Types of Content Promotion Strategies for a B2B Brand

November 1, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

One of the hard truths of content marketing is that creating pieces isn’t enough to make people fall in love with your brand. No matter how great your content is, people must know it exists before the strategy works its magic. But if you never share your pieces with your audience, how are they ever going to find all the value your team creates? That’s where content promotion strategies come in. The more you hype your content in the right locations, the easier it is to capture your audience’s attention:

What Is Content Promotion?
15 Content Promotion Strategies for Your B2B Company
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Content Promotion Strategies

What Is Content Promotion?

Content promotion is a distribution process where you share your content pieces with an audience on paid and organic channels. Most brands use content promotion for visibility. The more places you share your pieces, the more people interact with them. Better interactions increase conversions and sales.

Content promotion is the last step in the content development process. It includes several unique but effective strategies to reach audiences in any industry or demographic. There are multiple types of promotion all your strategies fall into. They include:

Advertising: Paid marketing tactics that share content with your general audiences, such as PPC ads or social media marketing
Digital marketing: Online tactics that bring more visibility and traffic to your content, such as SEO or content marketing
Personal selling: One-to-one interactions between a brand representative and a customer, such as using direct marketing
Public relations: Communicating with your audience through official media channels like press releases or interviews
Sales: Marketing specific products, services, or offers for a limited time
Sponsorships: Paid marketing techniques that include partnerships with other industry brands to increase readership or viewership with a larger audience

15 Content Promotion Strategies for Your B2B Company

Choose a combination of these strategies that best fit your industry and business model to promote your content to the right segments of your target audience:

1. Embrace Email Marketing

Email marketing lets you build a list of audience members interested in your brand and connect with them on a direct, personal level. Everyone on your email marketing list may not be ready to make a purchase from your brand. But the longer you nurture these leads with valuable content communications, the better chance you have of sliding them lower and lower down the sales funnel. To get people to opt into email marketing communications, you may try tactics on your website or within other content like:

Adding a pop-up box or sign-up form on your home page
Including interstitial ads within other written content with a place for your audience to share their email addresses and contact information
Pinning an email marketing registration form or box to the top or side of every page on your website
Creating scroll ads and CTAs that show a subscription box as people scroll pages, articles, or posts on your site

Some of the most common types of email marketing for B2B companies include sharing newsletters and exclusive content for subscribers, like coupons or discounts. The most effective way to promote your content through email marketing is to segment your audience into smaller groups. That way, you’re sending the right information to people who want to see it and are most likely to benefit from it.

2. Work With influencers

Partnering with influencers to share brand content helps you reach a targeted set of clients and buyers. Influencer partnerships are more common in the B2C marketing space, but they exist for B2B marketers too. They’re not restricted to just social media marketing or blogging. You may also partner with influencers who attend conferences, trade shows, or business events and speak. These are the circles where your most qualified leads often spend their time. Working with influencers who have clout at those types of events can be great for content and brand promotion.

If you don’t already have a network of B2B influencers to contact, start developing these partnerships before you develop your content. Working with them may help you get a better understanding of the content your audience really wants to see. Plus, the collaboration allows you to figure out what type of content is best for each influencer to promote.

3. Develop Contributor and Interview Content

All of your content marketing doesn’t have to come internally from your team. Similar to using influencer marketing to promote your content outward, you can draw people to your content by name-dropping subject matter experts and other notable interviewees or contributors.

Developing interview or contributor content allows your team to leverage the expertise of people outside of your organization in the same industry. But it also helps bring a level of authority to your content, which makes it easier to promote. Rather than trying to convince your audience that your brand knows what it’s talking about, you can promote the expertise of someone they already know and trust. Creating this type of content also encourages the interviewee or contributor to share the content on their own channels, exposing your brand to a wider audience.

4. Start Content Partnerships

Rather than developing one-off contributor content pieces, consider establishing content partnerships instead. You can enter content partnerships with individuals, other businesses, or even agencies. One of the most common content partnerships is guest posting. In this strategy, your team creates content for another brand, which hosts that content on its site. Most guest posting takes place on blogs, but in the new age of content, it could also include articles, social media posts, or video content.

Like interview content, content partnerships allow your pieces to reach a wider audience. They also come with a stamp of approval from the host site. The extra vote of confidence tells the audience that the host company trusts your expertise. They wouldn’t share your content if they didn’t.

5. Leverage Community Networks

Joining industry or niche communities on the internet gives your brand another avenue for promoting content. Question-and-answer websites like Quora are one example of an industry community network. Others include content aggregation sites like Reddit or social media groups on channels like Facebook and LinkedIn. These communities let you target members of your audience interested in specific topics or subjects and who are actively looking for more information about them.

When your brand becomes an active participant in these spaces, it helps build authority and trust through helpful comments and valuable content. The rules for posing and sharing content within each group or on each platform differ. Be sure to read the rules and check in with the administrators before posting within a new community to make sure you follow the guidelines.

