Most SaaS businesses recognize that content is a vital part of their marketing strategy. Whether you use a content creation agency or do it all in-house, good content delivered across multiple platforms is an effective vehicle to encourage people to buy your software solutions.
If they like your content, they’ll most probably respond by following and engaging more with your posts, and, at some point, this will hopefully lead to a sale.
But what if you’re putting the effort into creating quality content but nobody is actually seeing it?
One solution is to adapt your content so it can be shared across multiple platforms, from your blog to Instagram to Twitter and so on. However, even covering all your online bases doesn’t necessarily guarantee a high number of views or good engagement.
In fact, even the best content may need a little help to reach your target audience, which is where content promotion comes in.
What is content promotion?
Content promotion is a way to push your creative output toward your target audience using both paid-for and organic methods, with the ultimate aim of driving sales.
If your business is well established, your content may already have great reach, but promoting quality marketing materials can still help you connect with new audiences and increase your visibility. This may be particularly useful if you’re launching a new product or service.
For newer businesses without a huge following, content promotion is even more vital, empowering you to build an audience across multiple platforms. This is one way that start-up ecommerce businesses can stand out.
Why does content promotion matter?
Content should offer something of value to the reader, whether its aim is to entertain or inform. If you put a lot of effort into creating your materials, you’ll undoubtedly want as many people as possible to see them — but this doesn’t happen overnight.
However, content promotion can speed it on its way. Some of the benefits include:
- Improved brand visibility. Consistent and engaging output can increase interactions with your audience and make your brand more visible. The more you appear in their newsfeeds, the more they’re reminded of your existence. Therefore, when customers have a particular software need, your brand will be one of the first to pop into their heads.
- Authority in your field. If your content is both useful and accurate, people will not only trust your brand but turn to your posts for information. With sufficient promotion, your audience may eventually include other businesses and even competitors. If they begin to cite information you’ve published in their own marketing materials, this will make your expertise appear unparalleled.
- Increased sales. This is the end goal, after all. Customers often need a little nurturing, and seeing your posts regularly can create the trust they need to make a purchasing decision. However, be aware that the number of times they’ll need to see your content before they commit to buying can be quite high.
What content promotion strategies are there?
There are several ways to promote content, and these are usually determined by the platform you’ll be disseminating it on. The main options include social media, paid promotions, blog and email marketing, and online forums.
Once you’ve decided on the channels you’ll use, you can plan your promotional strategy.
We’ve explored some of the most popular options below.
1. Sending content to your email subscribers
Your email subscribers are already interested in your product, and the beauty of using these lists for promotional purposes is that the message will land in every one of their inboxes. With social media, on the other hand, your content will never reach all your followers.
To use email to promote your content effectively, it’s important to monitor various analytics and KPIs that can help you tweak future campaigns. You should also send regular communications to keep your subscribers engaged (this might mean providing useful tips and promotions, for example).
Subject lines, in particular, should be used as a tool to pique interest. You can do this by addressing a common concern or problem, asking a rhetorical question, or including emojis.
Sending reconnecting emails can also help re-engage subscribers who haven’t opened your previous messages.
Be sure to include a clear CTA in your emails, as well as links to your blog and social media channels. This will increase eyes across all your platforms and should encourage greater engagement and increased conversions.
2. Share new content on social media
Social media is one of the best places to share content because more than half of the population uses it. This means you’ll probably find your target audience there. The key is understanding them and identifying which channels they use since demographics differ across platforms.
Being sociable — e.g., liking, responding to, and sharing comments or DMs — should be part of a wider strategy to engage with your audience. It’s important for them to get something back where possible as this shows you appreciate them and helps you build meaningful relationships that put you a cut above your competitors.
If your engagement is nonetheless falling short, you can always promote your social content by using paid advertising.
Regardless of whether you opt for paid or organic social media marketing, you need to regularly produce quality content that’s interesting and encourages interaction. If your audience operates on multiple social channels, this can be time-consuming, but it’s still a worthwhile task.
If you’re finding it overwhelming, don’t be afraid to look into social media management software, which can help you create and schedule posts across different channels to reduce the associated legwork.
