Amplifying high-quality content allows brands to significantly boost awareness, strengthen relationships and maximize the value of your content budget.
As a brand, it’s not enough to create great content. That’s table stakes in today’s hypercompetitive digital world where consumers have volumes of information coming at them from every direction. You must showcase your best-performing content and make sure it reaches the people you need to see it.
Content amplification is a process that will make your content work harder, allowing you to make a greater impact with your content marketing initiatives.
Here is Postmedia’s introduction to the foundational elements of content amplification: what you need to know and how you can use it to extend the life of your best content — and drive more of your target audience to your digital channels.
What is content amplification?
Content amplification leverages social channels and online platforms to expand the reach of the high-quality content you’ve already created to targeted market segments. It is a process that includes a range of tactics, such as paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), partnering with influencers, guest posting and email marketing. All content amplification tactics share a singular goal: to generate targeted web traffic.
The power of content amplification
The benefits of content marketing go beyond highlighting the hard work you put into creating useful, relevant and entertaining content for your website, social media channels, blog, podcasts and more. A strong content amplification process can help you:
- Expand your high-intent audience by boosting your visibility and brand awareness. The more people who see your best-performing content, the more likely they are to engage with your brand and spread the word, attracting even more like-minded consumers.
- Tip: Combine paid advertising and organic SEO to promote your content.
- Enhance existing customer relationships. Staying top of mind with customers by providing content that will help them is an important way to build your credibility as a caring, knowledgeable brand that delivers added value and is not solely focused on making a sale.
- Tip: Use social media and email newsletters to regularly engage with customers who aren’t frequent visitors to your website.
- Extend the impact of your existing content. One key aspect of an effective content amplification process involves collecting, indexing and curating your content to make it easy to find and re-issue or repurpose when the timing is right. This will allow you to leverage the maximum impact from content and drive up your return on investment.
- Tip: Build a library of blog posts, podcasts, videos, case studies and other content. Update and re-share relevant content at industry events and whenever an appropriate opportunity arises.
How to harness the power of content amplification
Create a content amplification strategy designed around your unique brand. The foundation is your most impactful content. Use tried-and-true tactics that will ensure more of your target audience see the high-quality content you’ve created with them in mind.
Identify – and amplify – your best-performing content
You’ve done the hard work, built buyer personas to understand your customers and their buying journey, created the type of content they like, and shared it on their preferred channels. Use the key performance indicators (KPIs) you identified as part of your content marketing strategy to pinpoint the content that has garnered the most engagement so you can boost its impact. Promote it and keep promoting it.
Fast fact: 95 per cent of top content marketing performers use metrics to measure content performance and 83 per cent have KPIs to measure content initiatives.
Tip: Use content marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot and Semrush, to understand how content is performing across your platforms.
Align your messaging to the channels you’re using
The objective is to build interest and garner clicks for the content you are amplifying. Match your promotional messaging to the social channels and platforms you are using to entice people to access your priority content. For example, Instagram is all about photos and visuals. Carousel posts (a series of images and videos) can be an effective way to get people to go to the content you want them to see.
Fast facts: Engagement on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook. The visual storytelling platform also outperforms Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn when it comes to engagement. Carousels have the highest engagement rate of all post types.
Tip: Pinterest is all about content sharing, making it a great place for content distribution. Be sure to use relevant hashtags.
Use platforms to showcase your expertise
In addition to social media platforms, Quora, Medium and PR Newswire offer brands the ability to answer user questions and share related content, provide thought leadership and post press releases, respectively. These powerful tools can help you demonstrate your expertise, increase backlinks and amplify your brand.
Leverage paid advertising
Paid social media and search advertising are cost-effective ways to show up where your target audience is. They typically take the form of pay-per-click advertising, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. They can help you reach targeted audiences based on the parameters you set and are easy to manage and measure.
Tip: Facebook Ads offer strong retargeting tools and personalization options.
Put your blog posts to work
Blog posts offer a great opportunity to provide value-added content to your target market. They can also be used as a promotion tool. Offer to contribute guest posts to publications aligned with your brand and that share a similar audience. This can also help you reach more of your target audience and earn backlinks to your site.
Partner with influencers
Influencers are influencers because their followers trust them and their endorsements. Reach out to the influencers who will have the most impact with your customers and pitch them on reviewing your product or posting about you and tagging your business when they do. This will expose their followers to your digital channels and content. Another option: Bring influencers into your content creation process early and make them part of the strategy.
Doing the hard work to create high-impact content is the first step in an effective content marketing strategy. Content amplification is a critical tool to unlock the power and expand the influence of those efforts.