6. Submit Content To Online Directories

Some channels promote content for you. All you have to do is upload the content and let that site or channel’s algorithm do the rest. Online directories and review sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Google Business Profiles are just a few examples. When you include your website, business information, or content within the directory, it becomes available in that service’s index. Anyone who visits the site and searches for related keywords can find your information.

Google My Business, especially, allows you to share posts and content updates right on your profile. That way, any time someone searches for your brand, or it appears in the algorithm, people see your content.

7. Revamp Your Internal Linking Strategy

You don’t even need to leave your own sites or channels to promote your content. Sharing related links within your content helps your audience find even more evergreen pieces that provide value. Suggesting content your audience should view or read keeps them on your site longer while continuing to provide the information they crave.

This strategy keeps your old content relevant and increases your brand’s authority. The more helpful content your audience finds, the more they’ll trust your company and come back to get additional information.

8. Try Live Streaming

Though live streaming can be a type of content all its own, you can also use it to promote other content. After you publish another type of content to your website or another channel, consider going live on one of your social media platforms to talk about it with your audience. Be sure to share the link to the content in the live stream description or display it on screen, depending on the capabilities of the platform you use.

You may also consider going live to preview your content before you publish it. This tactic helps prepare your audience for a content release. It also gets them excited to engage with the piece and share it once it’s published.

9. Promote Content Sharing

Every piece of content you create should be easy to share. Getting your audience to share your content with their colleagues or networks is a form of indirect promotion that your team doesn’t have to orchestrate. Adding social sharing buttons to all content on your website or through email marketing makes it easier for your audience to click the button and send the piece back to their own feeds.

Social media isn’t the only sharing promotion you can do. Consider adding forward links within your email content, or “share by email” buttons in other written or video content. You can also create share and embed links for any content to get people to send your pieces through text messages or post it to their own websites or blogs.

10. Create Video Teasers

Video content is no longer reserved for YouTube channels. Nearly every marketing platform supports video either through uploads, embeds, or linking. Consider using video content to your advantage to test and hype other content projects. You can use brief clips like trailers to promote longer video articles, podcasts, or webinars. Consider using teaser videos to give overviews and highlights of both long- and short-form written content.

Then you can share videos on their most popular platforms, like social media stories, TikTok, and YouTube to attract your audience. Wherever you share the videos, link back to the original content or provide details about where and how your audience can find the full piece when it goes live.

11. Pull Your Best Quotes

People love quotes. You see them everywhere on social media, even professional social media outlets like LinkedIn and segments of Twitter. People quote their favorite industry leaders, celebrities, and other personalities all the time. You can do the same to promote your content. Pull some of your best quotes from an article, podcast, or interview. Use those quotes as teasers on Twitter and then link back to the original article. Create a custom graphic to make the quote look fancy and share it on your social media feeds or display it in your company newsletter.

There are plenty of ways to use quotes to tease longer pieces of content and entice people to click and read. Make sure you always link back to the original piece and encourage that conversion. People are prone to sharing quotes without ever reading the full content. The more you prepare to combat that situation, the less you may experience it.

12. Engage in Beneficial Comment Discussions

Take your content promotion strategies a step further than just sharing on various channels. You can also use the promotion process to engage with your audience in the comment sections of social media and blog posts. Those who actively engage with your brand on social media or in comments are more likely to share your content with their own followers or networks.

The better rapport you can build with your audience, the more inclusive your content spaces feel. When people feel more accepted, included, and engaged, they’re more likely to return to that space again. If you can get your audience to return, you have a better chance of them seeing and sharing your future content.

13. Ask Questions or Start Polls

A classic way to get more engagement on your content is to ask a question or poll the audience. When you invite this kind of interaction through your content, you encourage the audience to get involved. When they’re involved, they’re more likely to share. They’re also more likely to return and follow the conversation.

For example, if you mention in a poll that you’ll be using the data in a future piece of content, that might get your audience to subscribe to your newsletter. They won’t want to miss when the content goes live. Since they took part in the study, they care about the results.

Similarly, if you pose questions to your audience in comment sections or on social media and source responses, ask people if you can use their words in your content. When they know they have a chance of seeing their name or words in print, they’ll be more likely to engage with your brand further and share it with their followers.

14. Start Syndicating Your Content

Content syndication sounds like content promotion because it’s the act of republishing a piece of content on another website. But actually, syndication is a content promotion strategy. Similar to content partnerships, your brand works with others to republish content you’ve already shared on your own channels to new ones.

Rather than creating new pieces to share with syndication partners, you promote your best, newest, or most helpful content to the other organization’s audience. You could also let the partnership work both ways and republish other companies’ content on your channels, too.

15. Pay for Your Audience’s Attention

Content promotion embraces both organic and paid methods for sharing information with your audience. If your budget permits, don’t be afraid to exchange cash for visibility. Though organic marketing is a steadier long-term strategy, paid marketing and advertising help get your information in front of the right audience faster. If you’re promoting time-sensitive content, such as a sale or a limited-time offer, paid advertising is worth investigating.

Paid marketing appears on search engines, social media, and websites. Most ad platforms allow you to tailor your campaigns to reach specific audience segments to get your best potential return on investment. The Call To Action in your paid ads is one of the most important elements of this type of promotion. Make it interesting enough for your audience to click without turning into clickbait.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Content Promotion Strategies

Use these tips to get the most out of your content promotion to increase engagement and audience interest in your pieces:

Optimize Everything

Though you’re probably already doing this, it never hurts to remind you to optimize all your content for your audience and search engines. Though doing SEO isn’t only a promotion tactic, it’s a big one to help increase your search engine positioning and organic traffic. The more work you put into keyword research and perfecting the user experience for every piece and channel, the more people you can attract to your content.

Optimization doesn’t matter just for written content either. Make sure you optimize your images for every platform. That means getting sizing dimensions for social media posts or paid ad display banners to make sure your content and message are crisp, clear, and actionable no matter where they appear.

Use All Your Promotion Channels Effectively

You’re able to promote your content best when you understand the best practices and subtle tricks that work best on every channel. That means the members of your team responsible for promoting content on each channel should become experts on each platform. Encourage them to use the channels in their personal lives to get more familiar with each one.

Social media channels are the easiest to access in non-business settings because your team can create and use personal profiles. Channels like email marketing or content communities may be more difficult to find a use for in their personal life. In those cases, make sure you provide training and resources to broaden their knowledge.

Repurpose Old or Outdated Content

If you’re looking for quick or easy ways to create new content to promote, return to your archives. Repurposing content lets you use pieces you’ve developed in the past in new ways. Repurposing may look different for every brand or each new type of content. For example, you may turn an old blog post into a video. Or, you may create an email newsletter that rounds up some of your best past posts and shares them.

Remember, content promotion isn’t just about sharing your newest or latest and greatest content. You can promote older pieces that your audience finds interesting or valuable.

Focus on the Timing of Your Promotions

Even if you pick the right promotional channels, you may not get as much attention and reach as you want if you don’t share content at the right times. For example, if you send a newsletter in the middle of the night, while most of your audience is asleep, how many people do you think are going to read it? It’d be better to send that communication during the day when someone is awake and alert enough to look at it.

Most social media, email, and content scheduling programs suggest the best times to send or post content to reach your largest number of subscribers or followers. Another timing tip is to avoid sharing content on the hour or half hour. Most companies share their content at these times to remember when they scheduled pieces. But scheduling your content at 10:03 a.m. instead of 10 a.m. could help it beat out the competition and appear at the top of your audience’s feeds.

Make Each Promotion Strategy Unique

Your content promotion techniques should be as unique as the content you share. That means no two promotion campaigns look exactly alike, and they shouldn’t. Each one should be unique based on the audience segments you’re targeting, your industry, and the platforms on which you’re sharing content. Some techniques may work across platforms or audience segments, but you should still look at each one individually. Don’t create a blanket campaign and expect it to work on every channel. It won’t.

Monitor the Competition

Sometimes you can find the best content promotion strategies by watching what your competitors do. Use social listening to find all the locations your competitors’ brands receive mentions across social media and around the internet. Whether your listening turns up their own brand content or audience mentions, it provides plenty of data that you can use and apply for your own promotional strategies.

Need help learning more about how your competition shares content, and what the audience thinks of it? Request your free content marketing report from CopyPress. In the report, you’ll learn about your competitors’ top-performing content and find gaps you can fill on your own site to pull more market share for your brand.

Develop a Cohesive Marketing Strategy

One of the most effective ways to make sure your content promotion works is to keep your marketing messages consistent across all platforms. If your messages and branding are the same on every channel, they become synonymous with your company name. As you build your audience, they’ll know what to expect from your company, what values it upholds, and how you can help them solve their problems and meet challenges.

Adjust Your Strategies Based on Analytics

As with everything else in content marketing, always track your content promotion campaigns to see if you’re meeting your goals. For example, if you want to increase content engagement through promotion, monitor metrics like shares, likes, and comments on your pieces. Tracking content promotion strategy analytics helps you understand if the methods you chose were effective. If not, you can adjust them for the next one to bring better results.

Stay Up To Date With Content Promotions Strategies On Our Podcast

New content promotion strategies have the potential to arise every day thanks to new technology and audience expectations. Never miss a chance to catch these trends by subscribing to The Content Marketing Podcast by CopyPress. In each episode, we cover an important content marketing topic and provide tips and tricks to help you stay ahead of the competition and give your audience what they want.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress