Learn What Works: 5 Best Practices for Content Marketing Promotion and Analysis

Successful content marketers understand the importance of leveraging the right promotion channels to connect with new audience members, readers and prospects. But it’s not easy to strike the right balance, and not striking it is a big reason why only 42% of B2B marketers feel their content marketing efforts are effective.

The most effective content is usually pushed with a mix of organic and paid promotion. Organic promotion is done without spending money to promote content. Efforts such as email marketing, SEO, social media, events and word-of-mouth are all cost-free outside of the time it takes to do the work. The biggest benefit of organic promotion is that, without being constrained by a budget, you’re able to spread your brand authority to a broad audience across multiple platforms – you just need to make sure you stick to a consistent style and publishing cadence.

Paid content promotion lets you customize your target audience along with your messaging, but you’ll have to pay for people to see it. You can run paid social media campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, or ads on search engines such as Google. This often gets expensive, and that makes it tempting to put more of your budget toward one or two platforms. Try using only a portion of your money to test ads and smaller campaigns across multiple platforms to see what works before narrowing down your target audiences.

Organic and paid promotion efforts complement each other most effectively when you start with organic promotion for community management, then use paid campaigns to reinforce and deepen the reach of core messages that have performed well organically. Here are five best practices to help you leverage both organic and paid promotion to get your content in front of customers and prospects:

1. Create a content audit sheet

Keep track of all your content marketing efforts by making a spreadsheet of everything you’ve already created, from blog posts to webinars to infographics. Create headers for content type, topic and analytics to make it easy to filter your spreadsheet and figure out which types of content are resonating with your audiences. Next, experiment to determine the best platforms and times to post. Remember to maintain consistency in your messaging without sharing the exact same content across platforms. For example, your email audience may only want to hear from you once a week, while it’s OK to post on Instagram daily. Click here for my tips on how to write for different platforms.

2. Build out a content calendar

A content calendar will help you manage how and when communications will be released. Content calendars typically include upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships and updates to existing content. When you’re putting your timeline in place, don’t plan so far in advance that you’re not open to change, but leave enough time to execute on your initiatives. I recommend having an editorial lead time of at least three months.

3. Segment your audiences

Segmentation lets you customize your messaging to groups within your target audience based on specific criteria. This is a powerful tool to show your customers and prospects you understand their needs and to avoid sharing content that isn't relevant to them. And it works - 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

There are many different ways to segment your audiences, from building lists off of website form submissions, page views, email actions and more. When segmenting, make sure you keep your buyer personas in mind and align your segments with their interests, demographics and geographic location.

4. Experiment and optimize

Content marketing is an ongoing cycle of “try, try again.” Not that you won’t succeed the first time – it does happen! – but your goal should be to continue to test different methods and optimize to make sure your content resonates with your audience. If you’re not experimenting and then checking your analytics to be sure you’re happy with the level of engagement your content is getting, you’re probably wasting money.

Try testing different messages, distribution channels, days of the week, times of the day and paid-versus-organic promotion. You won’t know what’s working and what isn’t unless you add and remove variables and analyze the results of each effort.

Which brings us to …

5. Analyze your results

According to HubSpot, 75% of companies that miss their revenue goals don’t know their visitor, qualified lead or sales opportunities data. Help your organization stay on track by ensuring you have a solid strategy for measuring and analyzing the performance of your content and the contributions it makes to your overall sales goals.

You can learn a lot from your web analytics. I use Google Analytics to power all of my web reporting (one reason why I recently became certified!). You’ll be able to glean valuable information from the standard reports in Google Analytics, like how many people have visited your website, which pages are getting the most traffic, and where your traffic is coming from (hopefully this metric will include referrals from your social media and email marketing efforts). These default reports are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a plethora of metrics and insights below the surface in custom reports that can be designed based on specific needs. A broader overview of the dimensions, metrics and reports offered by Google Analytics can be found here.

In addition to your web analytics, make sure you’re checking your email marketing metrics if you’re running campaigns. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates and more provide valuable insight into user activity and help you measure the overall success of a campaign.

For any type of paid promotion, make sure you measure your return on ad spend, which is the difference in money generated by conversions of the ad minus the total amount spent on the ad. This level of analysis will show you which channels and types of messages are resonating with your audience and help you determine next steps based on the new insights you’ve gathered.

Do you have great content to share, but you’re not sure how to promote and analyze it effectively? Get in touch with me - I'm happy to help!