Content promotion for B2B SaaS companies is fundamentally different from retail and eCommerce businesses.
Your content will rarely go viral, and you’ll probably never get a million visitors to an article.
But that’s ok.
After all, your content is not designed for the masses.
You’ve created it for the businesses that are experiencing the problems that your product solves.
You should design your content promotion strategy for them.
In this article, I’ll tell you exactly how to do it.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
1. Create a Content Promotion Strategy Before Creating Content
Your goal with content promotion is to generate traffic by getting more social shares and high-authority backlinks, right?
So before writing on a topic, find out the average number of backlinks and social shares of your competing content.
This will help you understand two things:
- The number of social shares and backlinks your content can potentially get.
- The websites and platforms to get backlinks from.
Let’s say you’re planning to write an article targeting the keyword “project management tools”.
According to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, this keyword has a monthly search volume of 13K, but you’ll need around 108 backlinks to get into the top 10 search results for it.
Hard but not impossible, especially if your site already has some authority.
Let’s take the URL of the article that’s currently ranking on top of the search results for this keyword and analyze it in Ahrefs Site Explorer.
As you can see, it has 148 unique backlinks.
Let’s find out where they’re coming from by using the Referring Domains report in Ahrefs.
I’ve filtered the report for do-follow backlink only since those are the ones we’re interested in.
This leaves us with a list of 79 websites that have linked to this top ranking article. It includes blogs, forums, discussion sites, and various other platforms.
All of them are potential link building targets for your article because they’ve already linked to an article on the same topic.
Analyze this list and expand it by adding other similar sites.
Export the list as a CSV file and reach out to these sites once you publish the article on your site.
Similarly, head over to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and search for the URL of the same article we’ve just analyzed in Ahrefs.
This will show you all the people who’ve shared it on these social networks.
You could also search for your target topic on BuzzSumo and see how many social shares the most shared article has.
As you can see, the content on this topic is frequently shared on Facebook and Twitter. You can also use BuzzSumo to find the exact people who’ve shared these articles.
If you see that the topic you’re planning to cover gets plenty of social shares and backlinks, go ahead and write an article on it.
This way, you’ll know you’re writing about a proven topic and get an overview of the websites from where you can get backlinks to it.
2. Email Your Subscribers to Generate Early Momentum
If you don’t have an email list yet, you should start building one right away.
Because email marketing is among the best ways to drive traffic to your new content, get social shares, and create an early buzz about your article.
This is why almost 90% of marketers use it for content promotion.
Whenever you publish a new article, your email list is the first place to promote it.
Your subscribers have signed up to get your blog updates, so they’re the most likely to read and share your content.
No need for any long creative emails either. Just let them know that you’ve published a new article with a plain text email.
Like Neil Patel does.
Most of that email has been copied from the article’s introduction.
You can also add a one-line request at the bottom of my emails, asking the subscribers to share the article on Twitter or any other relevant social network if they find it useful.
Other than that, make sure your email’s sender name is a person, not your brand. This results in 35% higher email open rates.
As for the subject, just use the main topic of your article (e.g., “best project management tools”). This seems to work the best for most marketers.
Also, try sending your emails on Tuesday, Thursday, or Wednesday between 10 AM to 12 PM to get the highest open rates, according to research.
3. Leverage Your Professional Network to Increase Content Reach
You must’ve heard the saying: “your network is your net worth.”
This is 100% true when it comes to content promotion.
The more influential people you know in your niche, the faster your content gets shared.
Problogger and Copyblogger, two of the biggest sites in the digital marketing niche, are a great example.
Darren Rowse and Brian Clark, the respective owners of those two sites, regularly mentioned and linked to each other’s content in their early days.
For example, here’s an article on Problogger from 2007.
And here’s a Copyblogger article from 2006.
They purposely did this for years — and it worked.
The sites grew together and used each other’s audiences to build their communities and drive traffic to their content.
Google’s algorithms don’t allow such reciprocal linking anymore, but you can still use your connections to drive traffic, get backlinks, and promote your content.
How do you build connections in your industry?
- Shortlist the people you want to connect with.
- Subscribe to their email lists.
- Follow them on social media.
- Promote their content regularly (don’t forget to tag them).
- Comment on their posts.
- Ask questions, share feedback, offer suggestions.
- Stay on their radar.
- Mention them and link to their content.
Make this a part of your daily operations and be consistent.
When you publish new content, let your connections know about it with a simple email that only shares the link to your content.
Avoid asking for any direct favors.
Building relationships takes time but when you do it the right way, promoting your content becomes a lot easier.
