How to Promote Your Content in 2020: Strategies, Tips and Ideas

Everyone produces content. People make posts and publications on personal social network pages or professional content created as part of the development of a business, brand, project, blog, or in the process of creative activity. Content that is part of a business or brand development strategy needs to be promoted systematically and effectively. Let’s talk about how to promote content and what methods and techniques you can use to do this.

Why content is so important?

In the SEO digital and content marketing environment, the expression “content is king” is quite popular. It was formulated by Bill Gates in his essay back in 1996. It very accurately reflects the value of content and its role in the information environment, modern society, social, and business processes.

The degree of content influence is difficult to overestimate. Today, almost two-thirds of users (74%) make decisions about purchasing and using services based on information received on social networks from acquaintances or influencers.

With the help of high-quality and unique content, it is possible to ensure the presence of a brand and a website in high positions in the SERP, so content can be called one of the cornerstones in SEO. Most companies of all kinds create blog platforms on their websites. Information that is relevant, useful, and attractive to the user is published.

This is what our SEO blog looks like:

SeoQuake

In fact, today blogging is almost a must-have for promoting a website, brand, and business; it is a tool for attracting an audience, increasing loyalty, shaping the image of a company or personality, etc. At the same time, the format for presenting information, style, and type of content depend on the niche, focus, and platform of the business or project. If we talk about general trends, then in 2020 the following types of content are most popular:

1. Video content, streaming, broadcast
2. Content created in collaboration with influencers and micro-influencers
3. Interactive content
4. Webinars and online courses

For specialized and professional niches in the field of marketing, digital marketing, SEO, and IT, the most popular format of content are articles, guides, and research because it is interesting for specialists and professionals involved in these industries. 

It should be noted that every year the budgets that represent various businesses allocate for content marketing and are increasing. According to the Brafton report, the average budget in the B2B segment was $185,000 in 2019, depending on the size of the company, the costs looked like this: 

1. Large business (over 1000 employees) – $405,000
2. Medium Business (100-1000 Employees) – $213,000
3. Small business (1-100 employees) – $81,500

In 2020, more than 50% of B2B marketers planned to increase their content marketing costs: 34% of them – by 1-9% and, 12% were going to expand their budget by 9%.

In the B2C segment, the average budget was $230,000. A more detailed breakdown looks like this:

1. Small business (1-100 employees) – $111,000
2. Medium Business (over 100 employees) – $337,000

In the B2C sphere, 59% of representatives planned to increase the content budget: 42% by 1-9% and 17% by more than 9%.Of course, having a budget, it is much easier to effectively promote content, most marketers and SEO specialists recommend using a paid content promotion, especially at the initial stage of starting a project or business. However, such an opportunity is not for everyone, especially at the very beginning of the path. Therefore, let’s consider options, methods, and tips on how to promote content when you have no money.

Actual Guide: How to Promote Content Free

Free content promotion is a time-consuming task that requires significant time and intensive activity. By using various strategies, methods, and techniques, you can gradually bring your content to worthy positions, successfully competing with numerous players in your niche.

Consider what are the 5 promotional strategies that can be used to accomplish such tasks. Marketers and SEO specialists identify several areas in which you can develop an activity for effective and comprehensive content promotion.

Promotional strategies

• Creation of relevant content targeted at the target audience using SEO methods: It is important not only to create quality content but also to make it visible to search engines. This will increase the chances of getting to the first page of the SERP.
• Social Media promotion: Social networks are an excellent platform for communicating with the target audience and promoting content. Depending on the niche and profile of the user, it is important to choose relevant social networks and gradually build relationships with your audience and acquire useful contacts. It is sometimes enough to limit yourself to one or two resources.
• Creation of video content for YouTube: Back in 2018, this platform was ranked 3rd among search engines in terms of popularity among users:

As mentioned above, today video content is among the top trending types of content, so the creation of video materials can be considered one of the most promising strategies. Read the related article –  20+ Tactics for SEO Promotion on YouTube.

• Promotion through forums and thematic communities: This is a very effective strategy because thematic, niche, and professional forums have already accumulated a certain audience that is actively interested in the field. It will take some time and regular work to promote your content in the communities in order to take your place in the virtual team. In the future, it can become a good platform for promotional content on an ongoing basis among a loyal and active audience. For more information on how to use the community for SEO, see the Building community article.
• E-mail marketing and Outreach: Communication via e-mail will allow you to convey information about content to the target audience and influencers. For this method of communication to become effective, and to avoid emails ending up in the trash, it is important to follow the rules of business correspondence and communication. For more information on outreach and how to approach email recipients, see Blogger Outreach.

