How to Build Buzz for Your Content
Albert Einstein once asked fellow physicist Niels Bohr, “Does the moon not exist if nobody is looking at it?” I now pose the same question to you, fellow marketer: Does your content exist if no one sees it?
By now, we all know the value of quality content. After all, haven’t you heard? CONTENT IS KING. The writing is on the wall (pun definitely intended) when it comes to the value of quality content. However, creating great content isn’t enough – we as marketers need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and give our content the visibility and buzz it deserves with some (and preferably all) of the following ways:
1. Create High-Quality Content
In short, high quality content is far more important than high volume content. Long gone are the days where we as marketers can simply put up a couple of paragraphs on our blog and think that’ll cut it. In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet is saturated with content. Readers know this too and are hungry for content that provokes an emotional response, something that is fresh, exciting, or coming from a new point of view.
Here’s a fun fact to exemplify how the web is saturated with content: WordPress.com users produce about 53.6 million new posts and 59.3 million new comments each month.
2. Add a Call-to-Action
Tell your readers to share your content within the content, while sharing the content yourself. A well written call-to-action (CTA) encourages your audience to take a particular user journey. The purpose of this journey? To ultimately turn potential prospects into solid sales leads.
Naturally the CTA will vary depending on the platform, type of content, and actionable step you’d like your audience to take next. When I share this article on Twitter, I’ll be adding “Please RT” in my Tweet text to get more shares.
3. Make Your Content Shine
You’ve got your content drafted, images added, and you’re ready to hit publish. This is the finest crafted piece of content the Internet will ever see. You’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into every word on the page. But is it really ready?
Once you’re at the point of wanting to publish, STOP. Go ahead and sleep on it and revisit your content the next morning. You’d be amazed what a rested mind and pair of eyes can do for your content. You’ll most likely catch a few typos and spelling errors and want to re-work some of your thoughts. It’s not going to turn your content from a frog to a prince, but it will be worth it.
Unless you want your content to be only be read by your mum, your dad, and a couple of friends, you need to optimize it for search purposes. If you are successful in promoting your content, you’ll typically see a good amount of traffic. However, once that has died off, you should only expect search traffic to your content. Add relevant and searchable keyword phrases to your title, meta description, and H tags where possible.
4. Find influencers
Naturally, you want to direct your content to the right type of people. The road commonly traveled is to find people from our industry with lots of followers. Makes sense, right? Wrong. Those people aren’t necessarily the right type of people to boost and amplify your content. Size does not always matter. Here is what you should be looking for in an influencer:
- Someone who respects your work and the subject matter of the content
- Someone who has an audience that’s interested in the subject matter of the content
- Someone who has a high level of replies, retweets, or active blog following. In short they have an engaged audience.
5. Share, Don’t Spam
Naturally you want to share the content in as many places as possible, but be careful that you don’t turn into a spammer. If you join 100 LinkedIn groups, post your content, and then, poof, disappear, there’s a very good chance your post will be marked as spam and you’ll be removed from the group.
Tip: Establish yourself as a member of the community you’re targeting for sharing.
Once you’ve positioned yourself as a living, breathing expert (and not a spammer) you will have the authority in the community to be a genuine contributor to it. Post your content manually (don’t take shortcut and use tools such as Hootsuite, etc.) and add a sentence or two explaining the content. This is also a great opportunity to add a CTA or ask your audience a question.
6. Start the Conversation
Congratulations! People are reading your content. Perhaps the moon does exist! Now in order to generate buzz around your content, you need to start a discussion around it. It can be pretty easy if your content provokes emotion such as amazement, anger, joy, or terror.
Consider asking a question when you share your content. You can ask for your readers’ opinions, their solution to the problem presented, if they agree with the information provided in the content, or ask them to share their personal experiences with the subject matter. Be sure to participate in the conversation too – respond to all responses, ask more questions, and keep the discussion alive.
7. Invest in Visibility
Look at paid advertising as an investment – it automates your distribution efforts which increases the time you and your marketing team has for any and all the points listed above. Paid search and social media advertising are art forms in their own right and I would strongly advise A/B testing and experimenting with your ads and calls-to-action to get the optimal response from your target market.
Once you’ve mastered the art of PPC, paid search, and social media advertising, you can start getting your content in front of readers who aren’t yet familiar with your brand. With the use of data analytics, you are able to drill down and reach your target audience, which ultimately leads to conversions.
Did you know: A recent study showed paid social media leads to 25% more conversions than “organic” or free social media?
Wrapping Up
The time and money we put into content creation as marketers is valuable – don’t let that value go to waste with lackluster sharing efforts. Creating buzz isn’t easy, it takes work to establish your presence in the right community and win over influencers. But once you reach that level of authority in your circles, you can focus your efforts on creating high quality content, optimization, and paid advertising.
Here are the key points you should take away from this post:
- Place emphasis on high quality content – you won’t regret it.
- See the last sentence of this article.
- You think your content is ready – but it’s not.
- Size doesn’t matter. Engagement does.
- Be authentic.
- You are responsible for starting the conversation. What else do you do to create buzz around your content?
- Treat paid search as an investment.
CopyPress writer
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