5 Overlooked Ways for B2B Marketers to Promote Content
Brands across the globe are focusing on growth, marketing, and scaling one crucial aspect of their business: their content. But in a world where brands are churning out article after article, and ebook after ebook, how do B2B brands make sure their content cuts through to their audience? By looking beyond the tried-and-true content distribution channels—email marketing and social media. Here are five often overlooked strategies to promote your content.
1. Community Slack Channel
More and more businesses are adopting Slack as their main communication channel; however, the platform is also becoming a great choice for content distribution outside your team. Buffer says there are three main reasons why Slack is perfect for content distribution: the competition is low, the engagement is high, and it’s free.
Slack communities for businesses and startups are already on the rise, so why not create your own channel exclusively made for your team members and customers? With social sharing features, you can easily create a Slack sign-up form, share it on social media, and have your customers join your content channel.
The best part? You can see how this group is performing. Slack offers stats that allow you to measure how effective your community is. You can track things like engagement, member file uploads and downloads, and even sign-up referrals.
2. Content Syndication
Neil Patel considers content syndication one of the most important things marketers should do but are hesitant about. For the uninformed, content syndication is the process of republishing content on third-party sites. It’s scalable, easy, and if done right, won’t sacrifice your SEO. Essentially you create a piece of content and republish it for added distribution, which allows you to leverage a single piece of content multiple times.
When Kissmetrics started syndicating content for Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal, the site’s referral traffic soared to about 9,492; however, Neil warns this is a double-edged sword. Ensure that your syndication partners have full attributes to your blog. If you can, request them not to index the blog so the traffic goes to your original post, not to the republished content.
3. Facebook Chatbots
Chatbots help companies scale and grow their business. B2B companies can program their chatbots to perform basic and even complex interactions such as data gathering and lead nurturing through the delivery of personalized content. Facebook Messenger alone has an 88 percent open rate and a 56 percent click-through rate, making it one of the perfect environments for a chatbot.
Recent changes in Facebook Messenger prove that the platform is more than ready for mass content sharing. The Instant Articles feature allows brands to share articles and other links through Messenger, which the app redirects in-app. Facebook suggests this leads to 20 percent more clicks, 30 percent more shares, and 70 percent of readers are less likely to abandon a site because of loading issues.
4. Popular Community Sites
Seventy-one percent of B2B researchers begin their research with a generic search. This means using high-ranking sites such as social media and community sites like Medium and Reddit can help boost your SEO performance, giving your content more airtime.
There are dozens of subreddits that you could participate in. Without posing as a person from a specific company, your team’s effort at engagement looks genuine and can easily earn you a following from people who belong to the same industry. It’s an unconventional way to seek out fellow industry leaders but is a good way to create relationships based on the founded expertise.
If you want to establish your identity and have a platform that is designed for content promotion, then Medium is the way to go. Anything from culture to tech to politics to business is published there.
Medium’s brand revolves around expertise and promises a culture that is concerned with creating good writing instead of ad posts. Saving your best article ideas for Medium ensures that other thought leaders in your industry have easy access to your best content.
6. Text Message Marketing
In a study by Marketing Insider Group, 78 percent of the participants said that personalized content increases their purchase intent, while a study from Constellation Research suggests that generalized content generates 83 percent lower response rates. It’s not enough that you’re publishing content—people are now expecting that you personalize it.
In the age where everyone, from social media to messaging apps, is clamoring for attention, it’s become even harder for brands to stand out amidst the noise. Enter text messaging. Brands frequently flock to internet-based platforms and applications to conduct customer support, which makes SMS a unique and even more personal way to promote your content.
Text messaging engagement rate has proven to be 6-8 times higher than email marketing. And as most texts can be read in under three minutes, leads are more likely to click your link, share your video, or enroll in your online class. They require no internet connection and can be personalized for just about anything.
Don’t worry about having stiff fingers. There are plenty of bulk text messaging services that help businesses create campaigns by providing a platform from which companies can compose their SMS campaigns. It makes sending bulk and personalized messages convenient and more professional. You can even find templates for various SMS campaign use cases.