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Content is an essential digital asset for developing your brand voice and attracting customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Writing and posting content isn’t a complete strategy, however — it’s just step one in getting your message out.
Content promotion tools encompass a variety of solutions that can support your digital marketing goals. They can bridge the gap between your brand and your audience so you reach the people most likely to respond to your message. Here's a look at the role of content promotion in your marketing strategy, along with some of the top tools.
What Is Content Promotion?
Content promotion is about distributing your content in a way that maximizes its benefit to your marketing strategy. Promotion aims to increase the return on investment of your content by increasing its visibility, reach, and engagement — which all play specific roles in your content strategy:
Visibility
This increases the chances that your content gets views across platforms. Many marketers recognize this as a top goal. As there are untold numbers of marketers regularly churning out content, the algorithms of social media platforms have to decide what to display and what to disregard. Content promotion helps ensure your content gets seen in those social media feeds.
Reach
This improves the chances that your content gets to your target audience. Not all audiences are right for your brand, so mere visibility isn’t enough. Reach helps you find where your customers are looking online and develop new ways of attracting them to your content. As influencers and algorithms are gatekeepers for what content gets to specific audiences, content promotion tools that help you navigate these gatekeepers can be essential.
Engagement
Once you’ve gotten through to your target audience, you want them to take those final steps of engaging with your brand. Depending on your business, this might be to convert interest into a sale or to have a casual browser of your content to become a qualified lead.
Examples of meaningful engagement include:
- Following your brand
- Liking and sharing posts
- Visiting your e-commerce site
- Downloading a white paper
Achieving Content Promotion Goals
Depending on your content goals, you might want to focus on just one of these three areas. You might also want to segment your goals into different audiences based on their stage in the marketing funnel. No matter your objectives, there are content promotion tools that can support your objectives.
How Do You Create a Content Promotion Strategy?
There are a few initial steps you can take to create a content promotion strategy before you start to make sure of content promotion tools. It involves a bit of internal research and external listening – so you know what you have to offer and what your audience wants to hear from you.
Step 1: Listen To Your Customers
Before you dive in and start promoting your content, it’s critical to know who you want to reach and where those people hang out online. Ideally, you know the target demographic of your consumer or, if you’re a B2B business, the specs of the business clients you want to attract. Focus on content platforms that cater to those demographics.
If you have an email list or online feedback capabilities, consider also asking your customers for input. Ask them:
- What they love about your product
- What they don’t love
- Where they get product information
- How and where they consume online content
Step 2: Conduct a Content Inventory
You should already have a sense of what content is working for you and what’s gathering digital dust. Consider repurposing your popular content as long as it remains relevant. Content that is not performing or underperforming might require a second look. Ask if it is quality content that speaks to a customer’s pain point or just empty words.
Underperforming content might just need a refresh, promotion through a new marketing channel, or to be replaced with more invigorating digital assets.
Step 3: Decide on Marketing Channels
Once you know how you want to use your content, you can focus on where it’s best shared. Whether you are an e-commerce consumer packaged goods brand or a B2B company with valuable thought leadership content, consider which platforms are the best fit. Then, use the content promotional tools to determine how best to access those platforms for maximum marketing effect.
Step 4: Reflect on Campaign Success
After you have run a content promotion campaign, it’s essential to review the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing spend. Most content promotional tools can give you some type of analytics that let you see whether you’re getting results for your efforts. Compare these to your budget and see what works. If you’ve had success, determine in the greatest detail why and how your strategy worked, and try to do it again.
Top 14 Content Promotion Tools To Boost Your Traffic
Whether your goal is to get more eyes on your e-commerce site or more calls to your enterprise sales team, content promotion tools can help you get there. Here are the 14 top content promotion tools to support all aspects of your content marketing strategy.
1. BuzzSumo for Relevant Content Ideas
Content demonstrates the value you can bring to your customers, supporting your brand. The best content is relevant, which means it taps into what your audience wants to know. The moods and interests of your readers might shift over time, so knowing current “hot topics” and timeless pain points is essential.
BuzzSumo is a comprehensive research tool that helps you index existing content across the internet, connect with influencers, and find new ideas for your own content. The platform goes beyond mere keyword analysis to offer an in-depth picture of what might interest your customers.
2. Sprout Social's All-in-One Marketing Platform
Content and its promotion should work in conjunction with other aspects of your business, such as sales, offline marketing, and customer care. Sprout Social is one solution that strives to support this integration with in-depth data intelligence to support your social networking strategy.
It also offers intuitive tools for customer care and social media marketing, helps brands connect with verified influencers, and provides a solid platform for team collaboration. The solution lets you get these benefits without major changes to your existing tech stack.
3. Later To Publish Social Media Content
Scheduling your social media content can help improve the efficiency of your content promotion strategy. It allows you to select when an audience will most likely engage with your posts to maximize their reach. Scheduling also frees you up to work on other aspects of promotional campaigns instead of sitting at your desk, waiting to click “post.”
Later is a social media content scheduling tool that allows you to create and edit content, including reels and stories, across major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Plans include features like analytics and team collaboration tools.
4. MeetEdgar to Re-Share Top-Performing Posts
Social media content takes time to produce. Whether it’s a reel, story, or text-and-image-based post, keeping that content handy can save you time later. It can also let you repurpose content people enjoy so you can maximize that content’s marketing benefits.
MeetEdgar is a scheduler that offers a library to keep your old social media posts. You can then dig into this library whenever you want to reuse previous content, whether it's in response to breaking news, to celebrate anniversaries, or just because.
