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Traditional in-your-face media marketing tactics have started diminishing. Brands are now publishing content and shifting towards building their own digital media properties.
Nobody can deny the effectiveness of content marketing and content promotion.
As per Demand Metric, content creation and marketing costs 62 percent less and generates roughly three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
It’s nothing new, though. Brands have been using stories to attract their target audience and retain customers for centuries now.
Custom publishing was found in cave paintings as early as 4200 BC.
Right now, the barrier to start publishing is low for brands making it simple to get started on a content marketing plan.
You only need to install WordPress and set up your social media accounts to get started.
But, starting a blog, creating an editorial calendar, and publishing content on your social channels will not attract your audience by itself.
Just look at the massive number of blog posts published every day to show you the scale of brands vying for content promotion everyday.
Here is a snapshot from Worldometers at the time I’m publishing this post.
Jayson DeMers, founder of Audience Bloom, puts it aptly
You can’t just publish your valuable content and pray for your target audience to visit your website.
You need to invite the people who will like your great content to your website.
So, where are they available?
You’ll find them hanging around in niche communities on social media platforms and forums.
Let’s drill into 16 distribution channels and strategies on various platforms and look at the best practices for driving traffic from them to help improve your media marketing.
1. Repurpose your post in an infographic or a short video post
Visual content makes up to 93% of the content included in all human communication and this is why it works wonders with social media marketing.
You can appeal to your audience’s visual learning skills by publishing infographics and short videos and sharing them on your social channels.
Let us have a look at both of them and see why they are great for working into your editorial calendar.
1. Infographics – They are huge among B2B marketers. Their usage saw a tremendous increase this year – 11% (from 51% last year to 62% now).
They are also great link bait.
Example – Buffer used an infographic from Post Rocket in their article on Facebook’s organic reach. And, they linked contextually to Post Rocket from within the post. This worked for content promotion and reached their target audience in the right way.
Repurposing your post into an infographic for the social channels is simple.
- Just write the key points from your article. Then use a drag and drop tool like Infogram or Piktochart.
- Ensure that the infographic fits your brand’s style and blog’s design.
- If you’re ready to spend around 500$, you can also hire a designer from Dribbble.
- Next comes the important part – using the right distribution channels. You can submit your infographic to some of the following infographic directories.
Here are 100+ other infographic submission websites.
Be careful though.
Don’t republish your infographic on too many low-quality websites as this can have a negative effect on your media marketing strategy.
Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard took an interesting approach. He saw that an expert roundup post was doing well on his blog.
Seeing the popularity of the post, Adam approached TweakYourBiz about republishing the post.
What’s awesome is that he managed to strike a collaboration with 24Slides to repurpose his blog post as an infographic (free).
The repurposed version managed to get 22,000 visitors and 2000+ shares across social media sites.
There are no rules when it comes infographic marketing.
2. Videos – 100 million internet users watch online video everyday which is why they should also be a part of your editorial calendar.
Mobile users LOVE video.
Have a look at the mobile statistics shared officially by YouTube (the world’s second biggest search engine).
You can take advantage of this video revolution by repurposing your posts into videos and adding a call-to-action at the end of your videos to get your target audience back to your website.
Look at Entrepreneur.com.
They publish Weekly Tips Roundup videos with their contributors.
These are mostly short video interviews with the authors of their top performing posts.
Here is a 1-minute video roundup by Entrepreneur that threw light on 3 of their posts from the week. The video got 3000+ views.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghbKe-nxauQ]
You can also distribute this video on other video platforms like Vimeo and Viddler as well as sharing it via social media marketing tactics.
Read this post to get started with repurposing your blog post or great content into a video.
2. Send the article to your email list
Email is a personal medium. People sharing their emails with you have ignited a relationship, this is gold for any content creation expert and content marketer.
It’s little wonder that for acquiring new customers:
Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
At wwwclikitzapp.blogspot.com/, my traffic from email is engaged and consistent and I know I am reaching my target audience directly.
Email subscribers are the first to engage with your content creation and trigger social media sharing.
So, if you aren’t already, then start building an email list now, it’s one of the most valuable things you can do for your lead generation.
You can send a weekly follow up email newsletter to your list like Entrepreneur Magazine does.
Or send them an update for every new post published from your editorial calendar (like I do).
Some people don’t like leaving their emails. So, they consume content in their inbox.
Leo Babauta from Zenhabits deeply understands his audience. Since his subscribers like reading in their email, he sends them his complete blog posts to them in the body of each email. Knowing your target audience allows you to hone your content creation and also to adapt your marketing strategy to suit them.
You can also repurpose your popular blog posts and great content into an email course.
