15 Highly Effective Content Promotion Tactics You Need Use Regularly

Content promotion is at the core of every effective content marketing strategy. Yet it’s often the key reason why many companies fail at content marketing. 

The truth is your blog post or ebook isn’t the only piece of content your audience sees. Other businesses, in all industries, are publishing new content as well, fighting for your prospect’s time and attention.

With so much content available, how do you expect your newly published article to stand out? You must create and execute a thoughtful content marketing plan for every piece of content you produce. Just think about how much time and energy goes into producing quality content, and nobody wants to see that hard work go to waste.

In this article — which, coincidentally, you’re reading now thanks to our solid content promotion strategy — you’ll learn 15 smart content promotion tactics that will give your content the attention and engagement it deserves.

Start With Your Audience

The best way to start promoting your content is to start with your audience. Your audience is the reason for your blog post in the first place, so getting them interested in what you have to say should be your number one priority.

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By talking with them before writing about specific topics, you'll end up producing much more targeted content which will greatly increase the chance that they click on it.

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"I’ve seen far too many marketers (and internal stakeholders) skip ahead to, “Let’s hold a webinar!” or, “We need a white paper!” without ever having researched if that’s how their ideal customer likes to consume information. Research your audience. What keeps them up at night? Where do they go to learn about their industry or to help them solve their pain points?

Don't even think of launching a campaign or writing any content piece before you've answered these questions. Write content that speaks to their needs, and publish it where they already hang out." - Amanda Durepos, Content Marketing Manager at Sama

Promote Even Before You Publish‍

You don’t have to wait for your article to be live to start promoting it. If you’ve got a robust content calendar, you already know the topics that are coming up. 

Start talking about those topics in social media before you publish. Post relevant questions and highlight the challenges you’ll be addressing in upcoming articles. With this approach, you’ve already got people talking when you share the new article link.

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Brendan Hufford does something called a "Social Gate" where he talks about his upcoming ebook on LinkedIn and has people comment on his post if they're interested in getting it. This generates a ton of comments, which in turn ranks the post higher on LinkedIn.

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Then, he follows up with a DM to everyone who wanted it, creating even more engagement on the post!

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This works especially well if you're a part of online communities where your ideal customers hang out. You can start discussions about upcoming topics and get people to participate without looking spammy. When the article is ready, you can share it back with them.

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Participate in Industry-Specific Online Communities and Forums.

Your target audience may be more engaged in an industry-focused online community than on Facebook or LinkedIn. Figure out where they are, and get active in those groups.

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You can find online communities for all sorts of niches, from Ice Chewing (don't ask), all the way to broad groups like gaming. Your best bet is to look for something specific. So, for example, Lenny Rachitsky has a popular Slack group just for Product Managers. Corey Haines runs the Swipe Files community for up and coming marketers.

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As Jes Kirkwood says, "Identify micro-influencers who actively participate in online communities that cater to your target prospects — and build mutually beneficial relationships with them. People trust recommendations from their peers, especially those they look up to, and are more likely to consume and share content they learn about through this channel."

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Give Some Interlinking Love From Your Best Performing Content

Internal links are links that take readers from one article to another within your blog. They allow you to give readers more information on a topic without having to republish information you’ve provided in another article.

It’s easy to link to previous articles when writing a new piece of content. But it’s also important to go back to older articles and add links to your new article — especially well-established, high-traffic articles.

This creates a cluster of articles that talk about the same topic and are relevant to one another. It also signals to Google that your blog is a good source of information on that topic. 

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Build Backlinks Via Guest Posts

I'm not a huge fan of the old way of begging for backlinks by cold emailing a bunch of bloggers. A better way, as Dayana Mayfield does, is to write guest posts on other sites.

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The guest post adds value as content on that site, and you get a solid, organic backlink to your post. Dayana recommends creating a guest post template to speed up the process, but make sure you're not creating duplicate content. To make it even faster, generate unique guest post variants in seconds using Broca.

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Leverage Employee Advocacy

Your employees have their own social media accounts, and some may have a large following. Ask them to share your posts to their network, multiplying the reach of your content.