4. Promote Your Content Through Your Employees and Team Members
Did you know that content shared by your employees and team members from their personal social media accounts gets 24x more exposure as compared to the same content shared by your brand account?
It’s one of the easiest ways to generate early buzz around your content and get lots of eyeballs on it.
If you have a small team, you can simply ask them to share content from the company blog whenever there’s a new post.
Doing that with hundreds of employees is a bit more complicated.
This is why having a formal employee advocacy program in place is crucial for larger teams.
According to a study by Hootsuite, employee advocacy programs have many benefits apart from increasing the reach of your content.
Imagine the kind of traction your content will get when 200 or 300 hundred employees share it on their personal social media profiles in the space of a couple of days.
That’s a low-hanging fruit of content promotion that many brands ignore.
5. Make It Easy for Readers to Share Your Content
You’ve written great content, you’ve attracted people to it from search engines, your readers love it and want to share it.
But they can’t.
Because there are no social media sharing buttons on your site.
Not ideal, right?
I see this mistake on so many SaaS blogs that it deserves mention.
Don’t let that happen to your visitors.
Add a simple and easy to use social media sharing widget to every page of your site except for the homepage.
You can add it right after the title of your post or the end of the article. However, if you add the floating social media widget on the side of the screen, it’s always visible to your readers.
Several WordPress social media plugins can add this feature to your site for free.
But make sure the widget you add to your site uses a responsive design so that mobile visitors can use it easily.
6. Make Your Content Share-Worthy and Link-Worthy
Nobody shares useless content, no matter how hard you promote it.
Still, even when your content is great, you need to add certain elements to make it more share-worthy and link-worthy.
For example, Hubspot analyzed all of its blog content (thousands of posts) and found that articles longer than 2500 words got the highest number of links, social shares, and visitors from search engines.
So, aim for at least 2500-3000 words for every article on your site.
Similarly, a study found that using relevant images and screenshots in your content can increase its pageviews by almost 94%.
BuzzSumo researched the use of images in blog content and found that articles that used an image every 75-100 words got 200% more social shares than content without images.
That’s not surprising at all.
When you have more images in your content, you give yourself more chances to get traffic from platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Image Search.
If you’re interested in this topic, I recently published an in-depth guide about creating link-worthy content that mentions several other factors that affect an article’s link worthiness.
7. Repurpose Your Content on LinkedIn and Niche-Specific Forums
Repurposing your blog content into other formats for different platforms is a great way to:
- Increase the life of your content
- Drive more traffic to your content
- Increase content ROI by getting more value from a piece of content
- Test new platforms and content formats for your content strategy
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing means converting your blog content into other formats like Slideshare presentations, videos, podcasts, short articles, social media posts, etc.
For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is one of the best places to repurpose old content.
Why? Because more than 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in managerial and decision-making positions.
Additionally, 59% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn, out of all the social networks, generates the highest number of leads for them.
It gives you a chance to make a strong impression on your prospects and find new business opportunities.
To write an article on Linkedin, click on the “Write Article” link under your status editor in LinkedIn’s Home section.
This will take you to the content editor where you can create and publish your articles on LinkedIn.
Still, don’t just copy-paste content from your blog to LinkedIn publishing (or any other platform where you’re repurposing content).
Instead, write a custom introduction that’s relevant to your target audience.
Plus, remove the lower half of your article and link back to the article on your site.
Re-publishing your blog content on LinkedIn won’t cause any duplicate content issues for your site.
Nevertheless, you should still wait for at least a couple of months after publishing a post on your site before repurposing it on LinkedIn.
Apart from LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube, Quora, and any other niche-specific forums are also great places to repurpose your content.
For example, you can extract the main points from any of your best-performing articles and create a video about it.
If you’re camera-shy, use slides on the screen with your voice in the background.
Similarly, you can hire a voice-over artist from Fiverr or any other freelancing portal to create an audio version of your content and publish it on audio-sharing and podcast sites.
In short, you can get a lot more value out of a piece of content by repurposing it on other relevant platforms.
8. Use Expert Quotes to Find New Audiences
Make a habit of getting 2 to 3 original quotes from industry experts for every new article you publish on your site.
It doesn’t need to be a long quote, either.
Just ask them a simple question via email or on any social network where they’re most active, and tell them you’ll use it in your content and give them a backlink.
Here’s this strategy in action.
Doing this has two main advantages.
- It increases the credibility of your content and makes it more share-worthy and link-worthy
- It often gets you social shares from the experts you quote in your content.
Just don’t forget to tell them once you publish the article on your site.
9. Promote Content Through Smart Internal Linking
Frequently using internal links to your old content in every new article you publish is a great way to:
- Get more eyeballs on your old content
- Improve your site’s indexing rate
- Strengthen your site’s overall SEO health
What’s a good internal link structure?
Ideally, no page on your site should be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage.
Here’s a good example.
Let’s say you’ve published a new article that’s getting a lot of visitors from social media.
What happens if you don’t have any internal links in it? People read the content and go away.
On the other hand, if you’ve used relevant internal links throughout your content, people will read it then click on an internal link to read more and click on another link to read even more.
Internal links serve to expose your old content to new readers, reduce your site’s bounce rate, and increase its average session duration.
All of these things result in improving your search rankings.
10. Invest in Link Building for Your Most Valuable Content
Getting more backlinks to your content is a guaranteed way to increase its search engine ranking and drive consistent traffic to it.
According to a study by SEMRush, there’s a direct relationship between the number of unique backlinks to a page and its search rankings.
How do you get backlinks to your content?
I’ve already covered this topic in detail and discussed both the best practices of link building and the mistakes you need to avoid.
Right now, I only want to focus on paid link building.
I suggest having a separate link-building budget for your pillar pages. With the right internal link structure, any links to your pillar pages will benefit all the internal pages linked to it.
How should you spend your link building budget?
Mainly in hiring guest bloggers who have access to high authority sites in your niche. You can pay them for linking to your pillar content.
Since your content is already link-worthy, they should not have any problems doing it.
11. Attract Readers With Facebook Retargeting Ads
Do you have Facebook Pixel on your site? If not, you should get it asap.
Once the Facebook Pixel script is added to your website’s code, it can track all your website visitors who’re also using Facebook.
What’s the benefit?
Using the pixel data, you can run targeted Facebook ads to show your new content to people who’ve visited your site in the past.
Since they’re already familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to read and share your content again.
According to a study, visitors who see retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert on a website as compared to those who don’t.
Still, make sure that you already have an email list-building strategy in place so that the traffic you drive through Facebook ads converts into subscribers.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you set up Facebook Pixel on your site.
12. Automate Social Media Sharing for Consistent Traffic
Social media marketing is a continuous activity.
You can’t sit and wait after posting your content on social media only once.
You have to do it repeatedly…
…every week…
…for months!
But don’t worry, you can automate your social media sharing, set up your sharing schedule once, and forget it.
You can do this using Buffer, Co-Schedule, Hootsuite, or any other popular social media scheduling app.
How often should you share your content?
This infographic explains it quite well (although it’s a bit old since Google+ doesn’t exist anymore).
There is no need to measure the effectiveness of your social media posts daily.
Instead, develop a sharing schedule and measure its overall impact every month or twice a month.
Social media marketing demand long-term commitment and a lot of hard work. This is why automating a part of it makes the job easier.
13. Refresh and Update Your Content to Get New Readers
We’ve already talked about repurposing old content.
Another hugely important task is to keep your content fresh and updated all the time.
You can do this once a year to your best-performing articles and relaunch them as new posts.
According to Google’s own search guidelines, content freshness is an important search ranking factor.
It not only helps you rank higher but also drives more social shares since people find fresh content more relevant.
So what exactly should you update in your content to keep it fresh?
- Update the year in your article title and content.
- Link to new data or any new studies relevant to your content.
- Add new tips.
- Create new screenshots.
- Check if any of your advice is outdated or needs to be rephrased.
Refreshing old content and promoting it to your email list and social media followers is another easy win when it comes to content promotion. Make sure you’re taking advantage of it.
14. Use Your Community to Promote Content
Do you have a Facebook Group or a Slack community of professionals associated with your niche?
If not, seriously consider starting one because it has numerous benefits like networking, exchange of ideas, and of course promoting content to relevant people.
What’s the secret to growing a successful community?
Never make it all about your brand — instead, create the community around a set of needs or problems and offer free value (lots of it).
For example, if you run a monthly subscription-based invoicing tool, create a slack community for freelancers or growth marketers, or any other market segment that frequently uses your product.
Buffer has a Slack community of more than 6000 marketers. Similarly, many bloggers and SEO consultants run huge Slack communities and Facebook Groups.
Are You Ready to Promote Your Content?
The success of your content promotion strategy depends mainly on how actively you work on developing your email list, social media audience, and connections that can help you spread the word about your content faster.
Think long-term.
Make content promotion a part of your daily operations, instead of doing it only when you publish a new piece of content.