Types of promotional strategies depend on your goals, niche, audience, and positioning. To get a result when promoting content, try using several strategies at the same time. Also, when implementing strategies, it is important to act consistently and use a variety of methods, techniques and tips, which we will now consider.

• Audience formation: This process will continue throughout the entire time as you promote your content, develop a resource, business, etc. Globally, the quality of the content plays a key role in how broad, relevant, and high-quality your audience is. At the very beginning, it is worth analyzing how relevant the content you are going to promote is to the interests of your target audience, and if it falls a little short of it, upgrade it. In order to understand what topics the audience is interested in and what people repost most often, you can analyze the most popular queries in your niche. For more efficient work, you can use SEO services to find out the most popular searches and topics in the niche using keyword selection tools. For example, for the theme interior design, the most popular questions would look like this:

SEMrush

Look for more useful instruments in Top SEO Tools for Businesses in 2020 article.

• Influencer Targeting: Influencers are people who have a big impact on the audience in their niche, they are people whose opinions are listened to and whose advice subscribers actively use. Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing areas. Some of its methods are successfully applied in SEO. A recommendation from a major influencer or their mention of your content can sometimes play a life-changing role and quickly move your content to the top. Reaching out to influential influencers is a difficult task, and only a few succeed at the initial stage. But cooperation with representatives of micro-influence is quite possible, and this should be used for content promotion. 
• Comments like a promotion tool: At the initial stage of audience formation, you should actively use comments as a tool for building contacts, attracting attention, and creating your own image. Analyze communities in your niche, groups on social networks, etc. Learn the communication style in these communities. Their rules and be active by leaving comments on the discussion topics. If your content turns out to be relevant to the topic under discussion, you can leave a link in the comments, or talk about your resource (website, blog, etc.). You can gradually build relationships with active, popular, and authoritative members of groups and communities and enlist their support and reposts.
• Creation of various snippets for social media: Neil Patel recommends creating over 20 different snippets (descriptions and previews) for social media posts. At the same time, they can use various variations of the title, quotes, interesting data, statistics, or everything that can attract the attention of users. This tactic will be especially useful for social networks such as Twitter and Facebook because it will allow you to post the same content repeatedly over several weeks or even months, which will be presented in a new way each time.
• A mention of the source that was used to create the content: When publishing content on social networks, as well as in the text itself, it is sometimes worth mentioning the source to which you referred. If it is a reputable media outlet (CNN, The New York Times, etc) or an influencer, you can add a tag them in a snippet that can attract the attention of users subscribed to a resource page on the network.
• Content adaptation into video format. Create a video on the topic of your written content to attract additional audiences from other platforms such as YouTube. Given the growing popularity of video content, it is worth paying attention and allocating time and resources to create a quality and engaging video. Among promotional strategies examples, you can find many examples of how video content brought excellent results in the implementation of a promotional strategy.

The case of Cleveland Clinic, implemented back in 2013, is quite indicative. A large medical institution with thousands of employees positioned its main value in this way: Patients First. In order to fully convey this message to the clinic staff, patients, and partners, it was decided to make a video – Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.

The video was posted on social networks and on the clinic’s blog and went viral, eventually collecting more than 5 million views. This was a great success for this genre. Traffic to the Health Essentials Clinic blog has also increased dramatically. Today, it is the most visited blog of any clinic in the United States with a monthly audience of 6 million visitors.

  Health Essentials

• Create infographics for text content: Users love visual content and appreciate it when it is made with high quality and attractiveness. Add illustrations and photos because it is a good idea to create infographics to display a piece of content. Related to statistics or how to recommendations are a good start. It may also be worth developing an attractive and original design for posting on social networks. This will make your content recognizable and add points in the eyes of users.

An interesting case using original infographics was demonstrated by the travel company Lawrence of Morocco. At a time when the Game of Thrones series was at its peak of popularity and was actively discussed on the network, tour operators developed special routes to the places where the fantasy epic was filmed and accompanied the content with infographics with references to the theme of the series and cinematic names of locations.

Lawrence of Morocco

Infographics helped to attract attention to the content, and posts on social networks attracted the attention of the audience, which eventually brought 11 thousand new visitors to the site in 2 weeks. It became a serious success for the local tour operator.

