You’ve created high-quality content and hit publish. Now what? If you’re not getting the level of engagement or interaction on your content, it’s time to turn to promotion tactics. And we’ve got two options to do it: organic content promotion and paid promotion. As you might have guessed, one of these comes free to marketing teams, while the other can quickly eat into a marketing budget.

To help you push your marketing campaigns as far as possible, we’ll be diving into everything you need to know about organic content promotion. By incorporating these strategies, tactics, and tips, you’ll be well on your way to boosting the reach of your content. Let’s get right into it with the following topics:

• What Is Organic Content Promotion?
• Types of Organic Content Promotion Strategies
• Balancing Paid vs Organic Content Promotion
• Tactics for Organic Content Promotion

What Is Organic Content Promotion?

Organic content promotion boosts the visibility and reach of your business’s content without using paid methods, like buying ad space, sponsorships, and paid ads. A whole lot of content is produced every single day. While 2.5 quintillion bytes might not mean much to many of us, that works out to about 7.5 million blog post uploads on any given day, according to Earth Web. If you’re posting daily, that’s 7.5 million other blog posts that instantly become your competition—not to mention the endless amount already live.

That’s a lot of competition to overcome, especially if you don’t have a strategy in place. No matter how excellent your content is, it’s not going to be doing itself any favors if no one is reading it. So, using a blend of organic and paid approaches can help your business deliver content to more audiences. But organic promotion does this without the hefty price tag.

Related: Your Guide to B2B Content Distribution

Types of Organic Content Promotion Strategies

In this context, organic marketing means any promotion that you can do at no cost. If we think about different types of content distribution, owned content is something you can control. Most of the time, these will be your main sources of organic content. Anything you’re not directly paying for, and you can organize yourself, is organic marketing and can work as part of your promotional strategies. There’s a range of different organic content promotion types for you to select from:

Email Promotions

Image via V12 Data

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of organic content promotion and distribution, according to V12. Using lead magnets like subscription or newsletter signups, businesses and brands collect email lists. Using these lists, teams can create targeted messages and promote these to subscribers. An effective way to streamline this method is to repurpose content into weekly updates or email newsletters. This way, you get more visibility for your content and the chance to capture more clicks.

If people didn’t see your content on the day you posted it, they’ll see it as it arrives in their inbox. Equally, if your customers don’t want to spend their time going through your content, they can get weekly updates via your newsletter. From there, they can click on the article links that are closely related to what they’re interested in.

At this point in the game, we all know segmentation and personalization within marketing are key. Don’t forget these rules with email content promotion. And as Campaign Monitor states, segmented campaigns generate 760% more in email revenue than generic campaigns. Incorporating a level of personalization will allow you to send the right content to the right customers.

Related: Free Email Newsletter Templates

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the ability to structure content so it ranks in search engines and appeals to target audiences. We’re talking keyword placement, helpful content, and effective formatting. Without an effective SEO strategy, there’s a very slim chance that your content will ever make it to the first page of Google. Considering the vast majority of clicks come from this page, you don’t stand much of a chance without good SEO.

SEO falls into the category of organic content promotion as it’s something that your marketing team can include in the content creation process. Without adding extra costs to the process, you’re able to optimize content to help it rank better. With better SEO, the chance of your content moving up the google rankings also increases. As your posts climb in rankings, organic traffic can also increase. This tactic pushes your content to more people, making it a win-win.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is another effective organic content promotion strategy. There are many different ways to go about content promotion with guest posting. You could write a review of a recent article or a follow-up. Alternatively, you could arrange for content syndication to another brand in your niche. However you go about getting your content on other sites, the fact that it isn’t there is all that matters.

Alongside a backlink, guest posting can help you to put your content in front of an audience that might not be typical for your brand. You can find brands that do something similar, helping to break into a new customer segment for you. Once you’ve established a few partnerships with other websites, guest posting can become a valuable way to boost your brand’s reach.

