Rainy-Day SEO: Digital PR and Content Promotion

Our Rainy-Day SEO series of initiatives you can take if you’re blocked on bigger projects continues with a topic near and dear to my heart: getting more engagement with the content you’ve already created.

Specifically, we’ll look at ways to strategically promote your best content on paid, owned, and earned fronts. We break it down like this (and note the umbrella as part of our rainy-day theme!):  

3 Content Promotion Strategies

1. Broadcast owned content 

For content you’ve written and posted to your owned properties (likely a blog), your first order of business should be to include ways for readers to easily share content to social media – whether it’s by tweeting, posting, or sharing. Your second order of business would be to share the content to your own social media and/or your organization’s social media.

When you post, try inviting engagement by asking questions related to the content. If you publish a piece on advanced HubSpot features, for instance, try asking what people would most like to learn about their CRM, or even what their preferred CRM might be.

Make sure you also have a plan for repurposing, reusing, and recycling your top content. Potential media for re-usage includes newsletters, roundups, email campaigns, infographics, videos, and even podcasts for topics that invite more in-depth exploration.

2. Distribute content through paid channels

There are a few ways to get more engagement on your content by paying to promote it. LinkedIn, for instance, has both sponsored placements and in-platform lead gen ads that could be worth testing, and Facebook’s lead gen ads could be worth a test (even for B2B campaigns) since their targeting algorithm has improved a lot over the past few years. Display, whether programmatic or the GDN, is another option. Just make sure you’re keeping expectations and KPIs in line, since content promotion is great for top of funnel and nurturing but not great at direct sales.

3. Employ digital PR for more earned placements

This method is the most advanced of the three and the longest-term play. Digital PR utilizes traditional public relations tactics in a digital space to boost the awareness of a brand, company, or business as an expert on a particular topic.

If you don’t have any insight into outlets you want to build relationships with, start by creating a list of publisher targets, journalists, and/or influencers by monitoring your competitor’s brand mentions. If you can offer those entities content of real value – benchmarking data, insights gleaned from your base of customers – that will benefit their audiences, your brand can land coverage (press mentions, backlinks, networking, social media shout-outs) and build social proof for its authority and expertise.

At JDM, our SEO team is versed in helping produce effective, engaging content and achieving multiplier-effect engagement through strategic distribution. If you’re sitting on a wealth of good content and would like suggestions on how to use it to build even more engagement, drop us a line.

Check out the final post in our Rainy-Day SEO series on brand reputation management here.