This article has been contributed by Laura Narušytė.

Your business may offer the best product on the market, but that means nothing if you can’t show potential customers that you have something that they want to buy.

If you want to get more customers and get your brand noticed, then you need to promote your content.

Promoting your content involves going out of your way to share your brand and products with your audience. If you don’t know where to start with content promotion, here are nine ways to communicate and engage with potential customers.

1. Direct Messages

Businesses can use multiple channels to quickly contact their customers through direct messaging.

You usually see businesses use text messaging and social media messages to contact their customers. Text messages go straight to customers by using SMS (short messaging services) to get in contact with them.

Image source: SimpleTexting

The stats don’t lie when it comes to SMS marketing. You get faster response times, higher engagement rates, better campaign performance and higher response rates when your business uses SMS. With results like these, it’s not surprising that plenty of businesses use SMS to promote their content.

Your business can use SMS marketing in different ways to interact with your customers while promoting your business.

• Send customers or leads deals and offers.
• Remind them about appointments or abandoned carts.
• Inform them about relevant information.

Since SMS works as a way to get quick responses while informing customers about time sensitive information, you can easily promote your content through this channel. People constantly have their phones with them, so you’ll be able to get the responses that you need.

2. Email Lists

Email has the highest return on interest (ROI) in comparison to other channels. This means that you get $40 for every dollar that you spend.

Image source: Mark The Marketer

However, like anything, you have to go about email marketing the right way. Email lists work effectively if you get them from the right sources. If you don’t, your emails will most likely get no responses and they’ll be marked as spam. This will negatively affect your metrics while causing people to dislike your brand – nobody wants unsolicited emails.

Once you’re underway using a reliable list, and you want to improve your email marketing, you should invest in automated marketing software. Find one that can handle your email marketing. This way, it will collect emails from relevant sources, add them to your newsletter and promote your content.

It can increase your email list in multiple ways. It can automatically add people that sign up for your email newsletter through your website or other sources. This means that you won’t have to add them yourself. On top of this, it can go through your social media followers, see if they included their emails in their profiles and send them a message as well.

The point is that you should focus on sending emails to people with an interest in your content.

3. Referrals

Remember that your business already has loyal customers, especially if you’ve been around a while. These are the people that buy from your business on a regular basis and seek to interact with you. You can invite these customers to assist you through a referral system. This will allow you to get referrals, share your content and products with a new audience and build stronger relationships with your existing customers.

Setting up a referral system involves giving your customers rewards whenever one of their referrals decides to buy something from you. You can offer different types of rewards to your customers for their referrals.

• Give them in-store credit.
• Offer points that they can exchange for free products.
• Send them discounts on your products.

Try to rewards both people – your existing customer and their referral – so that they can both benefit. This encourages your customers to invite their friends and also encourages their friends to make a purchase.

As you reward your customers for referrals, you strengthen your relationship with them since they appreciate the rewards for their efforts.

4. Social Media

Social media stands out as one of the best ways to promote your content to your customers. Since you can communicate with customers, share your posts and gain followers, you can build a community that allows you to share content. Not only will your followers see your content, but so will their friends if they share your posts.

Image source: Oberlo

As you can see above, nearly 3-out-of-4 marketers feel like social media marketing gives at least some benefits to their business. This makes sense when you consider all of the ways you can promote your content via social platforms.

• Create ads that target your business’ demographics.
• Interact with followers to show them that you care.
• Share deals, offers and information on your pages to inform your followers.

Social networks give you an easy way to reach potential customers. Go out of your way to interact with them – like and reply to their comments, and share posts that relate to your business. These simple actions allow you to build a relationship with customers while encouraging them to promote or share your content with others.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has always played a large role in promoting content, but people usually don’t realize it. It involves getting an influential person, expert or organization to promote your product. While people may think of basketball players promoting shoes on TV, you can also use influencer marketing online.

Keep in mind that you can’t pick a random celebrity or business to promote your content, just because they’re hot right now. This may cause your influencer marketing to fail, as there may be a clash in content which people will quickly recognise, or you may reach the wrong demographic.

You need to find the right influencer to promote your content, but what should you look for?

