“Build it and they will come”.
It’s a well-known and often over-used quote from the movie, “Field of Dreams”, used to describe the fallacy of great content as a marketing tool. In my opinion, great content isn’t great until someone shares it. And they share it with their friends, and so on and so on.
With content marketing, great content is the beginning not the end objective. An effective content marketing strategy includes information about target buyer personas, search keywords and social topics, an editorial plan and a plan for promoting all the high quality content being created. Today’s Internet and social web are full of information overload. Buyers can easily be distracted and so it’s important to stand out and stay connected.
Here are 3 basic reasons for B2B marketers to plan content promotion:
- Many B2B buyers rely on information to be pushed to them because finding and trusting new sources on an ongoing basis isn’t practical.
- Promoting content through social channels can lead to exposure, traffic and links. Links from social channels and web pages can influence search engine visibility, adding an additional source of relevant traffic.
- Content promotion can inspire syndication and citations from other blogs and online media. Getting on the radar of other influential bloggers can lead to inclusion in future stories, blogroll links and engagement.
A particularly effective model for coordinated Social SEO and Content promotion is the Hub and Spoke. Depending on your content strategy and target audience, the hub might be a resource center, a blog, Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel or a Website. The spokes are distribution and promotion channels leading to off-site networks or communities. Each spoke has it’s own unique content and social network characteristics. When coordinated, relevant content promotion across the right mix of channels can amplify overall distribution, reach and engagement.
Understanding the communities of interest and involving them in both content development (crowdsourcing, social engagement, polls) and promotion (Retweets, shares, comments, links) keeps topics fresh and relevant as well as interesting for the community to promote to others.
If you’re a B2B online marketer, how are you including content promotion in your content marketing strategy? Do you plan targeted promotion or do you promote to the same channels every time? Do you plan on the repurposing of your content as well?
(Photo credit “arukasa” – Flickr)