Your content is written, but your funds are limited. So what do you do? Clearly you would think that you should start looking for marketers to market your content, but those limited funds come right back up. This is a chance for you to save some money and begin marketing on your own. You can still utilize the services from other companies, but this blog is going to help you learn several nifty ways to market your content without breaking your bank account.
To Market or Not To Market
Believe it or not, there are people who wonder if marketing is important. In fact, you might be one of those! We can tell you that marketing is of the utmost importance when it comes to getting your content and product out there. How else will people find you? How else can they learn about your amazing products and services? Just because you have published your content does not mean it stops there. You have to market or else your other efforts will fall flat and you will notice your site going downhill fast. There are many ways in which you can market your content and according to Convince and Convert, some of these are:
- Emailing employees on an internal network. If you do not have an internal network, you can still do this via Google+ or sending out an employee newsletter.
- Social Media news release.
- Traditional news releases.
- Appearing on local news stations.
- YouTube demos for apps and other products.
These are based on what one company did when creating a nifty app to help parents find the best car seat for their children. The app was successful because of the marketing this company did. Instead of treating the release as the end of the line, they advertised their product as much as they possibly could. While some of their methods may not work for your business, following some of what is listed above will help you. Do not neglect marketing or you will live to regret it.
Now, we are sure you are wondering how to market your product, content, and services. We will discuss a few handy tips and products that can help you immensely as you begin your marketing campaign.
1. Great Strategies and Strong Foundations. In order to market your content, you need to have solid content foundation. You cannot just jump into the content marketing game, you need to have a plan and follow it. Strategy is the best way to make sure your content will be noticed. If you do not have a strategy for your content and your content marketing campaigns, you will see it slipping. Once you have a strategy and a strong foundation, you can begin to publish great content and market it wonderfully. A good strategy will help you keep up with your marketing needs, but bad strategy will make you lose more customers and money. Never underestimate the power of great strategy!
2. Street Teams. These have proven to be pretty effective for a lot of groups and companies. Street teams rely on clients to give out information regarding a company or group. These can be done in numerous ways. For example, the International Geek Girl Pen Pal Club (IGGPPC) has several street teams throughout the world. Their teams give out postcards, pins, stickers, pencils, and other things that relate to letter writing. This is a great way for people outside of the IGGPPC friend circle to hear about this group. Because of the street teams, this group has approximately 45,000 site views a month. The street teams combined with social media get the information out there to a huge audience, creating a tremendous success for this year old group. Utilize your social networks and start creating a street team that will be appropriate for your business and content, you'll be amazed at how much your name will get out there by getting clients to give out information around their towns!
3. Social Media. One of the biggest helps in marketing your own content is social media. It is so important that you have read it a thousand times over, but we keep saying it because a lot of people are ignoring this. Social media is a great marketing technique. A big help in social media is that share or retweet button. When you have an active social media marketing campaign, you will see more and more of your information being shared on the basic social media sites. It is really great when your info starts being shared a lot; it means you are one step closer to going viral, which is absolutely perfect in the world of the Internet and marketing!
While Facebook and Twitter are great ways to market, there are some other social media sites and tools that will help you in your marketing campaign. It is time to start thinking outside of the generic social media box. (And do not worry; we will be discussing these awesome tools in this blog!) As we have said and will continue to say, social media is the greatest way to self-market and promote your content and product, as it gets to a wider audience and can be shared many times over.
4. StumbleUpon. This is a great resource for marketing. StumbleUpon users will "stumble upon" various webpages that have been added. They then rank the web page as being something they are interested in or not, which will help StumbleUpon streamline the web pages the user sees most. This is a great opportunity for your marketing campaigns. Firmology gives a few examples of how StumbleUpon can be used in your content marketing:
- Add a Page. This is an easy way to promote your page. Go to the drop down menu beneath your profile photo and locate the link that is appropriately titled, "add a page." From there, you can add links to pages from all over your website. Be sure to add applicable tags so users can find you quicker! Make sure the content you add is engaging and do not overwhelm users with a lot of information from your site.