5. Mailchimp To Share New Blogs and Newsletters
Reaching your audience often means going beyond SEO to gain organic traffic. In addition to posting content and hoping people see it, your email newsletters can help reach your audience where they are at. There is a continuing role to reach out to your contact lists by email, altering them to new blogs and timely pieces of content.
Mailchimp is an omnichannel marketing solution that lets you plan, A/B test, and optimize your customer-facing emails. The tool makes it easy to share your new content with readers already in your pipeline and to maximize those email campaigns to reach your target audience.
6. Buzzstream for Promoting Content and Linkbuilding
Sometimes, your content promotion relies not just on algorithms but also on other people. Influencers, brands, and media personalities can all give your content that extra push your company needs. Finding and pitching those people requires time, dedication, and organization.
Buzzstream helps you build press lists and reach out to influencers. It also has a great link-building tool, so you can identify prospects and ask them to share your content. Buzzstream also allows you to monitor and track the status of your campaigns.
7. Sender for E-Commerce Email Marketing
E-commerce businesses have to quickly grab customer attention and hold it long enough to make a sale. The reality is that most online companies have a high cart abandonment rate – about 70% on average. Recovering those near-sales is therefore critical to a thriving online business.
Sender is a platform that supports marketing automation and lets you make the most of your email lists. The tool lets you automate email and text campaigns and help earn back some of those customers who haven’t quite yet completed that sale.
8. IFTTT To Automate Content Promotion
Automation is often key to successful content marketing efforts because it helps to establish consistency and formality. It supports a regular stream of content that helps you to develop and maintain a brand voice that your customers can rely upon. Automation also saves time, allowing you to focus on important components of content promotion strategies.
IFTTT is a stripped-down, powerful tool for content marketers that helps you link your apps together. Instead of constantly tracking every mention of your brand on all social media platforms, IFTTT can help you to link apps together. This allows you to do complicated actions after predetermined events. With one click, you can promote your blog on social media with several platforms.
9. Bitly for Link Tracking and Analytics
URLs and QR codes are the links between your brand and its customers — no pun intended. They are how your audience finds you and takes the first steps to interact. Short links and QR images are essential to place in promoted content so your customers have the opportunity to convert.
Bit.ly helps you create short links and QR codes. The platform also goes a step further, offering a substantial tool to track the effectiveness of your content promotion tools. Bit.ly offers click and-scan data so you know where your audience clicked and with what kind of device. That’s essential info for your content distribution strategy, as you can determine what geographic regions to target and what technology to support.
10. Outbrain for Content Syndication to Publishers
Platforms for content marketing are particularly powerful because they allow for blog promotion. Targeted, relevant content is essential for getting traffic to your brand website and converting your audience into paying customers. Even with the importance of analytics and targeting, there’s another pretty basic method of getting your quality content seen: having it available outside your own digital assets. This is sometimes known as content syndication.
Outbrain is a large-scale content marketing toolkit that helps connect brands and publishers that can host their content. Outbrain uses the analogy of old-school media, when newspapers with large distribution would include content from smaller outlets and freelancers. The small outlets got exposure, while the newspaper got content. In the digital world of multiple marketing channels, these kinds of arrangements help get eyes on your content.
11. GaggleAmp To Promote Content Through Your Employees
Employee advocacy is a lesser-discussed option to measuredly and effectively promote your content. Your employees are often your biggest source of untapped marketing potential, as they have a vested interest in the organization doing well. They also typically have professional networks where they can amplify your brand message in a structured way.
GaggleAmp specializes in developing and executing employee advocacy campaigns. The platform guides you through the steps for creating such a campaign and offers practical tools for social media posts, such as AI-generated variations of your brand message that employees can use on their own socials.
12. Taboola To Reach a Wider Audience
Your content marketing tools can make the search engine and social media algorithms work in your favor. However, techniques to improve organic traffic are not the complete picture of brand promotion. There are still the tried-and-true methods that predate the era of SEO. Case in point: paid advertising.
Taboola allows you to place paid ads on highly trafficked websites. Taboola differs from other kinds of online paid advertising since it doesn’t rely on third-party cookies. You can place your ads directly on a site you already know your audience is visiting. According to Taboola, this kind of native advertising results in more views, higher engagement, and higher purchase intent than display ads.
13. Viral Content Bee To Promote Content Through Influencers
Authentic shares are often the jewel of blog marketing tools, as they indicate that a prominent figure on social media is interested in your content and wants to show it off to followers. Typically, when an influencer taps your content for promotion, it’s because there’s a sincere alignment in brand goals, audience, and messaging.
Viral Content Bee helps brands and influencers connect through a free platform. The concept is quite simple: Join Viral Content Bee and upload quality content. Influencers then choose to use your content on their channels, and you can engage with those posts. This offers mutual benefit for creators and promoters of text posts, video content, and other kinds of visual content. Your brand awareness increases and influencers have new content to offer followers.
14. LinkedIn Articles for B2B Content Promotion
B2B content marketers have to cater to a slightly different audience than B2C organizations. B2B marketers also often use a distinct set of promotion tools. While your B2B brand strategy might include the full suite of social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok, you might take a slightly different approach when speaking to business customers via LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has always billed itself as the professional networking site, but it’s increasingly being used as a marketing platform. Your LinkedIn articles can help you sell your services and solutions to other companies. This is where enterprise-level solutions make their pitch. Thought leadership and long-form articles have a home on this platform, but don’t forget to make your posts visually appealing. LinkedIn says video content can increase engagement 5x. You’ll also get 2x the engagement if you post at least weekly.
Start Promoting Your Content To Achieve Your Marketing Goals
Great content can’t help your brand if no one sees it. Creating relevant content is only the first stage of a brand marketing strategy. Use these content promotion tools to amplify your online content, sharing your brand’s message with your target audience in the process.
