How to Amplify Your Content

Now that you’ve created compelling content that you know will be useful to your audience, you’re ready to amplify that content so that it reaches as many of your prospective customers as possible. Too often, content marketers will spend a great deal of time crafting engaging content that is useful for their audience, only for it to fall into the ethers of the internet. Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. At a minimum, you should be promoting your content on all of your social networks. The content you’ve created to appeal to your audience in the early stages of their sales cycle will tend to be more easily digestible and shareable. But of course, not all content will lend itself well to the short attention spans of social media -- for example, a white paper may not translate well to 140 characters. In these cases, you may want to consider paid content amplification. Content amplification is “the practice of marrying valuable content with paid marketing tactics.” It enables content marketers to get their content in front of their target audience across multiple channels through the use of paid advertisements, which then direct traffic to the content on their owned media properties.   

Promote Your Content on Social Media

Beyond posting your content to your social media accounts, put some of your marketing budget behind sponsored posts. Facebook’s sponsored posts, LinkedIn’s sponsored updates, and Twitter’s sponsored tweets all take advantage of the platform’s user data to deliver targeted messaging smoothly and efficiently.

Content Discovery Widgets

Content sharing widgets automatically embed snippets of code at the beginning and/or end of your content, giving your users the ability to share your content with their social networks with a single click. There are many free services available, but paying for a premium subscription will unlock more options for greater customization.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a web-based advertising method that targets prospective customers based on previous behaviours. For example, if someone visits and e-commerce website, adds a product to their cart, but abandons their transaction, retargeting will serve your content to them through ad networks as they navigate elsewhere online. Studies have shown that retargeting improves click-through rates from an average of 0.07% to 0.7% and increases conversions by up to 60%.

Native Advertising

At its most basic, native advertising is “a form of advertising that integrates high-quality content into the organic experience of a given platform.” Native advertising fits within the look and feel of the websites on which it’s displayed, delivering a consistent user experience and improving click-through rates to be closer to those of editorial content. 70% of people would rather learn about products through content than through traditional advertising, and native advertising is viewed 53% more than banner ads. However, content marketing and native advertising have somewhat different goals, and there are definite pros and cons to each:   As brands continue to produce content that adds value to their audiences, native advertising is a less-intrusive way to deliver this content alongside contextually-relevant and publisher-produced content. Native advertising allows businesses to target their audience and reach them on platforms that they already know and trust -- all without disrupting their content consumption.

Conclusion

Crafting useful and engaging content is only part of your content marketing plan -- once you’ve created it, you must also have a plan in place to promote it so that it reaches your target audience during their buying cycle. Sharing it on your social networks is a good first step, but consider paid amplification strategies to cast a wider net. The next, and last, post in our series on content marketing basics will look at how to measure and optimize the content that you’ve created and shared.