For example, Mastercard’s Employee Ambassador program encourages its employees to share relevant news and content with their social connections.

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"Take a hour or two, and pre-write a tweet, or a LinkedIn post for each person on your marketing, and maybe more importantly, your whole company including sales, engineering, operations, and leadership. Then, coordinate a social blitz over 48 hours. It not only gets your content in front of as many eyes as possible, but it lets your team step up and present themselves as the thought leaders they are." - Myles Carter, Manager of Content Marketing at ShareGate‍

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Pro Tip: Broca can automatically generate dozens of unique social media posts in seconds based on your blog post, so this step shouldn't take you too long!

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‍Create Video Snippets

Done right, videos can outperform text posts on social media. Create one or more videos related to your content, and post them regularly with your blog link. This can drive a lot of engaged traffic to your article.

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I've been trying this out with TikTok recently and I love how easy they make it to create short videos. So, for example, with this blog post, I'm going to turn each tactic into it's own 60-second Tiktok video. Then, I'll download that video and re-post it to Twitter, LinkedIn, and IG stories with links back to the original blog post.

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Syndicate Your Content on Popular Publishing Platforms

It’s been three weeks since you published your article, and your social traffic has flattened. Now is the time to syndicate your original post on popular platforms like LinkedIn Pulse or Medium.com.

With this strategy, post an excerpt or summary of the original piece with an enticing CTA at the end to encourage readers to visit the original article on your website.

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One good way to promote content is to republish or syndicate content in as many legitimate places as possible. For example, after we publish a non-technical article by our CEO on Forbes we will republish it on LinkedIn, Substack, and Medium one month after. And after we publish a technical blog post, we will syndicate it to DZone, Dev.to, Medium, and even HackerNoon. You can use canonical tags on these platforms so the original technical blog post gets SEO credit. - Rob Gibb, Content Marketing Manager at Fabric

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Pro Tip: Use Broca to generate new summaries and variants of the original post to speed up this process.

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Don't Stop Promotin'

Say that to the tune of Don't Stop Believin'.

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Most marketers will spend hours creating an amazing blog post but only share it out once or twice on social media before moving on.

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But you should be continuously talking about your best content online. In fact, every time you publish a new blog post, queue up social media promotional posts for the next month with a scheduling tool. And if you're having a tough time coming up with unique blurbs, Broca can generate dozens of them for you in seconds using AI.

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Recycle Your Compelling Visuals and Infographics

If your content includes images, graphs, or screenshots, use those visuals when you’re promoting your article. 

Create social posts around each of your visuals. An image or infographic can become a Pinterest post. A graph might hook your LinkedIn connections. Then include a link back to your article.

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This article is a perfect example. We've got videos, screenshots, and quotes that will eventually turn into separate social media posts over the course of weeks, driving a steady stream of traffic back.

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"I like to promote content in a way that further enriches its value. Posting a recent and cutting edge industry update on social and backing it up with a detailed article on the primary topic is one tactic I advocate. The audience benefits from staying up-to-date on the industry news and educated about the subject in detail. Content promotion includes the distribution of content across multiple channels in a consumable format. It involves repurposing content and creating slides, infographics, and videos to make sure that the content reaches the audience where they are." - Sagar Joshi, Content Marketing Specialist at G2

"It's all about repurposing content for different channels - so you might have a long form piece (in the form of a white paper for example) - the themes can be then turned into a blog series / interview. Then thinking about format - video / podcast etc. Then it's about promoting the content and ensuring it's the right fit for the channel - i.e. white paper for LinkedIn advertising to generate leads and then on organic social - repurposing content into carousel imagery and uploading as a PDF." - Amy Flippant, Digital Marketing Director at Della

Make Your Content More Social With Quotes, People, and Brand Mentions

If you haven't realized it yet, most of this post is just quotes from experts. In fact, when I asked for quotes on content promotion, the most common one was... asking for quotes!

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Content that’s written for social is much easier to promote. All you have to do is tag the people and brands you mentioned in your article when you share it on social media. They, in turn, will like, comment, and reshare your content.

