Content marketing is all about the content, right? Well, sort of. If content creation is one half of content marketing, the other half is content promotion. After all, the best content in the world isn’t truly effective unless people are reading it.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, “content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.” But an Adweek study also showed that “92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from others, even people they don’t know, over branded content.”
How do you embrace the potential ROI of content marketing without branding? It’s all about content promotion. To illustrate this point, we’ll first define content promotion (aka influencer outreach) and show how it worked for one of our clients: Rainbow Muffler & Brake.
What Is Content Promotion?
Content promotion is an effort to get your created content shared on other sites or social media accounts belonging to people or companies that are relevant in their field. Content can include blog articles, white papers, infographics and any other content created by you (or your content marketing agency).
The ultimate goal with any inbound marketing campaign is to increase traffic to a website, improve SEO and thus increase sales. It is no different when promoting content with influencer outreach. When you get a piece of content published on an influencer’s site or social media, you increase visits to your website, (hopefully) increasing engagement on the site as well as sales. Best of all, if you’re sharing the right content to the right people, you’ll not only be directing just more traffic to the site, but better traffic. (More on that below!)
Content Promotion Case Study
One of our clients that recently saw a huge boost in better-quality and better-quantity traffic due to content promotion is Rainbow Muffler & Brake, a chain of auto repair and maintenance shops in Cleveland, Ohio. Here are some details about how this content promotion worked:
The Strategy
Since the summer months often result in a website traffic dip due to vacations — especially for companies in the automobile industry — we were hoping to give the site a boost by promoting a relevant, high-quality blog. Based on keyword research, we were able to land on a solid topic and wrote a blog post titled “The Essential Road Trip Checklist for Your Car.” The post had three sections beneficial for people who may be traveling during the summer: an Ohio-based destination checklist, a packing checklist, an activity checklist and a preventative maintenance checklist. Overall, the blog was packed with relevant information, keywords and links (both external and internal).
The Promotion
At madison/miles media digital marketing agency, we use a variety of content promotion techniques, from social media engagement and guest posts to participating in forums and even live events. One of our favorite content promotion techniques, however, is using Pitchbox to run a blogger outreach campaign. That was how we found an influencer who was a particularly good fit for Rainbow’s blog content: WheelScene, a website featuring content focused on automotive news, articles and maintenance tips. It was a perfect fit!
After negotiating a bit, we agreed on a mutually beneficial backlink and social promotion exchange. We would link to one of their blog posts and share it on our social media channels, and they would do the same for us. We inserted a WheelScene blog post on the above road trip checklist post and they shared it on their social media — where they have more than 70,000 combined followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
The Results
This is where it gets fun. The numbers for the blog post that WheelScene shared (and our overall blog numbers) exploded. Take a look at the all-time numbers for the specific blog (published on May 15), just a couple days before it was shared by WheelScene on June 28:
Not really impressive, right? Now, compare those numbers with the numbers for July:
That’s a 23,245% increase in views alone! That would be impressive enough, but take a look at the other metrics:
- The bounce rate plummeted 1.31% (meaning the content resonated with visitors)
- The time on page doubled (meaning visitors are reading the entire blog post)
- The exit rate shrank to 3% (meaning visitors went to other pages on the website before exiting)
As of today, the blog post has 8,970 views, an average bounce rate of 8%, a time on page of seven minutes and an exit rate of 3%, showing that the content continues to resonate with its audience. It’s also helped the overall numbers for the blog improve. Here’s a look at the overall blog views for Rainbow Muffler & Brake from May to July:
Talk about impressive! Other side effects of this content marketing success story include an increase in leads, social followers, conversion rate and more, so it was a tactic that is paying tremendous dividends for our client.
The Secret to Effective Content Marketing
So what’s the lesson learned from the content promotion success story? It’s that the very best way to promote your content is to develop relationships. By creating relevant, valuable content and partnering with another company or brand who shares the same vision as yours, you can create a mutually beneficial agreement. We’ve continued to work with WheelScene on behalf of Rainbow since they first shared our content and look forward to many more content exchanges in the future.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there are start building relationships to promote your content!
