MARKETING MIX: Maximizing your reach with clever content marketing

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Helpful content can be a welcome source of information for your customers, creating opportunities for your brand to connect with audiences online.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 per cent of the top-performing B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. These marketing pros use content to nurture leads, generate sales and revenue, and build their audiences. The more you can grow your audiences, the more of these benefits you’ll see from your content production.

However, simply creating content isn’t enough. You’ll need a creative strategy for getting your content in front of people to ensure it creates an impact and attracts audiences to your business. The smartest approach is to create content consistently and employ a strategy to distribute it as widely as possible to increase your reach.

Does Content Marketing Work?

Content marketing is a strategy you can use to offer useful and relevant information to existing and future customers on a regular basis instead of simply selling your products and services. With content marketing, the goal is to plan, create, and proactively share content consistently to show ongoing value and raise brand visibility. Content created with this strategy in mind is usually written for a specific audience, about topics that are top of mind or important to readers.

Why is content reach so important?

Your content can only make an impact on the people who see it. Therefore, your content strategy should always include steps to increase the reach of the content you produce to get the most benefit from it. Content that reaches larger audiences can help you attract new customers to your business.

10 tips to increase the reach of content

To start, you’ll need a creative strategy to ensure you make a widespread impact that will attract audiences to your business. The smartest approach is to consistently provide content and deploy a strategy that distributes it as widely as possible through as many channels as possible: social media, websites, news releases, newsletters, podcasts and more.

Here are our top 10 tips for increasing your content’s reach:

1. Target your ideal audience

You need to understand the people you’re trying to reach. Take some time to clarify who you want to attract before you write a single word. Consider who your best customers are, what they have in common, and how they make buying decisions.

Ways to gain insight into your audience:

• Customer demographic information
• Feedback from customer surveys
• Comments on your social media
• Website traffic data

2. Use keyword research

Provide helpful content by doing keyword research and using tools that help you choose topics that interest your customers. Understanding who wants to see your content and how they find it is key to understanding how to reach them. What problems do they have that you can solve? What language do they use to search for answers?

Digging into these insights can help you come up with strategic topics and ensure your ideal audiences can find what you create.

3. Create a content plan

A content plan that outlines the topics you want to cover and when you want people to see your messages can help you manage your resources and cover all the major themes you want to include.

A good practice is to have a rough idea of the key elements you want to cover over a year, then drill down into specifics for each quarter as you strategically time the release of your information. With this strategy, you’ll know high-level details in advance, and you’ll be able to work from a thorough quarterly plan with topics, publishing dates, and assigned content creators.

4. Explore different content formats

Content marketing isn’t just about blog posts. As you plan out your content, consider the best format for each idea to get your message across. When a topic or idea is well-matched to the format, you’ll have a powerful piece of marketing content that will make a more significant and memorable impact.

For example, some topics make great blog posts, but others might work better as an e-book or how-to guide. In another comparison, you could reveal a new line of products off a gallery of photos shared on social media. But you could also create an explainer video to help your customers make the best use of your products.

5. Optimize your website for online searches

A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy will help ensure every piece of content on your website is doing its job to pull traffic to your site. Structuring your content so search engines know what your website is about and who to show it to is a good foundation when building reach.

Even better, with good SEO, you’ll attract relevant searchers who are actively searching for your content.

6. Let your brand personality shine

Any content you produce for your business should hold value for your customers. However, you’ll need ways to stand out from other brands. For example, injecting a bit of personality or humour into your content can help people get to know your company better.

A solid and recognizable brand voice can be an essential differentiator that helps make your company memorable.

7. Share your content across multiple channels

Once you’ve carefully planned your content and optimized for SEO, you need to publish it on various platforms where you know your audience spends time.

Not sure where to share your content? You can check user demographics for different platforms to see if they align with your target customers. Consider the purpose of each platform and if they tend to draw B2B or B2C audiences.

8. Nurture engagement on social media

Engaging with your audience is the best way to organically increase the reach of your content. When you publish your messages on social media, these platforms may only show your posts to a few followers. Algorithms built into each platform see engagement as a signal that content is valuable, interesting, or relevant. When you get people to like, comment and share your posts, the algorithm shows that post to more people.

Posting to social media is just the first step to promoting your content. Someone should be monitoring the accounts to like and reply to comments. You can invite more interactions by writing captions that motivate people to comment. Respond quickly to comments and questions to keep the conversation flowing. The more you interact, the more the algorithm will show your post.

9. Consider paid promotion

There are a lot of brands competing for consumers’ attention, which means you may want to consider spending money to push your content in front of people. Organic posts are only shown to your followers, whereas, sponsored posts can reach an audience you specifically target, based on their interests.

Organic traffic to your site can be a slow-growth strategy, and you may want to see results faster. Paying to promote articles or blog posts on social media can help you increase content reach. As a bonus, a social media site like Facebook offers precise targeting parameters that can effectively reach the right people.

10. Repurpose your content

Consider reusing your content wherever possible. For example, a blog post on your website can quickly be turned into a series of social media posts. Articles on your site could be a jumping-off point for a podcast or an e-book. Customer testimonials can become powerful social media posts and inspire you to create case studies to show a more in-depth look at how your company contributed to solving someone’s problem.

Creating valuable content is just the first step in content marketing. With a proactive plan to get your content in front of more people, you can increase your reach and ensure you get the most out of your content strategy.