If Content is King – Then PROMOTION is it’s Queen!

Content is King. It is at the heart of all of today’s marketing strategies.   As businesses use websites and blogs to grow their reach, how else would they demonstrate their expertise in their industry? Creating content on the Internet is one of the most efficient ways to educate current and potential consumers. 

Now every king has it’s queen, and that queen plays a very important role in any metaphor! Like anything, you never just want to do something just to do it. You never want to be caught just going through the motions, because somebody told you it was the right thing to do. You go to school and you get good grades, actually you get PHENOMENAL grades, and graduate with a 4.0. Well, does this mean Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Miami University will just come knocking at your door?

NO! It does not. Being brilliant is not enough. You have to promote yourself!

You have to write unique essays, deliver them directly to these Universities, and ask them to read your work. Then just maybe, they’ll invite you to join their university.

Content within your digital marketing strategy works the same way. If you run any type of professional business today you’ll know that, in terms of marketing, the world has changed dramatically. In the past, if a potential customer wanted information on your products or services he would call your office and engage you or one of your sales team members to get the lowdown on your offering. Today that same customer may very well still pick up the phone and call your office, but his first port of call is undoubtedly the Internet. In the past it may have been tangible directory of some sort.  Today, he’ll search on Google, check out your website and expect to sign up to article updates or social media feeds to find out more. By do this, he is checking to see who he could best trust to solve his business problem. What he is searching for on the internet is valuable content.

“Content is king” has become quite the buzz phrase in the digital marketing world. People often take it in the direction of quantity, instead of quality. As James Chartrand and Derek Halpern have been saying for a while, “Good content is not enough because everyone has good content. You must promote it.”

Time after time I see people complaining that their epic content is not getting noticed. This is a problem that bloggers have been having since the beginning of time. If nobody is coming to your blog, then creating new content quicker is not your immediate fix! At that point, you’re just throwing up billboards on a road that doesn’t have any traffic, and we’ve come a long way since the billboard days.

So when bloggers hear experts telling them that content is king, they more often than not, mistakenly think that content is all they need to succeed.

However, creating epic content (or being brilliant) is never enough. You need to know how to syndicate it, and get your content out there. Your content should be created with specific purposes, that fall under the over arching goal of:

Reaching new audiences, and making sure that the new traffic you receive converts into a lead, a customer or a subscriber.

The promotion and outreach process (your queen) requires an entirely different set of skills. During the content planning / creation phase, you will want to ensure your piece of content follows a specific strategy, with everything from internal & external linking, down to the keyword focus planned out to a T.

You’ll want to ask yourself the following questions:

• Who else is talking about this?
• Who is ranking for my keywords, who is my competition, and what characteristics of their content makes it so successful?
• Who has been linking to related articles?
• Is what I’m creating relevant, yet unique? And that is a fine line to walk.

As you begin to find the answers to these questions, you can start to establish an outreach process. Throw the post and pray model away, and take a more tactical approach. You’ll want research influencers that are talking about your topic, and manually reach out to them. Ask them to share your content, and link to it.

Research different social groups, on various channels, that are talking about what you’ve written about, and ask them for their opinions. Ask them to take interest, and to share your content with their networks as well.

You want to leverage your content to increase your footprint on the Internet. It’s never been enough to just post a blog, and tweet about it to all your followers. That level of commitment is expected. In order to grow, you must seek people out. Very rarely do people find you, and take something you’ve created viral.

Now promoting your content will only get you as far as an increase in traffic. So when that traffic increase finally comes, make sure your content is ready to convert it! At the end of the day, increasing conversions is the goal here. Whether it’s email subscribers, leads, etc. getting people to convert is the name of the game.

So make sure your content is created with:

• Internal links to related pages – this will further the user down your funnel, and report an increase in interest
• Measurable goals – whatever you deem as a conversion, make sure you can track your efforts
• Multiple opportunities to convert – don’t just use one call to action, place them throughout the text, and even on other elements on the page

Spend 30% of your efforts creating great content, and 70% promoting it to relevant audiences.  Successfully executing this strategy takes a lot of hard work.  But hard work (and smart work) produces great results!  

Give us a call today to see how AdVision can help grow your business online!