To maximize the reach and coverage of your content on social media, you’ll likely need to tailor your output to each channel. Instagram is primarily focused on images, for example, while Twitter is more about words. Similarly, Facebook might be useful for targeting domestic consumers, but LinkedIn is often best for reaching B2B clients.
The word “socia” in social media is not to be ignored — this is your reminder to engage with your audience.
3. Use paid promotion
Organic content marketing can produce good results — but these can be maximized with the use of paid promotions. While there are packages to suit a range of budgets, it’s important to know what you can afford to spend before you start strategizing.
Some paid promotion options are:
- Paid social media ads. Most social media advertising offers the ability to hone in on your core demographic. You can target your audience based on gender, age, location, and even interests, meaning adverts are more likely to land where they’re well received.
- Promoted posts on search engines. Search engines such as Google also offer the option to pay for higher rankings based on your choice of keywords. This can be particularly successful because many people only look at “above the fold” results; however, it’s essential your keywords are relevant and reflect your product, service, and brand – otherwise you’re just paying for views that won’t turn into purchases.
- Blogger or influencer marketing. This particular method has grown in popularity in recent years as more people turn to influencers for product reviews.
By working with an influencer or blogger, you can bring your products to a new audience and boost sales by sharing discounts, promotions, or competitions. A respected influencer with a good following can also enhance your credibility and make you stand out in your field.
4. Use a content recommendation engine
Promoting content that’s relevant to your audience is key, and a content recommendation engine is one tool that can help.
This is a software program that uses AI to analyze data and provide a personalized experience based on users’ keywords, interests, and past content preferences.
If you install a content recommendation engine on your website, it can suggest other blog articles or tutorials that visitors might find interesting based on the content they’ve previously read and engaged with.
5. Optimize your content for SEO
It’s also a good idea to optimize content (e.g., blogs and web pages) for SEO, as this will boost its organic reach by helping it perform better in search engines.
Remember, a higher ranking generally increases ROI, so it may be cost-effective to hire an expert if you’re not sure how to optimize this yourself.
Here are a few things to take into account:
- Use high-volume keywords that are relevant to your product or service to boost your ranking on search engine results pages.
- Make sure you use optimized keywords in your page titles, meta titles, and meta descriptions.
- Use relevant internal links throughout your content to maximize a user’s session time.
6. Participate in online forums
Forums such as Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn can also provide access to new audiences, especially for B2B businesses, and taking part in discussions and offering advice can gain your online profile a lot of additional views.
For example, by sharing your thoughts on trending or evergreen topics, you can position yourself as an expert in your field and encourage people to reach out to your brand or follow you elsewhere.
7. Make your content easy to share
Any time someone shares your content, it automatically increases your reach. That’s why you want to use one-click share buttons on your blog and website — to make sharing simpler for viewers and ensure they’re more inclined to do so.
This could be by highlighting shareable snippets or building strategically placed social media widgets into your website.
8. Add video to your content
Video is a great way to engage with your audience. Visual content has been an especially useful marketing tool for a while now, and with the increased viewership of Instagram and Facebook reels, TikTok videos, and YouTube shorts, you’re lagging behind if you’re not creating this type of content.
Blogs, posts, and adverts can all be repurposed for video and shared on sites such as YouTube. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel — just how you deliver your messaging.
9. Gather feedback
Getting insights directly from your audience relating to how well-received your content is can provide valuable feedback to help shape any future marketing strategies.
Feedback might be gathered using a simple and easy-to-complete survey. Additionally, close monitoring of your unsubscribe/unfollow list can highlight patterns regarding the type of content that either turns people away or sparks their interest. You can even provide an option for people to call up and leave qualitative feedback using toll free telephone numbers.
Research needn’t be solely reactive though. You can get ahead of the game by assembling a group of people who represent your target demographic and having them look at a selection of different types of content before it goes out, to provide feedback on things like tone and relevance. They should also be able to tell you if there’s anything in there that could come across as either offensive, insensitive, or exclusionary.
10. Create a newsletter
Newsletters are another excuse to contact your subscribers. Similarly to blogs, you can include social media links in them to promote sharing and increase your audience reach.
