- Maximizing your reach will help you squeeze more value out of your existing content.
- Don’t overlook the basics of creating high-quality content, ensuring it is easy to share, and doing SEO for every piece you produce.
- Marketing automation tools can help you to increase your reach without any extra effort.
1. Improve SEO
You can’t optimize your content reach without making sure your content marketing strategy is solid from the very start.
In the research stage, it’s vital to not only figure out what topics your audience wants to consume content on, but also to ensure they can easily find this content when they’re searching online.
Keyword research will give you insight into the terms your audience is actually typing into the search engine when they’re looking for information or solutions to their problems.
If you don’t include these keywords in your content, it’s highly likely that your website won’t appear on the first page of search results for relevant search terms. As a result, not as many web users will be able to find your content organically.
While it is possible to drive traffic to your content via other means, SEO is an important traffic source for most businesses. For people to be able to read your content, they first have to find it. If you’re relying purely on social media and referrals for traffic, your growth will be significantly limited.
Websites across every industry can expect to attract at least half of their traffic via search. SEO is even more important for websites in specific niches. For example, health and medical sites attract over 87% of their visitors by search.
Whether you’re producing content in-house or you’re outsourcing to an agency, make sure SEO is a top priority.
2. Repurpose Your Content in Multiple Formats
Publishing a variety of content types means you have more opportunities to reach a wider audience. While some people like reading blog posts, others like watching videos. You can ensure you reach both audience groups by blogging regularly and publishing videos to YouTube or another social media channel.
Repurposing content also helps to improve your content ROI, as you don’t have to start from scratch at the research stage for every single piece of new content.
You can spin a good topic into an article, a video, a podcast, an e-book, and an infographic. Each of these different content formats has the potential to be shared on social media, found in a web search, or linked to from another site.
3. Include Original Research in Your Content
The most successful content tends to be in-depth and original. Just think about how often “state of the industry” reports are shared on social media or linked to around the web.
Being the original source of facts, statistics, and unique insights helps you build your reputation and authority as a thought leader. This means other sites and social media accounts are more likely to link to you.
Creating infographics, charts, and graphs of data is also a very effective way to ensure your content is shared and linked to, which, in turn, will grow your overall reach.
Or, if you don’t have the budget for original research, graphs, and infographics, we like to write about other people’s content such as original research (with attribution of course.) Here is one example on thought leadership research. And one of our most popular pages on blog post frequency research.
4. Use Multiple Content Promotion Channels
Once you publish a piece of content, what do you do?
Hopefully, the answer is not “nothing”!
While most businesses will link to a new piece of content on social media after they publish it, there are many more opportunities to promote that content that they’re overlooking.
If you’re currently only using Facebook and LinkedIn to link to your content, consider expanding into other social media channels such as Twitter and Instagram.
It’s true that it’s best to focus on a few core social media platforms, but marketing automation software means that you can easily post your new content to multiple social networks without investing more time or effort.
Your email newsletter can also be a great way to promote your content. Useful emails are often forwarded, which can be yet another way to expand your content reach.
5. Consider Paid Promotion
Utilizing digital advertising and paying to promote your content can be an effective and fast way to reach an audience that you may have been unable to reach organically.
There are many different methods of paid promotion available to you. PPC or paid search, social media ads, influencer marketing, and paid content distribution platforms are all avenues available to you.
When integrating paid promotion into your content strategy, it’s vital to keep track of your spending and the results each channel is generating. Use this information to calculate ROI and decide if individual channels are a worthwhile investment or not.
6. Implement an Employee Advocacy Program
Your corporate social media channels have a limited reach. But you can greatly increase the reach of your content on social media by encouraging your employees to share it with their personal social media networks.
Successful employee advocacy relies on your business having actively engaged employees who share the values of your company and want to help your brand succeed.
You can’t force your employees to share your content on their personal social media channels. However, if your content is good and they think that their peers will find it interesting or useful, you have a great opportunity to expand your content reach.
7. Publish More Content
Whatever industry you’re in and whatever type of content you produce, the number-one surefire way of increasing your reach is to publish more content.
More content online means more opportunities to attract search engine traffic, be shared on social media, and be linked to from other sites.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