• Find people who have shared similar content and connect with them. For example, your content is about digital marketing and tips relevant to 2020. In the search engine, you can find articles that are at the top of the search results on Twitter, who shared a similar article by sending its URL to the search box.

The article:

Wordstream

Searching for the URL on Twitter and getting a list of users who have shared this content:

Twitter

From this list, you can select people with whom you should try to get in touch and share your content. In the same way, you can use the search for users interested in the topic in other social networks.

• Post content on social media at the most appropriate time for this. The social media feed is always full of rapidly changing information. In order for your post to avoid passing by the target audience, it is important to publish at a time when the probability of being noticed is the highest. Sprout Social believes that the best day to post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is Wednesday, and the worst day is Sunday.
• Use platforms such as Quora, Reddit, Medium, BizSugar to promote content. By participating in thematic discussions on these platforms, you can form a reputation for yourself as a specialist and expert in your field, and also use them to publish your materials. The ability to choose an audience according to niches makes communication targeted and effective.
• Use links in your posts to your most successful content. By regularly analyzing your content, you can see which materials enjoyed the greatest success and attracted the most traffic, reposts, etc. When promoting new content, you can use links to your popular posts. This will increase visibility for a new issue.
• Make your content mobile-friendly. First of all, it depends on how Google will index the content, as well as how it will rank. Plus, mobile-friendly is an essential ingredient for positive user experiences. Pay attention to the mobile version of the content and how it will be perceived from the small screen. In some cases, it is worth adopting the visual part and structure of the content to make it look attractive. It is also worth monitoring the page loading speed in the mobile and desktop versions because there is a direct correlation between the waiting time for page opening and site traffic. Read more in the articles Mobile Search and Mobile-First Indexing.
• Use flashy quotes to draw attention to your posts. Quotes from famous people, influencers, engaging and inspiring quotes can be a good way to draw attention to a post. It is important that quotes are relevant to the context, correspond not only to its content but also to the style. Here, as in everything, appropriateness and a sense of proportion are important.
• Use Pinterest to promote by creating a business account. This method will be especially relevant for content related to Lifestyle, how-to, DIY, fashion, travel, and culinary topics. In this case, it is important to pay increased attention to the visual component of the content, to make it attractive, memorable, and stand out against the background of similar pins. The peculiarity of this network is that you can post pins several times a day, and they can be devoted to the same topic. For more information on how to use Pinterest for SEO and promotion, see Pinterest SEO in 2020.
• PR & media relations. To promote your content, it is worth gradually building relationships with the media, in particular with journalists who specialize in your topic. They can be found through monitoring the media and social networks, contact, and offer cooperation. Typically, the press is constantly on the lookout for new and original material, so if you can act as an expert or offer unique content, the collaboration can be very successful. The HARO platform can be used as one of the media communication tools. It communicates between journalists, bloggers, experts, and resources that are able to provide them with the information they need. Free registration is available on the site, and with regular monitoring and activity, you can gradually achieve publication or link to you or your resource in the media.

 HARO

• Content Syndication. An interesting and quite effective tool with which you can attract the attention of a wide audience to your content. The essence of the method is the publication on third-party sites of a copy of content that came out on another resource. It’s a different way to distribute content that doesn’t take time to rewrite text, video, design, etc. At the same time, it is important that the citing publication contains the address of the resource from which the content was taken and a link to the original. In case users like your content, there is a high probability of going to your website or blog. This will lead to increased traffic.

To get to another site with your publication, you need to use the same communication methods that are used when working with influencers such as outreach, communication in social networks, establishing personal contacts with resource owners, etc.

With an eye on SEO, this tactic should be used with a bit of caution because Google may interpret duplicate content as spam or manipulation attempts, which will result in changes in indexing, a drop in rankings, or imposing sanctions.

However, these troubles can be easily avoided. Google recommends when syndication is made to link to the original article on all sites hosting the content. Another way to hedge against trouble is to agree with the site owners that your content will not be indexed using the noindex meta tag.

Google Support

Content promotion is an important and time-consuming process, without which development and movement forward are impossible. Even the best, most unique, and brilliant content cannot reach the audience without accompanying complex work. Over time, when the resource generating content becomes famous and authoritative in its niche, the promotion process will be easier, and in many ways, even automatically.

In all cases, you should always pay attention to content promotion. This is the same regular, systematic, and highly professional activity as the process of creating unique killing content itself.