10 Ways to Expand Content Marketing Reach
While content marketing doesn’t innately long to be free, it does like to get spread around. How you craft your content marketing can enhance its ability to be seen by a wider audience.
What makes content spreadable?
For content marketers, here are 10 elements to ensure that your content marketing gets spread to the maximum audience.
- Great title. Every piece of content needs a strong hook. This is probably the most critical part of a piece of content. The best writing in the world will get a limited audience without a good hook to lure potential readers in. Among the elements to consider in your titles is the use of lists and important keywords for your audience.
- Intrinsic value. Remember every reader is thinking WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) Does your content have value because it entertains, informs, or connect to the reader? Does it provide explicit value in the form of savings, promotions or coupons? To help understand what’s of value to your readers, develop marketing personas.
- Fulfill customer needs. Does your target market find your information useful to help them solve their problems? You can be a resource for your readers. For example, here’s a list of 99 free blog titles to help you get over writer’s block.
- New data. Is your information hot off the press? Are you the first to get the scoop? In some categories like gossip or financial, an hour can make a difference.
- Freshness. Are you the trailblazer of your niche showing readers what to read or do? Are you talking about topics that your peers aren’t? Content is one area where recycling doesn’t work!
- Multiple content formats. Provide your content on a variety of multi-media platforms to reach a broader audience. Consider the type of device (computer, smartphone, tablet or other device) that your readers are using and where they are when they consume your content.
- Easy-to-consume. In today’s time-strapped world, do you make it easy for readers to get through your content or do they perceive that it’s one big lump that will get caught in their throats? Among the elements that help to keep this going are bullet points, summaries and other forms of media.
- Findability. Have you made your content as easy-to-find as possible? This includes SEO, posting to social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and other ways to spread the word. Remember that in order to be able to track your promotion’s performance, you need to include a call-to-action and a targeted promotion code.
- Effortless-to-distribute. Don’t make readers work to share your content; give them a choice of sharing options. Do your readers feel that they’ve received value from sharing your content with their friends and social media acquaintances? Does your content help them look like they’re in the know?
- Syndication. Are you publishing your content to multiple feeds? Among the options are Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds and email. Consider ways to broaden your reach.
Your goal is to make your content marketing spreadable to ensure that it reaches as broad an audience as possible. To this end, it’s helpful to make it valuable to your target audience so they will pass it along to their peers.
How do you increase your content marketing’s reach? Do you have any points that you’d add to this list? If so, would you please include them in the comment section below?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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Photo credit: Spreadable peanut butter by Vivian Chen via Flickr