- StumbleUpon Plug-in. You can add this to your Google Chrome or Firefox browser to share your content quickly. Just click the little thumbs-up button and you are good to go. If you see that it is already green, that is a great sign! It means it has already been shared on StumbleUpon. That would be an appropriate moment to do a little happy dance.
- Badges. Yes, badges. Badges are cool. Using a StumbleUpon badge is a great way to get your content shared. The more people who like your content via the StumbleUpon badge, the more other people will see your site. This will assuredly lead to going viral. (Remember, that is what you want!)
- Payment. The above listed items are the free ways to get your content noticed, but you can also pay StumbleUpon to share your content. This is another excellent way to get your content noticed, but you should keep in mind that it will show as a sponsored post on StumbleUpon, meaning some folks might ignore it.
We can personally attest to StumbleUpon being worthwhile. We have found that certain blogs and infographics are shared quickly. It has really helped to bring in more readers. In fact, our infographic The Era of the Content Beast received 91 shares on StumbleUpon! Pretty nifty, huh?
5. HackerNews. HackerNews is a great way to get your information out there if you are just starting up and you are in the techie and entrepreneurial world. Before you start thinking this is yet another social media platform, it is actually a news source for all in the technological and entrepreneurial realm. If you make it onto the home news feed, you will find your content receives thousands and more visits to your site. It is a great community that is dedicated to a niche topic.
6. Reddit. Following in the same vein as HackerNews is Reddit. It has the potential for a wider variety of topics, so it does not just have to be for tech related companies. Mashable discusses the various ways in which marketers can use Reddit in their upcoming campaigns and points out that this simplified format also gives consumers and readers the ability to discuss the elements they like or dislike. It is a great format to receive client feedback, as many will be able to stay anonymous and will feel freer letting the company know how they feel about certain aspects of the business.
7. HootSuite. You will start to feel really overwhelmed with all of these social media platforms and keeping them up-to-date, but never fear! There is a great app to help you keep all of those social media platforms together in one central location and make sure everything is adequately updated. This is an app called HootSuite. It allows you to add up to five social media accounts for free so that you can monitor them all and update them, as you need to. You can schedule an automatic RSS push to go out from HootSuite to all of your social networks, effectively covering all of the bases. It is a great way to make sure you do not forget about one of the social networks you are using, which is highly possible the more you increase your social media presence.
Be Sure to Use DIY Marketing With Paid and Earned Promotions!
These DIY marketing tips will be very helpful because they will save you a lot of money. They are also perfect ways to interact with your clients on a personal level and make them feel involved with your company. People who feel involved are more likely to share your content with others. However, according to Marketing Land, you need to use your own marketing in connection with paid and earned promotions. In the marketing world, you cannot rely specifically on one form of marketing, because you will miss reaching a lot of different viewers and potential customers.
Let's take a look at paid and earned promotions and how they will help in connection with your own form of marketing:
- Paid Promotions. This strategy is a good way for your content to be seen by a wider audience. You can do paid promotions by paying for sponsored tweets or Facebook posts that will show up in people's news feeds. While some people might skip over the promotions, you will find that many people will start coming your way due to this sponsored item.
- Earned Promotions. These are simply when you go viral; hence having the title "earned" promotions. Viral content means you have a lot of viewers and readers, it also means that your viewer and readership will grow with each new share. You can also obtain earned promotions by having a visually appealing website, as well as having an easy to navigate website, by writing for your audience and not the search engines, and by making your content easy to share on social platforms.
By combining your own marketing, paid promotions and earned promotions you will see that your content is being viewed more and that your company is beginning to be a tremendous success. Marketing is vital to getting your company running and keeping it going like the Energizer bunny!
In the End...
You cannot forego marketing, no matter what others might be saying and no matter whether you feel awkward or silly marketing for yourself. Self-promotion does feel strange to many people and you may feel like you are constantly trying to make yourself look good, and that is what you want! That is what marketers do already, why not do it for yourself? Go on and begin that self-marketing journey and you will see a significant amount of success for your company in 2014!
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