Issue #177
Strategically using blog content in promos
In the last issue, I started off with some super-obvious things you need to do after you hit the publish button on a new post.
But, let’s move past that. Today, I want to talk about a simple way to utilize blog content in a strategic way in promotions in order to reach new people.
To do this, I’m going to use an example of my own business. This is an IDEA. This is not something I have (yet) done for the Blog Marketing Academy itself. But, I want to use BMA as an example because you guys all know it.
So, you know that I talk about online marketing and blogging. My emphasis is on using a blog as a strategic marketing tool in order to build businesses. While most of my clients are starting or building online businesses, truth is that much of what we discuss would apply to offline businesses, too.
So, let’s say I wanted to specifically put a piece of content in front of a sub-market of people who I think might make good potential customers. Let’s say… DENTISTS.
Let’s say I wanted to attract dentists to the Blog Marketing Academy and get them into some kind of training or consulting on how they could utilize a blog, email marketing and some content marketing to bring more patients into their doors.
So, I could write a blog post which talks about the potential uses of a blog for a dental practice. I do all the optimization stuff to that post for SEO, for readability… all of it. I give it a solid call to action with a lead magnet designed to attract dentists onto my email list.
Once I publish that post, I then turn to paid traffic (most likely Facebook, but could be Linkedin as well) in order to boost my post specifically to dentists. I would utilize the targeting options on Facebook to put my ad in front of people in the dental field and the ad would point right to my blog post which I write specifically for that sub-market.
See how that works?
It’s pretty simple. But, it is targeted.
Most blog owners just view their readership as this… mass. A starving crowd you have to send new content to regularly. Well, that’s short-sighted.
You can actually TAILOR your blog content right to specific sub-markets – then reach them using paid traffic.
The cool thing is that you can do this into markets that might not, on first glance, seem related. I mean… Blog Marketing Academy and dentists?! But, sure, it could work.
But, you know what else?
There’s likely hardly anybody at all who is paying to reach dentists with stuff about blogging. In other words, less competition.
To start with this, you need to think about what it is you do and how it could apply to other sub-markets that might not otherwise be obvious. I mean, for me, it would seem as if bloggers are my main crowd. But, content marketing could be used for dentists, for restaurants, chiropractors… all the way to the local lawn mower company if you really get down to it.
Would what YOU do apply to seemingly different markets, too?
Perhaps you can choose your content – and your distribution strategy – specifically to target some of those markets and bring them over. Worth some thinking, huh? 🙂
– David