bullHornHow to Generate More Leads through Strategic Content Distribution Content Promotion is important when providing inbound marketing consulting.

You’ve just created a piece of content for lead generation! While it’s tempting to go and celebrate, you’re not done just yet. You can’t just put a piece of content up on your website and hope that people will find it – you’ve got to optimize that piece of content and actively promote it to your audience. But that’s where many of us get stuck. What else can we do to get people to notice – and hopefully convert on – that new piece of content you created?

Let us go through the details of how to successfully coordinate a campaign for significantly more leads.

The three phases to promoting your marketing content:

  1. Planning, organizing, and optimizing
  2. Coordinating promotion across multiple channels
  3. Analyzing and reporting after your offer has launched

Let’s walk through all the various options for promoting your content, and when it makes sense to use each channel. These ideas are simply levers that we continue to pull month over month. Additionally, if you have ideas for experiments that are not included in this ebook, it doesn’t mean that they won’t work for your audience. It’s always smart to experiment and test out different ways of promoting your content!

HOW TO PLAN AND ORGANIZE YOUR CAMPAIGN

checklist-1Even if you a great piece of content ready to go, you still have to find a way to get that content in front of the right people. The following is a 3-week campaign to put in place prior to your launch date.

TO DO – 3 weeks prior

  1. Set your goals – Make sure you have a goal for your offer. You should have a primary goal and secondary goals considering website traffic, branding, lead generation, marketing or sales qualified leads, or direct sales.
  2. Brainstorm, creating a timeline – Be sure everyone on your team is on the same page with promotion. Come up with a launch plan.
  3. Determine your promotional levels – If you spend 10 hours promoting the content, then spend at least 10 hours promoting it.

TO DO – 2 weeks prior

  1. Finalize your content’s persona and where are they in the buyer’s cycle.
  2. Create images for your landing page, social media, email, and blog promotion.

TO DO – 1 week prior

  1. Write landing page copy to show why someone should download the offer. Then creating the “thank you page” where people will be sent after filling out the form. This links to the actual offer.
  2. Write a blog post to promote your offer. This is the best way to launch an offer.
  3. Create calls-to-action to put on your website and blog.
  4. Write email copy to promote the offer.
  5. Start a LinkedIn Group discussion about the offer.

COORDINATING PROMOTION ACROSS MULTIPLE CHANNELS

When you launch your offer, remember that it doesn’t have to be a one and done type of deal. You can (and should) re-promote your offer a week, a month, or a year after the first launch as long as the content is still relevant. This can be done by writing multiple blog posts on the same topic or creating additional social media images to help re-promote your content.

To better where you should promote your lead generation content, consider:

  1. Blogging – Blogging drives traffic to your landing pages and website better than any other tool. Each time you blog, you give Google and other search engines an opportunity to find you.
  2. Organic Search – Optimizing your content for search will help you generate leads for years to come.
  3. Website – Your website is your greatest asset.  Create a call-to-action for the offer on your homepage. Make sure you include social sharing buttons.
  4. Social Media – Social media has become the most important channel for marketers and sales professionals.

facebookInsightsFacebook

  1. Change your cover photo to be branded for the piece of content you just launched.
  2. Pin a post to the top of your page that has the same branding as the cover image and include the link to the landing page.
  3. Posts with images 2-3 times during launch week.
  4. Post once a week during the month after launch.

bird3Twitter

  1. Change your cover photo to feature the piece of content you’re promoting.
  2. Pin a tweet to the top of your page and an image with the same branding as the cover photo.
  3. Create a hashtag for the campaign. This allows you to monitor conversations around the content and answer questions specific to the content.
  4. Host a Twitter chat or Q&A at a specific time about the using that hashtag.
  5. Tweet frequently including an image and link. (Did you know that tweets with images generate 55% more leads than Tweets without images?
  6. Have the content creator send tweets out about the offer on his/her personal Twitter Account.
  7. Host a contest, ie. The first 200 people to tweet about your offer will get a free gift or discount. This is valuable because you are reaching an audience you wouldn’t have been able to on your own.

