for your users to take the next step – through a very visible call-to-action button for instance, or a box where people can enter an email address.
Finally, use metrics to track your activities, so you can determine which internet promotion strategies are working best for you, and refine your activities.
Creating content that engages your audience and helps build a community around your business takes time and possibly quite a bit of trial-and-error along the way. However, the results are well worth the effort!
