Content Amplification Strategy: 8 Best Practices To Amplify Your Content
Our Content Marketing team shares their top tips on how to spread your brand message, connect with your target audience and help potential clients glide through your sales funnel, using content amplification.
Why do you need a content amplification strategy?
One of the biggest challenges you’ll face as a content marketer today is producing effective content that drives organic traffic and generates high quality leads. Even if you spend all your time and effort creating compelling content, there’s no guarantee that anyone sees it. This can be disheartening and adds little value to your marketing efforts. If you want to get your content out there and under the nose of your target customer, you need to devise and implement an effective content amplification strategy.
Definition: Content Amplification
As the name suggests, content amplification refers to the various methods you can adopt to ‘amplify’ your content and distribute it among your target audience using different online channels.
Organic Content Amplification
Organic content amplification means distributing your content among your existing audiences, such as your social media followers or CRM contacts, in order to drive traffic to your website and encourage them to engage with your
content and your brand. Organic social media marketing, email marketing and content seeding are a few organic methods you can use for this. Let’s see how…
1. Social Media
There are over 3.6 billion people using social media platforms all over the world, making social media marketing one of the most popular and effective ways to promote your content organically and spread your message across your existing social audience.
You can leverage social media by repurposing existing content, publishing it to your social platform and linking back to the original version on your site. This will not only help to boost website traffic but will also provide ample content inspiration for your social media accounts. If you provide valuable content that your followers are compelled to share, you could also encourage follower growth and higher engagement. The key is to make your repurposed content social-media friendly, experiment with formats such as data infographics, engaging videos and eye-catching images. This will inspire more users to engage with your content, to like, share and comment on posts.
However, with organic social media promotion, it is important to avoid adopting a blanket approach across every channel. You should choose the appropriate content format for each different social media platform as, for example, posts that are successful on Facebook won’t always translate as well on Pinterest.
We also always recommend effective use of hashtags to get your message across to the right people and reach new audiences organically, as well as consistent style and messaging across the board to accurately represent your brand and tone of voice.
2. Email Marketing
Another great way to amplify your content organically is through email marketing. It is best practice to set up an email newsletter to highlight your top pieces of content and encourage email recipients to read the full version on your site. Email newsletters are a sure-fire way of getting your content directly into your customers’ inbox, however the more challenging part is making sure they open the email and engage with it!
The average open rate is only around 20.94% so it’s your job to make sure your email doesn’t end up being deleted, in the junk folder or worse yet, unsubscribed. Design and optimise your email to grab your reader’s attention and make them want to read more. The most important element to consider when it comes to open rate is the subject line. Choose a subject line that’s concise, creative and engaging; you want to pique the interest of the recipient. Emojis have also made their way to the modern subject line and, when used correctly, can be a great way to catch someone’s eye and reflect the contents of an email.
You should also make sure your mailing lists are clean, GDPR-compliant and properly segmented so you’re delivering content to the right people at the right time.
Ultimately, it all comes down to testing. Run a few tests with different copy, images and subject lines, and see what your audience engage with most and go from there.
There are multiple tools you can use to manage your email marketing campaigns, such as HubSpot, MailChimp, Active Campaign and Klaviyo.
3. Content Seeding
Content seeding is a type of digital PR strategy which involves ‘planting’ your content on various off-site platforms to help expand your audience reach and establish your brand as a thought leader. You should start by contacting relevant bloggers or journalists, introduce them to your brand and offer them valuable content to host on their platform.
It is important that the content you use for seeding is very high quality and benefits the recipient. This will encourage them to share your content and help you organically attract inbound links and traffic. Content seeding campaigns even have the potential to go viral when shared with the right high-traffic sites with highly engaged audiences, for example national online news publications or popular magazines, such as The Daily Mail or BuzzFeed.
Paid Amplification
Paid content amplification is any type of promotion that involves you having to spend money, for example paying for ad space on a social media platform. Paid content amplification can have a much larger and faster impact in comparison to organic methods. Here are a few examples of the Paid channels you should consider to promote your content.
4. Twitter Ads
Twitter ads are a non-intrusive form of Paid social media advertising since the ads appear in the user’s newsfeed in the same format as all other posts they are scrolling through. Twitter is a great platform to promote your content since you only pay for performance, which means you only pay when a user takes the desired action, such as clicking through to your website or downloading your content. You do not pay for organic impressions or engagements. We suggest you post to Twitter organically and then promote the tweets instead of creating ads in the Ads Manager interface.
5. Facebook Ads
Facebook advertising is an effective way to reach new hyper-relevant audiences. Using Facebook’s extensive targeting tools, you can refine your specific audience and ensure only those who are likely to engage with you, will see your content. You can target by interests, jobs, demographic, location, behaviour and much more.
6. Instagram Ads
Instragam is becoming increasingly popular among content marketers and has proven great success as a means of promoting products, services and content. Like Twitter, Instagram is one of the less disruptive forms of Paid social media advertising as you use videos and photos in the same format as others on the user’s newsfeed. And, like Facebook, you have all the same types of targeting tools, so that the users seeing your content are those most likely to read and engage with it.
7. Pinterest Ads
Pinterest is one of the more neglected social media platforms in terms of marketing however, with over 300 million users every month, and local search optimisation options, Pinterest is a great platform which can help you attract more users to your site. There are multiple types of ads you can choose from on Pinterest, such as one tap pins, promoted carousels or video pins. When designing your ad, you should make sure that they are visually appealing but include text overlay so that users know what your content is about and encourage them to click through. Some of the best content for Pinterest includes how-to’s and recipes.
Pinterest may not be the right choice for all brands but you can use social listening tools to identify which social platforms your audience engage with most.
8. LinkedIn Ads
Over 500 million active professionals use LinkedIn, making it the ideal platform for B2B businesses to host their ads. LinkedIn is quite an expensive social platform to use for Paid advertising compared to others therefore may only be suitable for more established businesses and should only be used for high value content. For instance, for lead generation assets, such as a gated whitepaper or ebook, LinkedIn can be a powerful way of generating high quality leads in B2B. You can use LinkedIn to specifically target the right people, such as by job title, function or industry. This means you can get appropriate content in front of the real decision makers and make the greatest impact.
A few things to remember when defining your content amplification strategy
Before you start your strategy, set out your goals and choose purposeful content, be that an informational ebook that is going to educate your consumers or your most creative thought leadership piece that will translate best to your social media audience.
Selecting only a few of your best content pieces is also much more cost-effective, especially when using Paid channels. Likewise, there is no need to be using all of these content amplification tactics nor spending all your budget on them. Find what works best for your brand and what resonates most with your audience.
When done the right way, content amplification can drive more traffic to your website, attract more qualified leads and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Get in touch with our expert team to find out how we can help you create a content amplification strategy or visit our content marketing page for more information.