Press Releases

Creating press releases is a PR and marketing format that’s slowly lost favor over the past few years. Some marketers see them as outdated since we have instant access to news at any time. But press releases are fantastic hidden gems for business promotion. And crafting effective press releases for notable publications can be a great way to increase your brand’s visibility.

A press release can be short and sweet, not taking many resources to create. From there, news outlets that post it on their site will generate more traffic on the initial post. What’s more, they’ll have to link back to your company, securing you another high-quality backlink. This is a big advantage for your company, helping your overall SEO while also funneling new clicks to your business.

Networking

Networking comes in many different formats. Especially after our post-lockdown world, networking doesn’t have to mean flying out to a conference and having awkward Smalltalk. Instead, you can use online platforms like LinkedIn to reach out to people within your industry. By forming connections on LinkedIn, you can create partnerships.

Finding people in your industry and delivering them news to share will help expand your social reach. Instead of getting your content in front of only your audience, you’re suddenly able to expand to a whole new audience. This doesn’t all have to be on LinkedIn. Even the action of someone with a following retweeting your marketing material on Twitter could turn into a great way of promoting your content.

Creating this network of invested individuals is a great way to get the ball rolling. Organic content promotion definitely won’t happen overnight. But, with a few notable friends in the industry, your network can do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

Cross-Platform Recycling

If you want to organically promote your content to as many people as possible, then you need to make use of all the social channels your business or agency uses. No brand exists in a vacuum. It’s likely that you have a whole range of social media accounts, not to mention platforms you use just to interact with customers.

Make sure that whenever you produce a piece of content, you milk it for all it’s worth. Now, we don’t mean spam. Don’t directly copy and paste content across different channels. Just like with email, you want to tweak your content to fit the medium. For example, if your team creates a blog article, adjust the verbiage and curate this content for LinkedIn.

You might also use business infographics from a blog post and upload them to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Recycling content in an effective way is a great method of organically promoting your content. Instead of spamming, you can distribute these posts over time, helping to catch users that didn’t see any of the posts when you initially uploaded them. Making the most of your owned channels is by far the best way you can go about organic content promotion.

Related reading: Types of Content Promotion Strategies for a B2B Brand

Balancing Paid vs Organic Content Promotion

Many markets believe that if you’re looking to make money, you need to spend money. While a PPC campaign can definitely speed up the results of your marketing campaigns, that doesn’t mean they’re the only option you have. Finding a balance between paid and organic content promotion will allow you to retain your budget while getting high-impact results. There’s no fixed ratio between the amount of paid and organic promotion you should be doing. But you should have an idea of the budget for paid content in any given quarter. From there, you’ll know how far your budget can spend.

But how do we add organic promotion to the equation when it doesn’t cost anything? Even though there’s no monetary cost, there’s the cost of time. Organic content promotion, in whatever form, can take more time than paid methods. With this in mind, there are two ways you can divide your campaign:

Team-Based

Split your team, with half working on paid content and the other always focusing on organic content. This approach can work well for enterprises and those that have enough team members to allocate content evenly.

Sequentially

Approaching promotion sequentially means you work through the PPC budget until nearing the max before switching to organic content promotion. This might be a better fit for smaller companies that want to see immediate results. The little push that a PPC-first approach can give can get the ball rolling. From there, your organic content channels can take over the work.

Of course, a balance of these two strategies will be where you find your own company. Depending on your budget, the size of your team, and the season you’re working in, the exact ratio between paid and organic will shift.

Related: SEO vs PPC: When To Use Each Marketing Strategy

Tactics for Organic Content Promotion

Organic content promotion doesn’t come easy, especially if you haven’t done this before. The good thing is that many skills needed to create content are applicable here, meaning you’ll be a natural. To help, here are our top tactics for effective organic content promotion:

Consistency

Creating a name for your brand doesn’t happen overnight. No matter how good your content is, you could be up against companies that have been ranking for years. You need to put time into your content marketing strategy practices to make it work. Consistency is key here, with a continual stream of new content to promote. With fresh content, your business is more likely to keep customer interest in the long run.