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"Something that is *always* worth the time is gathering at least a handful of quotes for any article you do. Better yet, make it a whole roundup to get expert insights. That way your content is better *and* you have a valuable way to share across social/networks—you can ask participants to share." - Brooklin Nash, Head of Content at Sales Hacker

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"We write our ebooks and guides based on quotes from finance experts in our CFO Connect community. This helps us engage that community (they love being involved), gives our content more authority (because it comes from experts, not just some SaaS company), and then those experts love to share their contributions far and wide. This is particularly valuable on LinkedIn, where CFOs have huge networks and are always looking for thought leadership to share. So when we can arm them with a guide that they helped write, they're thrilled to help get it out there." - Patrick Whatman, Content Marketing Lead at Spendesk and CFOConnect

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Collaborate With Industry Influencers

Influencer marketing has grown multi-fold in the past few years, thanks to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Medium. More and more of your potential customers are consuming content from influencers they trust.

As a business, you can partner with influencers to promote your next piece of content. Just them to add your blog link to their content. 

For example, a YouTube influencer who talks about content promotion tools may be happy to link to this content promotion guide. (Why yes, this is part of our content promotion strategy!) :)

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"I feel like in B2B content marketing, working with influencers and thought leaders is one of the best tactics I have ever used. I even had a case study where we built a podcast functioning thanks to constantly nurtured influencer relations and then created a gated piece of content with the same influencers, which generated over $400,000 in the pipeline for the company. There’s just no limit to what you can do, and the results are great not only for organic promotion, mentions, backlinks, etc., but also for the actual content creation." - Margarita Loktionova, Content Marketing Lead at SEMRush

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Answer Questions on Quora and Reddit

Quora and Reddit are popular online Q&A and discussion platforms. So make sure you leverage them to organically promote your blog content.

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Build a credible profile over time by adding valuable comments and answers. Then strategically place your content links wherever they fit organically.

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Invest in Paid

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Reddit offer effective paid advertising options that can give you high impressions from a very targeted audience in a short time.

Social ads (promoting content) typically get more engagement than conversion ads (driving traffic to your sales pages). So don’t limit yourself to free content promotion. Give yourself a small budget to boost social media posts for your best content.

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Similarly, paid search or Google Ads aren’t just for promoting your sales pages. By promoting your social posts, you can drive high-intent traffic to reports and guides that might not otherwise rank well in organic search.

When you start getting healthy traffic from organic search, you can reallocate the paid search budget to another piece.

Pro tip: Use Broca to generate dozens of ad copy variations, track the ad formats, copy, creative, and platforms that are delivering the best results, and keep optimizing them for your best results.

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Gamify Your Content

I saved the most interesting for the last. This tactic is so unique, I don't think I've seen any examples of it until I spoke to Tiff. I'll let her explain it.

"We took a really fringe technology topic that many in the industry think is dead (they are wrong, btw). Educating that this problem is actually NOT DEAD, is alive and kicking and our software helps solve it was one key goal to support sales of one of our software products.

I had this idea that we could try to gamify this concept that is very significant to our offering and "thought to be a problem of the past". We are lucky to have a lot of developers in the company and a lot of people into gaming and also retro games. The marketing team came up with a visual storyboard for the game and we developed the idea and concept a little further.

Meanwhile, our developers took the baseline concept and transformed it into a game played on touchscreens. Each level progression gave the player a little more info on the topic and the game kept getting harder until the end when you could not beat it – and you could actually grasp how difficult this problem is to solve.

We took this game to events and had visitors play it,  talking them through and drawing comparisons to how our software works as they progressed. At the end of the game, we asked if they wanted to read more about this topic, because we had a whitepaper. If they were interested, we would get their email after they played the game and send them a follow up email with the whitepaper on that topic attached." - Tiff Rossi, VP Marketing at Tuxera

Wrapping Up

There’s a lot you can do to get your content distributed, consumed, and acted on by your target audience. We’ve just scratched the surface of what’s possible here.

Create a content promotion strategy that works for your brand, and put it to work today.

But remember, content promotion isn’t your only  challenge. You should also be creating high-quality content at scale.

That’s where an AI-powered software tool like Broca can make a difference. Give it a try. 

Fun Fact: We use it too :)