Previously in our “Collective Wisdom” series, we’ve covered pre-planning for content marketing success, the art of crafting powerful content, enduring and often-overlooked content creation best practices, and how to use a number of tried and true content promotion tactics.
Now let’s dig into several spicy ways to take existing content promotion tactics and make them uniquely your own, including a smattering of flavorful insight from some of the best in the business when it comes to the art of promoting your content.
Innovate With Your Own Unique Promotion Twists & Tactics
Regardless of how many fine lists, guides, articles, or books you read about the art of promotion, if you don’t take the initiative to innovate and create something unique your marketing success will generally be limited.
Noted marketing author and speaker Guy Kawasaki has for years espoused the powerful benefits of enchantment in marketing.
“The three pillars of enchantment are likability, trustworthiness and a great product or service. If you have these down pat, you could rub two sticks together and enchant people.” @GuyKawasaki Click To TweetPromotion can be like cooking, with vast archives of tried and true recipes and cookbooks handed down through the generations. Most are sure to please, but they often bring the same old flavors and tastes. This makes for a boring meal for anyone looking for new combinations that push the boundaries of culinary arts.
You can do better, as Paul Hollywood might say on “The Great British Baking Show.”
From Comfort Marketing To The Enchanting Unknown
While there’s marketing success to be had in giving your audience what they’ve always wanted in the past — a sort of comfort marketing — I think there’s greater potential when you’re able to take your customers into the unknown, with enchanting promotion that amazes and delights. This, however, is easier said than done.
It helps to have an honest passion for your marketing endeavors, and as master chef Julia Child said, you must be interested in whatever you’re doing.
“Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” — Julia Child Click To TweetWith each passing year, the internet and mobile devices put more and more of the world at our fingertips. Of course, the number of promotion tactics has exploded as well, which means there’s opportunity for you to expand your promotional strategy.
You’ll find dozens of great promotion tactics on our blog alone, including:
- Our CEO Lee Odden‘s “Invisible Content Syndrome and the Content Promotion Tactics to Cure It“
- “Is Anybody Out There? How to Get More Eyes On Your Blog Content” by our own Senior Content Marketing Manager Joshua Nite
- A goldmine of promotion tactics also from Lee is “50 Content Promotion Tactics to Help Your Great Content Get Amazing Exposure“
Finding Your Own Tasty Flavor Combinations
Just as great chefs innovate by combining unique ingredients or applying never-before-used techniques, innovative marketers have a knack for finding their own new ingredient combinations to pushing the boundaries of promotion.
To us, this means going beyond building a social media amplification strategy to include other make-sense promotional ingredients such as email newsletters, third-party editorials, and working with influencers. As Lee says:
Content promotion can’t be effective if it’s an afterthought. Your best practice would be to make promotion part of content planning. @leeodden #ContentMarketing Click To TweetFlip The Mirror & Promote The Content That Excites You
Trial, error, and experience make it easier over time to set aside the promotional techniques that don’t combine well with others. But one way to ensure that you’re using promotion methods that complement one another is to turn the marketing mirror on yourself.
Focus on promoting your best content — the kind that truly excites you and drives you to want to share it with people who will feel the same.
Noted digital marketing speaker Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder of Orbit Media, sees this as an important function of successful marketing.
“It’s the marketers job to promote the best work. To share, link to, send and talk about the good things. It’s the only chance we have to bring the best to the most.” — Andy Crestodina @crestodina Click To TweetBeyond looking at the content itself, think about which promotional tactics draw you in. When something resonates with you, click on a link to see what else is on tap, follow a person or brand on social channels, or even sign up for an email newsletter to get more visibility.
With this kind of insight and personal authenticity, you can deliver a stronger sense of brand purpose in your campaigns.
If your promotion techniques aren’t strong enough to entice you, chances are slim they’ll be powerful enough to interest others, so turn the mirror of marketing self-reflection into your own personal crystal ball.
Help People Get What They Want & Recognize When To Enlist Others
The knowledge to be gained from looking inward can energize and invigorate you, helping you put together a marketing experience that’s genuine and relevant.
“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want” — Zig Ziglar Click To TweetEven the best don’t have expertise in every area. So, smart marketers should seek out answers from experts who are stronger in those areas, as marketing speaker and author Carla Johnson points out.
“To help promote content, tap into people who have solved the problem that your content helps your audience with.” @CarlaJohnson Click To TweetRelationships Blossom & Benefit With Influencer Marketing
Building these types of partnerships is one of the main purposes of influencer marketing, as Dr. Konstanze Alex, Head of Corporate Influencer Relations at Dell, recently shared in an enterprise B2B influencer marketing interview with Lee.
“Strategic partnerships with influencers provide for an outside in view when creating content for our customers.” @konstanze Click To TweetThe market for influencer marketing has seen continued growth, with several recent estimates predicting it as a $10 billion industry by 2020, with 35 % growth through 2025.
Add Some Spice to Your Promotional Strategy
By combining the right tactics that will take your customers into the unknown, using enchanting promotion that amazes and delights, and turning the mirror of marketing self-reflection into your own personal crystal ball, your content promotion campaigns are bound to have a measurable advantage.
Next up in our “Collective Wisdom” series we’ll start examining how to measure and analyze the content campaigns you’ve diligently planned, crafted, and promoted to clearly see what’s working well and what isn’t.
If you haven’t yet caught our previous episodes in this series, hop back and study up:
- “How to Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts By Planning Ahead”
- “The Art Of Crafting More Powerful Content: 5 Top Tactics from the Experts”
- “5 Powerful Messaging Tactics For 2019 And Beyond From Marketing Experts”
- “Don’t Blink: 3 Often-Overlooked Practices for Highly-Effective Content Creation”
- “Step Right Up! 8 Content Promotion Showstoppers For 2019“