If you’re not too sure how often you should be posting, take a look at some of your competitors. Using a resource like the CopyPress content marketing analysis tool can give you all the information you need to start making a plan. From which content works best to how often your competitors create content, this will point you in the right direction.

Empower Your People

Effective organic content promotion starts with making the most of what you already have. While content creation skills or various social platforms might come to mind, that’s not the only resource you have access to. Your customers and even social followers can be valuable resources for information here.

If you’ve got a product that people really enjoy, then why not reach out to some of your customers and see if they want to become brand ambassadors? They can share your posts, boosting your reach, in return for a particular reward. Your customers will feel more brand loyalty, and you get to make the most of their influence.

While not everyone will have a big following, this can quickly become a numbers game. Offering this program en-masse will help you expand your organic reach with little effort for your marketing team. This one is a powerful win-win that’s used all the time in organic content promotion.

Read more: Influencer Qualities To Look For To Promote Your Brand

Understand what Social Media Prioritizes

Adapting to what social media platforms are currently prioritizing can be a great way of organically increasing your content reach. Every social media account is an active business. They’re constantly developing new technology and distinct features to set them apart from their competitors.

Take Instagram, for example, and their launch of reels back in 2020. Reels were their answer to the rise of short-form video content on platforms like TikTok. With billions invested into this new technology, Instagram obviously didn’t want to let its new feature fail. Due to this, content creators that posted reels began to see more engagement and better returns on their reels when compared to normal content.

According to a study by Hootsuite, both follower count and engagement went up as they pushed into a reel-intensive marketing strategy. So instead of just doing what you’ve always done, keep up with the times and adapt as you go. Organic content promotion is all about taking wins where you can find them.

Don’t Gatekeep Your Blog

Your blog is your baby. That’s where you began your content marketing journey, and it’s still probably your leading inbound generator. Although you have a commitment to high-quality content, that doesn’t mean you have to do absolutely all of the heavy lifting. One fantastic way to go about organic content promotion is to boost the number of people that come to your site.

SEO aside, a great way of doing this is by offering something new. If you’re writing educational content, inviting some industry leaders to guest post on your site is a fantastic method of getting some new clicks. Instead of just having your content team produce absolutely everything you post, let some other authors have a go at writing. Of course, provide them with a style sheet to keep them in line. But more than anything, allow them to take their writing in a different direction.

The more your blog has to offer, the higher the chance of users finding something that they’re interested in. Sometimes, the best way to organically promote all of your content is simply to expand what you’re offering. Partner with others, foster information exchanges, and put online relationships to good use.

Experiment with New Content Streams

The digital marketing space is constantly changing, and we have to shift with it. Although written content is what most of us are best at and familiar with, that’s not the only player at the table anymore. Expanding into new content streams and making the most of new platforms when they arise is a fantastic way of pushing your content further.

In 2022, online video content makes up 82% of consumer web traffic, according to Cisco. If you’re only producing written content, then you’re only able to grab a fraction of the total content that your competitors are. Branching out into new content formats can be the push that your team needs to kick content marketing into overdrive. When promoting your content, be sure to make use of all of the distinct types, formats, and platforms that are available to you.

Get Started with Your Organic Content Promotion Strategy

Making use of all of the resources that are available to you is the best way of going about organic content promotion. Got a large email list? Send out a newsletter that directs people to your content. Have a lot of followers? Get some onboard with a brand ambassador scheme to help push your marketing even further. No matter where your strengths lie, organic content promotion is all about recycling your content into different social streams, formats, and for larger audiences.

While organic content promotion will never be the fastest way to success, it’s extremely powerful when done correctly. If you’re looking to kickstart your campaigns, get in touch with the CopyPress team. Our strategy experts can help you plan a content strategy that gets results for your business.

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