Image source: BigCommerce

If you want a solid influencer for your content, make sure that they meet at least the top three points in this graph. Influencers with high quality content draw in more people, having the right target audience helps you more and high engagement rates will improve your metrics.

Remember that you can look into influencers with large followings, but don’t underestimate the effectiveness of micro-influencers. This is particularly beneficial if you operate in a specific niche. See who you can reach out to so that they can promote your content.

6. Industry Experts

If you want to improve your content promotion, you can really benefit from advice from the experts. Industry experts have worked in your field, niche, or business for many years, some of whom will have accumulated large followings. Do some research and find out the industry experts that are relevant to your business.

Once you’ve identified key industry experts, see what you can learn from them. You should first try and reach out to them through different platforms. LinkedIn tends to work well alongside emails. With LinkedIn, they can see how you’re connected to them and email allows them to answer you at their own discretion.

You should always try to meet industry experts. This allows you to get advice and tips from them directly. However, if it’s not possible, there’s still plenty you can learn from industry experts. Look into the other resources they have available publicly to help you develop your content promotions.

• Look for videos they may have posted about the industry.
• See if any experts have recorded presentations or meetings from networking summits.
• Read their content from websites, newsletters, blog posts, etc.

7. Blogging

You should consider creating a blog for your business as another way to create and promote your content. A blog gives you the perfect opportunity to provide content on your website. As a business, you can use your blog as a place to store previous content that you wrote if you want to make it easily accessible.

This assists your business in multiple ways.

• Gives you a history of all of your written content from newsletters to articles.
• Allows anyone to see your previous content even if they didn’t have a subscription in the past.
• Makes it easy for you to share your content, especially larger pieces of content.

Image source: Fit Small Business

However, your blog won’t draw much attention if you don’t make it credible. As you can see in these statistics, your blog becomes more credible when you write quality content, use good design and consistently post on it.

As you build up credibility, more people will want to read your content. Don’t just focus on putting out as much content as possible. Instead, you should put your focus on creating quality and consistent content. This will help your search engine rankings and make people want to come back for more.

8. Guest Posting

If you want to further promote your content, then you should look into guest posting. Make sure that you consider both sides of the equation: try and become a guest poster for other blogs while getting guests to post on yours. This way, you can cross-promote each other’s content and seek to build each other up.

When you create a guest post for someone else’s blog, always make sure to create unique content. Also be sure to follow their standards and guidelines. They may format or set up their posts differently to you, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you write for them. This way, you can promote your content on their blog while keeping it consistent with their brand. This will make their life a lot easier and make future partnerships with them more likely.

On top of this, you should establish guidelines for your blog too. Put your guidelines in a clear place where potential guest authors can easily access them. This will ensure you receive guest submissions that will work well on your site and won’t need much editing.

9. Content Testing

Content testing involves making adjustments to your content to see if you can improve it. Creating content comes down to offering something that will appeal to your target demographic. You can try different approaches to test your content and improve it.

• Use A/B testing to find the better option out of the two.
• Collect data through automated marketing software to see how changes affect your metrics.
• Adjust content on your channels to make it more relevant.

Image source: Invesp

Don’t treat your content testing as a one-time deal. Two to three A/B tests per month seems to bring in the best results for businesses. This means that you need to constantly do content testing; it will help you to evolve your content.

Content is all about evolution and improvement over time – make sure that you take advantage of content testing tools so that you can accomplish this. On top of that, look into automated marketing tools to help you with your content testing. Those tools will make it easier for you while still providing the results that you want.

Conclusion

Content promotion may seem intimidating at first, but it comes down to naturally communicating about your brand and networking with others. As you make these two points your focus, you will see how you can promote your content through different channels. Continue to share your business with potential customers while building relationships with influencers and experts.

These nine ways will help you to effectively promote your content, but remember that they work as starting points. You can start implementing or working towards them, but you should always branch out and look for more ways to share your business with others. As you do this, you can spread brand awareness and become a recognized name in the business world.

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About the author: Laura Narušytė is an experienced digital marketing and SEO specialist at Omnisend – Ecommerce Marketing Automation platform. When not blogging, she likes to read about SEO, digital marketing and ecommerce trends, technology and personal productivity.