This week I’m pleased to introduce a guest blogger, Ivan Serrano. Ivan is a social media, business and finance journalist living in the Bay Area of California. He has written on notable sites such as Jeff Bullas, SAP and Tech Soup. I’m thrilled to have him on board to share his knowledge, great writing style and awesome infographic. Enjoy! – Mary
86 percent of brands are utilizing creating content as part of their digital marketing strategy. Interestingly, only 38 percent say that it has been effective. So does this mean content marketing has become ineffective? Not at all. The problem now is that there is too much content available to people that they cannot possibly consume everything within their lifetime. While great content is still important to build interest and brand loyalty, it’s even more important to distribute it. After all, if no one sees what you create then you have more or less wasted your time. You need to find ways to amplify your content.
Steps of Amplification
Many companies make the mistake of thinking about content amplification after they have already created their content. The problem with this is that you won’t know what metrics to track or what audience you are trying to appeal to. This can make content amplification much harder. For a more successful strategy, you should:
- Set goals – Before you create the first sentence of your content, you need to first ask yourself what you want to accomplish: increased revenue, brand awareness, links, increase engagement or generate leads. Depending on your goal, the audience you reach out to, content you create and metrics you track will be different.
- Find your audience – Creating the ideal profile of your audience will make it much easier to craft content specifically for them. This, in turn, will improve audience engagement.
- Use your owned channels – Once you’ve created your content, promote it through your social profiles, email lists and business website. Make sure you update frequently so your business stays in the forefront of your audience’s mind. In general, you should post to your social profiles at least once a day and your website two to three times a week.
- Utilize paid social ads – The problem with owned channels is that it is only as good as the audience you already have. With many of these sites decreasing the organic reach of updates, your posts will likely get buried quickly. After all, the half-life of a tweet is only four minutes. Paid social ads help put your updates at the top of your audience’s feed. Best of all, they are highly targeted to match your exact audience profile.
- Get earned media – You can’t really control this one, but the more your content pops up in front of people the more likely they are to share it. Eventually it might even get in front of influencers who will address it on their own site. While there’s no magic bullet to accumulating earned media, you can and should perform outreach to influencers and news outlets that might find your content interesting.
The infographic below provides additional information on amplification from tools that can help you find influencers to remarketing methods.
Ivan Serrano is a social media, business and finance journalist living in the Bay Area of California. Ivan has written on sites such as Jeff Bullas, SAP and Tech Soup. When Ivan’s not typing away, he’ll most likely be off practicing photography or watching his favorite sports teams with his friends. You can follow him on Twitter: @IvanSerrano55