linkedinLinked In

  1. Post a link to the content on your Company Page on launch day.  Include an optimized image if possible.
  2. Join a group and start a discussion. This tactic can be spammy if done incorrectly. Groups on LinkedIn are meant for valuable discussions among professionals, so don’t go posting links to your content everywhere, in hopes to drive traffic to your website. In the long run, this will negatively impact your brand. Instead, pose a discussion question related to your content.
  3. If you have a LinkedIn group of your own, send out the offer in your weekly announcement to all group members.

googlepluslogoGoogle+

  1. Post to your Google+ page during launch week. Include an image that links back to your landing page.
  2. Host a live Google Hangout to answer questions related to the content.

Other social channels

  1. If you have something fun related to your content like a picture, infographic, etc., post it on StumbleUpon. Volume might be low at first, but you can drive traffic to your landing page with little effort.
  2. There are many communities out there for like-minded professionals to discuss business.

Email – for most companies, emailing an internal database can be a great way to promote content. If your emails are optimized for social sharing, you can benefit from word-of-mouth marketing from your own audience. Try to reach out directly to some friends and influencers in your industry or personal email database and ask them to share the content with their audience if they found if valuable. To make it easier, have email copy ready for them to use.

Guest Blogging – when possible, use a blog post on a relevant guest blog to help drive referral traffic to your offer. By guest blogging, you’ll be able to increase awareness and link back to your content.

Paid Promotion and Social Advertising – You can also use paid marketing opportunities to amplify the message you already have on social media.

  1. Boost the engagement on Facebook by putting some money behind it. Make you ads very targeting to ensure your money is spent in the most efficient way.
  2. Create Promoted Tweets on Twitter to appear in targeted users’ news feeds.
  3. Use LinkedIn’s sponsored Updates feature to promote the Company Page update related to the content.

Live Event Optimization

If you’re hosting, speaking or running a booth at an event, make sure to let some attendees know about your new content.

Have a laptop or tablet open to your landing page at your booth and encourage people to download the offer right there.

Create a short link for the offer and include it in presentations of speakers at the event. You can also put the short link on the back of business cards you will be handing out at the event.

analyzeANALYSIS

If your goal is Website Traffic, look at website views compared to equal time period before the launch of your campaign

If your goal is Branding, look at new followers, mentions, blog view and comment, and reviews.

If your goal is lead generation, look at leads generated by source from your specific campaign.

If you goal is Qualified leads (MQL/SQL), look at leads that turned into marketing qualified or sales qualified leads from your campaign, or the number of leads sales considers to be qualified.

If you goal is direct sales, look at revenue driven directly or indirectly from your campaign.

When tracking your results, remember to hold your team accountable for what they agreed to take on during your team brainstorm meeting.

Also remember that what’s more important than the number of blog posts you publish or the number of emails you send, is the number of views, leads, or sales that you generate from your campaign. It’s these real ROI numbers that will help you, your team, and your company move the needle and become successful, not these arbitrary numbers such as number of blog posts. It’s always better to work smarter, not harder.

Setting a goal of four blog posts or two emails should help you reach a specific goal if you have a general idea of how many visits, leads or sales each of those channels could generate for you.

In this essential playbook for promoting your marketing content, there are three phases or takeaways that you should remember. First, make sure you have a meeting with your team to set goals and plan and organize your campaign a few weeks out. During this time, you’ll also need to optimize your offer, landing page, and launch blog post to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck. Once you have your promotional plan in place, you need to actually launch your offer by

coordinating promotion across various marketing channels. Some of the levers you can pull here include social media promotion, blog posts about the offer, Click to Tweet buttons throughout your content, influencer outreach via email, and much more.

Finally, you’ll need to determine if you actually hit your goals and measure the success of your campaigns. Once you know how an offer performed overall, and how well each channel performed with promoting that offer, you’ll be able to significantly improve your campaigns for the future based on what worked and what didn’t for your audience.

Now go create a successful campaign for promoting your marketing content!

 

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