As well as sharing your own news and views, a newsletter also gives you the opportunity to reach out to companies whose offerings complement yours and suggest ‘newsletter content swaps’ or featured guest pieces. This is mutually beneficial as it increases the visibility of both businesses.
For instance, a newsletter swap can help you build your audience by using the subscriber list of the other company (and vice versa). It’s therefore important to pick any collaborators carefully, as you ideally need to share a complementary audience.
For instance, a company selling windows might decide to collaborate with another specializing in blinds. While the two would not be in direct competition, they would most likely share a target market.
Of course, if you’re expanding your audience through these sorts of channels, it’s important to be able to direct potential leads to a website that’s up-to-date and functions smoothly.
Legacy systems migration might be worth looking into if this isn’t currently the case for your business, as it can improve the overall digitization of your systems and help create a website that’s not only user-friendly but includes sales data that’s updated in real-time.
11. Mention others
Whether it’s other businesses, public figures, or creators, reaching out, tagging, commenting, and sharing posts from external sources can also increase the visibility of your social media accounts.
For example, if you include quotes from public figures or have guest contributors featured in the blog posts you’re sharing on your socials, tag these individuals and ask them to help out by sharing your content. This is a surefire way to maximize your audience—without requiring any additional effort on your part.
12. Repurpose your content into podcasts
Similarly to video, you can also reuse existing content by turning it into a podcast. Whether it’s a blog or a video offering advice and solutions, this will enable you to reach a different audience (i.e., those who prefer to listen rather than read or view).
Even among those who don’t watch videos or read blogs daily, there will be many who regularly engage with audio media.
13. Offer exclusive content
Lastly, early software previews and access are one way to get people excited about new products. This creates a sense of exclusivity.
The same is true for subscribers-only content, like live Q&A sessions or video tutorials. Making this exclusive gives people a reason to subscribe to your email list, blog, or social media accounts, helping build your audience and ensuring more people are seeing the content you put out.
Bonus tips for content promotion
We’ve covered the 13 most important tips, but here are a few additional pointers you might find useful.
Understand your target audience
To be able to refine your promotional strategy, you need to understand your audience and how they access information.
It’s a good idea to create a target persona, including information like their:
- Demographic
- Needs
- Hobbies
- Interests
- Buyer behavior
- Challenges
- The channels they use
Be clear about your goals
You’ll also need to work out what you want to achieve, how you’ll achieve it, and when. Any goals you set should be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-based
Use KPIs to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns in light of these targets. For example, did those paid Google Ads provide a good ROI? Did you break even or spend more than you made? Did web traffic increase, or was your conversion rate higher?
Monitor the performance of your content
Most social media platforms provide you with free analytics. At the very least, this means you can monitor likes and views. Website, email, and blog performance can all be tracked too. It’s essential to do this across platforms to see what content performs best, where, and at what times. This can help you optimize your marketing across channels.
Since algorithms change constantly, monitoring content and keeping abreast of trends is important. Analytics software can be especially helpful if you’re managing multiple platforms because you can see all your data in one place and make easy comparisons.
Be prepared for the deluge
Okay, there may not be a deluge as such, but the phone should start to ring more if your content promotion is successful.
If you’ve put all that effort into driving people to make a purchase, you need to be sure your sales team can cope with increased demand. Outbound call center solutions and their like can help, so be sure to invest in tools that support your staff in delivering consistently excellent customer experiences.
Final thoughts
Content is one of the best ways to capture the attention of your target market, but standing out from the crowd and being seen is a significant challenge. Promotion is key to achieving this, and it can take a lot of time and patience to get it right, as well as some trial and error. If you want accelerated results, contact Sevenatoms, a proven content marketing agency with ten years of experience in crafting disruptive SaaS content marketing strategies.
Remember, too, that there’s having a following and then there’s keeping a following. This is where the creative part of content creation comes in. Your output must be interesting, engaging, and entertaining to successfully maintain an audience and build long-lasting (and hopefully profitable) relationships.
Sharing content across all your channels will maximize your reach, as will collaborating with other people, brands, and companies. With the added option of paid promotion, there are plenty of different and useful strategies out there to explore.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started today.
