This is a post from SETTER’s Marketing Bootcamp Series. This series is focused on providing education and instruction on a variety of marketing tactics. You can expect to learn about inbound marketing, digital marketing, blogging, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, keyword targeting, social media, content marketing, lead generation, and more. The goal is to provide accessible, actionable, easy-to-understand tactics that you can begin implementing immediately.
Welcome to phase three of your blog strategy. By now, you’ve put in your prep work, and written a stellar, search-engine ready post. Soon enough, search engines will crawl your article and incorporate it into their algorithm, ultimately driving prospects to your page. But now it’s time to proactively get your content in front of some eyeballs. Here’s how you do it:
Social Media Marketing
One of the first places you should be sharing your blog post is social media. Sharing on social media allows your current fans to keep up with you, helps with search engine optimization (SEO), and earns you new fans. Certain social platforms are likely to be more effective than others depending on the nature of your business. For example, LinkedIn is essential for B2B organizations, while Facebook and Instagram are often critical for B2C. Here are some best practices for social media sharing:
- Everyone Shares: Don’t just share your post on your company page. Share it on your personal pages. Employees can share your posts as well. The more people sharing the posts, the larger the potential network you can reach and build. It’s particularly important that your sales and marketing team shares the post with their networks since they have connections to prospects.
- Images and videos: People love images and video, and so do social media algorithms, so make sure you incorporate them into your social posts.
- The Shareable Snippet: Don’t simply post a link or an image and leave it at that. Make sure you’re including a small block of text to help generate interest. Setter calls this the Shareable Snippet. Consider a particularly interesting quote from your post or an intriguing data point (example: B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those that do not blog). Consumers will often re-share statistic-based social posts because it provides value to their own friends.
- Call-To-Action (CTA): The CTA is very important on social media. Research shows that engagement with your post increases when you simply tell your post readers what you would like them to do.
E-mail Marketing
Hopefully you utilize e-mail marketing. If you don’t, a marketing agency like Setter can help you set that up. Using blog content in your e-mail marketing campaign is an excellent way to offer something of value to your customers and prospects, maintain relationships, stay top of mind, and keep your network coming back to your website.
In addition, consider including your website and blog links in the signature of your personal e-mails. It’s likely that you are e-mailing potential prospects on a regular basis, maybe some prospects you didn’t even realize were potential customers. By including your blog information at the bottom of your e-mails, you may entice a few targeted leads to check out your blog and to start benefiting from the value you are providing.
Blog Relationships
It’s a best practice to link back to your own prior posts within the context of a new article, to expand readers’ exposure to relevant topics you’ve written about. However, you can also consider linking out to other blogs. If your readers can gain value from another person’s blog, link out to it. Granted, you don’t want to promote a direct competitor, but triaging industry information for your readers is helpful and positions you as a trusted resource. Further, the other blogger will see that there is traffic coming from your blog, and this can often start to build a symbiotic relationship—one in which the other blogger will sometimes share your posts with their readers, earning you new exposure and credibility within Google’s algorithm.
As you begin to build these relationships, you will develop guest blogging opportunities. This means that you will have the opportunity to write articles for others’ blogs. Due to their different readership, this is an invaluable way to expand your own readership. In addition, you can use the opportunity to reference your own posts, providing valuable inbound links that drive eyeballs in the short run and SEO value in the long run.
It’s also a great idea to comment on others’ blogs. As long as you add significant value in your comments (no spam!), providing a link back to your own blog is an acceptable practice. Just make sure that the content of your comment is focused on engaging in a relevant way with the article, not simply referencing your own link.
Conclusion
We hope you are able to utilize these tactics and strategies to more effectively engage your audience, and to help your content rank highly in search engines when potential clients/customers search online for the type of information you have written about. After all, when someone discovers your blog on Google and clicks, they arrive on your website to read it – right where you want them to be.
The value of inbound marketing is proven, and content marketing is the foundation. Stay on the lookout for future posts in our Marketing Boot Camp Series, and let us know your thoughts by commenting below.
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