At a previous role I had a small marketing team so the constant drive was to push the limited resources as far as I could. At the start of the year my focus was to produce more content. Inbound marketing/content is the future seemingly. I tried it for a few months but found I was just sending more content to the same people. More was not better. It was just more.
Using basic inbound marketing our audience and reach was not growing.
Instead I cut back on our content but tried more ways to promote it . The results were fantastic. In fact lead capture (my primary measurement of success) jumped by over 300%!
Write once, publish EVERYWHERE and EVERYWAY.
The approach I tried is based on the premise of write once, publish EVERYWHERE and EVERYWAY. I produce one detailed, great piece of content. Preferably evergreen, i.e. the content is not time sensitive and will always be useful. Then I break up and reformat that content for release on different channels over a period of one month or longer.
Over a 30 day period I will do the following:
- Publish one piece of anchor content a month e.g. an ebook on a single topic.
It can be small, about 6-7 pages. Big text and lots of pictures. But it must cover the topic well. An example of one I produced is this guide on how to set an employee performance goal. - Split the ebook into weekly blog posts.
- Post excerpts from the ebook on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. Not just the book title but share quotes from the text.
- Repost the blog posts to LinkedIn pulse, groups and other forums like Medium or Reddit. Put a week delay on these to let the blog get indexed by search engines first. Post the full content. People will appreciate it and still click through to download the ebook.
- Use the content to answer questions on Quora.com and Reddit.
If you find it hard to find people asking questions that your content answers, then you may not be writing the right content. - Set up alerts on social media for people asking questions around the topic so you can share the content.
- Take the images from the ebook and post to Flickr under creative commons so people can use (if they link to you). This is a slow burner but works great. I have got links from Forbes, Inc, Mashable and others using this.
- Do a press release.
- Do a webinar for the content and invite people from outside your existing subscribers as well.
- Post the webinar slides on Slideshare.
- Post the video recording of the webinar on Youtube.
- Boost or sponsor any of the above content with Pay Per Click ads.
IMPORTANT! EVERYTHING must end with a call to action back to your site, where you try and capture an email address and grow your audience and leads.
Promotion
I time all this promotion around the blog posts going live. The timing of tweets etc is based on research done by Neil Patel. In the below spreadsheet I put in the date of the blog post at the top and it gives back the day and times every tweet, Facebook post and LinkedIn update must go out. After every blog post, I spend about an hour in a tool called CoSchedule putting in all these dates and then everything is automated for the rest of the month.
(Tip, install the Coschedule google analytics custom report for great insights.)
(Extra tip, email everyone mentioned in your post using a tool like OutreachPlus to let them know. Chances are they will share it with their audience if it makes them look good.)
Bonus: Download the spreadsheet I use to time the promotion for every blog post.
Overall I split my time 30% content production and 70% promotion.
At the end of every month, I can measure how the content performed and compare it month on month.
Changing the focus from more content to more content promotion increased our leads each month by 300%.
Below is an infographic describing the process from start to finish. Feel free to share this or embed it on your own website using this code.
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<a href="https://brandpitchapp.com/this-content-promotion-plan-increased-our-leads-by-300/"><img src="https://brandpitchapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/B2B-Content-promotion-plan-increase-leads-brandpitch-v4-720.jpg" alt="B2B Content Promotion Plan – BrandPitchApp.com" border="0"><br>
The Content Promotion Plan from BrandPitchApp.com</a>
Embed this on your website. Copy and paste this code.
<a href="https://brandpitchapp.com/this-content-promotion-plan-increased-our-leads-by-300/"><img src="https://brandpitchapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/B2B-Content-promotion-plan-increase-leads-brandpitch-v4-720.jpg" alt="B2B Content Promotion Plan – BrandPitchApp.com" border="0"><br>
The Content Promotion Plan from BrandPitchApp.com</a>When you should share and post your content
After you post a new blog post add the date of the post to this spreadsheet. It will tell you the exact day and time to post every tweet, facebook post and linkedin status update to promote it. this is what I used to increase leads by 300%.
Download the free spreadsheet now:
