Too often, when we plan out a content strategy, we focus on content creation. Content creation is certainly important ― vitally important ― but it’s not the whole game. Without a robust content-promotion strategy, your content isn’t going to get read/watched/heard.
Adding a promotion/distribution strategy can make a major impact. Witness how one B2B content marketer at an HR performance management software company increased leads by 300% ― simply by taking this content distribution thing seriously.
Instead of making yet more content, the HR marketer Alan O’Rourke had his team switch their strategy. They spent only 30% of their time creating new content and a whopping 70% of their time promoting it.
That got them 300% more leads. With less content.
What might a serious content promotion strategy do for you?
Develop content for multiple personas and their different stages of the customer journey
Ever heard of “random acts of content”? It’s the bad habit of some content marketers to just publish whatever comes into their head, so long as it kinda complements what their company does and gives them a nice opportunity for a sales pitch.
Often, this content strategy (or lack of strategy) devolves into creating content for just one phase of the buyer’s journey. Typically, the discovery phase.
That’s a nice start, but you also need to be creating content for the middle of the funnel and the end of the funnel. That’s a very simplified version of the customer journey (some marketers break it down more granularly), but it’s a good place to start. It’s also a framework used frequently enough that marketers refer to this top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content as TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.
You need TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content for each buyer persona. And ideally, you want multiple content formats for each buyer phase and each buyer persona. A key part of defining your marketing strategy (and filling up your editorial calendar) should be mapping the content you already have to these buyer personas and journeys, and then identifying where you have gaps in your content.
Here’s what this might look like: