There’s no doubt that content marketing is the go-to strategy to establish an audience in a target market and position yourself as an authority.

But creating good content or spending hours researching information and presenting it in a visually appealing manner, is of no use if it does not reach the right people.

That’s where content promotion comes into the picture.

Sharing your content on social media once and calling it one of your content promotion strategies, is not enough anymore.

At a time when we’re experiencing content overload on the web, you need a bunch of content promotion strategies in action to distribute your content.

And, in this article, we’ve covered all the content promotion strategies that have worked for us and our clients.

What is content promotion?

Content promotion is the process of distributing content to reach a target audience using paid and organic channels. This includes but is not limited to using social media, email marketing, advertisements, directories, and more. Content promotion strategies may vary based on a business type, industry, or even your ideal customer personas.

When do you need content promotion?

As soon as you create compelling content, you would want it to reach the right audience and make an impact. And, that’s where content promotion comes into the picture. It helps you generate traffic, boost brand awareness and eventually increase conversions.

Most businesses give more importance to creating content but not to content promotion. As per studies, only 12% of marketers think  their content is reaching the right audience.

The reasons in most cases: not having enough time for content promotion strategies and not knowing where to begin.

While working on your content, give a fair share of importance to creating a content promotion strategy. To make it easier for you, we have explained all the content promotion strategies that have worked for us, in this article.

Tried and tested content promotion strategies for B2B SaaS marketing

When it comes to promoting content online or offline, there is no one size fits all strategy. But based on our experience with SaaS startups, here are some content promotion strategies that have delivered promising results:

1. Make it easy to share content on social media

For any content to be share-worthy, it has to be a value bomb. Without having proper content in place, you cannot expect your content promotion to be effective.

Now while most marketers ensure they create quality content, they’re still not able to get people to share it as proactively. The reason – the lack of a call to action and a  lengthy process of sharing on social media.

The share button on your content has to be visible so that when someone wants to share it at any moment while reading, they can do so easily. The good thing is there are several plugins for adding a sidebar or floating social sharing buttons on blogging platforms.

2. Optimize images for social sharing

A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes even more. Before promoting content on social media, make sure that the images are sized properly.

For example, Twitter shows a 440-by-220 horizontal rectangle, and Instagram shows a 640-by-640 square image. Ensure the quality of the images before publishing because if they’re not proper, the platforms will automatically enlarge or crop the images and make them lose clarity.

3. Repurpose textual content into videos

Videos are favored by all the social media algorithms because of their ability to grab viewers’ attention for a longer period.

Everybody watches videos on their phone due to which vertical video has become the next big thing – the future of storytelling. Now, this doesn’t mean you have to focus on video content.

Instead, what it means is to incorporate video content to promote other forms of content. For instance, sharing behind the scenes while you work on long-form content will create the hype and the traffic generated can be easily sent to the long-form content.

Alternatively, you can convert blogs into videos using tools like Wideo and Lumen5 as well; just make sure you use the right templates and sizes.

4. Use keywords to promote content organically

As per studies, 60% of buyer journeys begin from search engines. But search engines only show content that is indexed to be the most relevant and value-add to consumers.

The only way to show up in these search results is to use the right set of keywords. This typically includes using a mix of high-volume, informational, navigational, and conversion-driven long-tail keywords.

5. Identify the publisher’s intent by monitoring your competitor’s backlinks

Promoting content without a proper target audience will take your content nowhere. Even before you start drafting your content, analyze the content that’s ranking on the first page of the search engine. There’s a reason why it is on the first page of a SERP – an exceptional backlink profile.

Backlinks are an important aspect of SEO, making your content rank on the first page of the search engine. Tools like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Semrush, etc., help you track competitors’ backlinks while providing available link-building opportunities.

With all the backlink insights, you simply need to mirror the strategy of your competitors to rank on the SERPs. And this way, you can gain traffic to your website.

6. Collaborate on email newsletters

Sure, email is the oldest social media and yet the most effective marketing channel to ever exist. Email has the highest click-through rate compared to other media as the audience here has handpicked you to receive your content. Hence, promoting your content in newsletters will bring fruitful results.

One marketing tactic to attract more subscribers is to exchange content features from another brand through newsletters. For example, link one of their content pieces in your newsletter and ask them to do the same. This way both of your lists will have the right audience and win more subscribers to your newsletters.

7. Try cross-promotion on all the other social media

Just after your content is created, it has to be published to gain maximum results. It is called content promotion for a reason. What’s the purpose of having a social media presence where you don’t promote your content?

You can cross-promote the long-form content on the email list, Facebook page, Facebook groups, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. implement the content promotion tactics mentioned in this article, and utilize social media for cross-promotion to reap effective results.

8. Use influencer outreach for both content creation and promotion

49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations to make a purchase. Influencers have the power to impact audiences and increase your reach.

To give you an idea, say you are a cosmetics brand and want to leverage influencer marketing. You can reach out to a beauty influencer who has garnered significant following through their actionable content like beauty tips and hacks, etc. You can ask them for quotes for a blog post you’re working on.

And when you publish it, inform them. There’s a probability that they might share the content with their followers since it includes their quotes. This is a great way to promote your content though an influencer!

9. Leverage authoritative quotes to boost sharing

Another way for successful content promotion is to quote experts. Here’s how: quote them, let them know when the content goes live and mention them while you’re sharing it on social media.

Say you quote a company’s CEO. They have a decent social media following and might share your content. Moreover, the company’s page will also reshare it because it has the CEO’s words. Decision makers and employees of the company, too, might share it, making it reach key audiences, such as business professionals.

10. Utilize the comment section to your benefit

One of the best ways to engage with your audience is to leave a thoughtful comment on others’ content. This way, you establish yourself as an expert while also attracting new eyeballs to your content. Yes, it is one of the easy and free ways to stir engagement, but make sure you respect the rules.

For instance, do not drop a promotional or spammy comment with links to buy your product on others’ posts. Instead, just educate the audience by proactively leaving valuable comments. The comment you make should be valuable enough to make users check your profile.

This way you can easily promote your content online.

11. Share your content with credits

While creating content, you might have added quotes, statistics, or links to your article from another author. When you give due credit to the sources, it will benefit your content promotion efforts.

You can shoot an email and inform them about using their information as a resource in your content. If they are generous, they’ll share your article on their social accounts and this, in turn, would help you gain traction.

12. Add internal links to your evergreen content

If you are creating evergreen content in a specific niche then it means you have heaps of information that can be interlinked. Link the relevant pieces of content you have created in the past within your new content.

This content promotion tactic helps engage the audience on your website, increasing session duration, and brand awareness, and boosting site traffic.

13. Drive engagement from the audience

Say you’ve created amazing content but there’s zero engagement on it. How does it feel? Terrible!

To turn it around, rope in your audience in your content promotion efforts. Get your audience to actively engage with your content for it to gain maximum reach.

For instance, run an ‘ask me anything’ event around the content topic and link it to your content as an answer to frequently asked questions. Hence, making the audience engage with your content seems to be a clever content promotion tactic that gets everyone talking about it.

14. Engage content communities

Content communities like Medium, growth hackers, and Inbound.org play a big role in boosting content promotion. Also, sharing your content with these communities is an easy way to build backlinks. And, backlinks in turn, help with ranking on SERPs.

Before starting with them, here are two things for you to keep in mind:

• Make sure you share your best content only.
• Engage with others’ content by leaving thoughtful comments, sharing their article, etc. to become a part of the community without being a content spammer.

15. Make the most of your network

Businesses often get so busy rummaging on social media to find influencers to promote their brand, that they forget to seek people in their network to help promote their content. There are many valuable connections on your list that you’ve failed to utilize for your benefit.

You could do this: distribute the content internally to your network and encourage them to share. They might also have your target audience on their list, which is an added benefit of promoting content through networking.

16. Don’t forget to repurpose your content

Different people consume content in different formats. Some prefer podcasts while others blogs and a few of them stick to videos. Content repurposing is bound to help businesses reach different audience segments while also helping them save time, energy, and effort.

Say, for example, a B2B SaaS blog has performed better, you can create gated content like ebooks and use it for lead generation.

17. Leverage paid ads for content promotion

Organic content marketing sure works best but paid marketing works wonders. On social media platforms, content promotion can be done organically, but when paid ads come into the picture, the scope of reaching the target audience is next level. Running paid ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform where your target audience hangs out is the new way of content promotion.

But, before investing in paid ads be sure to do your share of research and promote the content that you think will help with gaining traffic. For example, it can be a downloadable or a webinar your target audience is looking for.

18. Promote your content at the ‘right’ times

Just when you think the work is done after hitting the publish button on your content, there’s content promotion to be taken care of. Just like content publishing, content promotion also has to be done at the right times.

Say you promote your content in the wee hours, unless your target audience consists of early risers, the promotion will be a big flop. Instead of untimely promotions, promote your content during peak traffic times. And, you can talk about it again, at low traffic time to cut through the noise and reach your audience.

19. Include only relevant content promotion strategies

A content promotion strategy is critical for any business and should be mapped out even before the content is created. We have discussed a lot of content promotion strategies in this article but, that doesn’t mean you should apply all of them. Take what suits your business best and apply it religiously.

Say, for example, if your target audience is teenagers then video-based platforms like tik tok and reels are the options for you. Or if you want to reach the age 50+ group then Facebook and email campaigns work best. A solid content promotion strategy helps you plan content distribution and promotion even before the content is chalked out.

Hence, making your content promotion strategy relevant to your audience is vital for your content’s success.

20. Analyze your content promotion strategy and tweak it accordingly

The beauty of the digital era is that nothing is set in stone and there’s a benefit of flexibility. Track your metrics and see if you’re getting the desired results. If not, then change your strategy. Analyze the type of content that outperforms others like short videos and make the most of it.

If your blog post gets traction when you share it on Instagram with a snippet of what it’s about then focus on distributing the blog on Instagram. Collect all the granular data, analyze what’s working and tweak the content promotion strategy accordingly.

Do you need content promotion?

Optimizing content for SEO with keywords will surely help you reach your target audience but it does take (long) time. And, with time, competition increases as well. You need content promotion to outperform the increasing competition and put your content in front of the right audience.

We’ve discussed what you can do to promote your content in this article – surefire ways to achieve your desired outcome. But, if you’re struggling with content creation, promotion, or overall marketing of your B2B SaaS business, then reach out to our experts today and avoid the overwhelm.