25 promotion tactics to ensure people actually see your content

When UBS launched “Unlimited” last year, the bank was excited to explore the new possibilities that could be opened up with content marketing.

Now, the team is cutting their content budget by 10 percent.

What happened? What went wrong?

UBS overlooked the engines of content marketing: promotion and distribution. The firm isn’t alone. When brands decide to “do content,” that usually means hiring someone to write a lot of stuff and then sitting back, awaiting leads.

But a successful content marketing strategy is, at best, based 50 percent on quality content and 50 percent on promotion. It won’t matter if your content is mind-alteringly original or ground-breakingly innovative. If no one reads it, you might as well not have made it.

Content without promotion is like a car without wheels.

Promoting the promotion

With content, it’s possible to get traffic without spending a cent on paid marketing. But that audience is going to be limited by search engine terms and the organic social media presence of your brand.

If you’re trying to target new markets, content should almost always be promoted, heavily, through a mix of organic and paid distribution channels.

“Everybody believes the content they produce is going to change the world of everyone. They believe it is going to be groundbreaking, changing world initiatives,” Thierry Campet, global head of marketing communications at UBS Wealth Management, said at the Mobile Marketing Summit earlier this month, according to The Drum.

“But if you don’t push your content in the good old-fashioned way — and that’s not TV anymore but paid social media marketing — if you don’t push it they won’t see it. That was a huge learning for us — we really thought the content would sell on its own and it didn’t.”

Sometimes, it’s easy to get so caught up in content planning, execution and publication that promotional tactics get overlooked.

So, here are 25 tactics that you can try out to get your content in front of more people:

25 content promotion tactics for right now

1. Email your teams.
2. Email industry peers.
3. Have an email sign-up form, and email web and blog visitors once a week.
4. Test email subject lines.
5. Email directly to qualified leads.
6. Put content in your email signature.
7. Submit guest posts and request guest posts to broaden the content audience.
8. Create content that acts as a resource for others, building a network of inbound links (research, infographic, video, education).
9. Make a Slack channel for content.
10. Post to Slack with each update.
11. Repurpose into SlideShare.
12. Share on LinkedIn.
13. Publish on Medium.
14. Post to Reddit.
15. Host a Facebook Live.
16. Livestream from Instagram.  
17. Convert to images and post to Imgur, Instagram, Pinterest.
18. Create an Instagram story.
19. Transform to video content and post to Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook.  
20. Share with relevant podcasts.
21. Mention companies and influencers featured.
22. Promote specific articles, research and e-books on paid social.
23. Co-promote with a partner.
24. Target long-tail search terms with sequenced blog posts.  
25. Create a content micro-site targeted for a specific keyword.

Location, location, location

The debate around high-quality and high-quantity content still rages, but it’s irrelevant if no one sees it. Every time you create something new, make sure you think about location.

Where do you want this content to end up? What channels will it be seen in and appreciated? Where is your audience?

When you ask these questions, you can format the content accordingly. That makes it a lot easier to start distributing to the right channels.

The most important thing content marketers can do today is to pitch their teams on an actual paid ad budget. Whatever channel, whatever format, and whatever the balance between quantity and quality, you have to spend money to get your content in front of the right people.