Promoted Content Strategies | Farotech

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There’s long beentalk of a content crisis. Parry Malm, CEO ofPhraseeand a fellow Forbes Agency Council Member, outlines what this crisis means for companies around the world:

“Marketing teams are expected to churn out content daily for several social media channels, each with their own formats and word counts. There’s content to create for their website, emails, ads, blog posts, press releases, podcasts — the list goes on and on. And it all has to stand out from the competition, generate positive ROI, express your brand voice, and translate well into different languages.”

What to do, then, aboutpromoted contentin this environment? Well, you’ll need a plan.

Andy Crestodinais famous for saying “create your promotion strategybeforeyou start developing content.” It is subtle, but very smart advice. Film studios know this well: way before they even start shooting a major motion picture, they know their audiences and how exactly they’ll promote their film to them.

We say we’re going to create content and then promote. However, what often happens is that we push off promotion and just keep pumping out more content, assuming that our next piece of content will be a unicorn and that people will just magically find us. It doesn’t work that way. That’s called publish and pray. If you believe in the axiom that “If you build it they will come”…. well this ain’t Iowa and, odds are, they ain’t coming.

Author and public speaker, Chad Pollitt, has been a mentor to me for several years, in his book The Content Promotion Manifesto he states that the Golden Rule of content promotion in the ideal scenario one should spend approximately 20% of their time developing content and 80% of their time promoting it. That is what he says is required to be competitive. Now let’s make the problem worse. Check the math? According to Orbit Media’s super-popularannual blogger survey, it takes 4 hours to create a winning blog (See the chart below). Therefore, you would need to spend a whopping 20 hours promoting it. What happens if you blog twice a month? How about once a week? Do you have 80 hours a month to promote?

I would assume not. And if you don’t, you need to make the most out of the time that you do have. The answer simply can’t be “to do nothing”

However, there are some critical questions about content promotion that need to be considered and addressed:

Those are some of the hard questions you need to ask yourself about how you approachpromoted content. The next thing I want to do is talk through some strategies for effectivelysharing your content. Here are my top five:

Syndicate Content On Your Social Networks: This should be table stakes: Once you have developed content, you should promote it on all your social media channels. If you can do a targeted , you’ll get even better results. Remember, is only about 2% on Facebook these days. Reverse Engineer Competitors: There are countless SEO tools that will tell you who is ranking for the keyword that you desire. Reverse engineer their results to find out if and who is giving them backlinks and try to do an outreach strategy to see if they will link to your content, too. This provides a compounding effect on your Influencer Marketing: This allows us to find out who’s winning already . There are ways through Twitter (use their desktop version) to find out who your industry’s influencers are. Asking influencers to contribute to your content through you write it goes a long way. A backlink from one of these influencers is ideal as part of a strategy. Tools like Buzzsumo often make this process way more effective and faster, but do note, it’s not free. Questions & Answers: There are a number of Question-and-Answer websites out there. Sites that are most famous for this are Quora and Reddit. This is helpful if your content solves a certain problem. We don’t recommend you spam, but provide real value to that community first, NOTE: If you post content without value, expect the situation to be like the movie –– these people often have a very special set of skills; they will find you and they will “crush” you. Programmatic & Native Advertising: This is more sophisticated, but it’s hands down the best. This AI-driven approach allows you to hyper-target your content to thousands of websites, podcasts, CTV. Through the power of AI creating thousands of versions of your ad targeted to multiple networks, it’ll find the best platforms that will promote your article, , and convert for the best price.

There are tons of other ways to promote yourgreat content. If you would like more information onpromoted contentstrategies that you couldn’t find on this blog,please reach out! I would be happy to walk you through it personally.

Enjoyed our discussion here? Gain more greatcontent marketinginsights bywatching our latest Digital Marketing Masterclass, where we break down the#1 Rule of Effective Content Promotion with Chad Pollitt himself.