Content marketing is the most effective way to grow your business and generate leads. It’s a way of making a connection with visitors by giving them valuable insight and information they didn’t previously have.

Sometimes, however, even the best content doesn’t get enough love, shares, and interactions. It stays buried in the 233rd page of Google seen by few. Why? Because there wasn’t a proper promotional strategy in place. There was a plan for producing the content but not promoting it so that it had a chance to grow that business.

Marketer Derek Halpern swears by his 80/20 rule: spending 20 percent creating the content and 80 percent promoting it. For a year, he published only two blog posts per month using most of his time to get his content into the right hands. He was able to collect more than 27 thousand leads as a result.

If you’re serious about optimizing your promotion strategy for your content marketing, here are three tips to get you started.

1. Address the right audience

It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing your content night and day; if you’re promoting to the wrong people, you can expect your conversion rate to stay stale. You must know who you’re targeting and who your audience is if you have any chance of your content getting likes, shares, and engagement.

Craft a few buyer personas of your customer base and map them out as specifically and accurately as you can. These are detailed profiles of your visitors, potential customers, and existing customers that include details like age, location, hobbies, purchasing behavior, and more.

Buyer personas are used to help business owners determine their target audience so they can market the right content, products, and services. You can use a nifty tool like Xtensio to create templates for any type of buyer persona you need.

If you have an existing customer base, send them a survey or questionnaire to figure out their questions, issues, and needs. Speak to your subscribers and followers on social media as well. If you don’t have any information to go off of yet, research what kind of audience your brand and its products attracts. Study competitors and their audience to see what they’re doing that’s working for them.

2. Conduct keyword research

You want your content ranking in the first few slots of SERPs because that’s where all the attention is. There hasn’t been much recent research published, but in 2013, imFORZA found that 95 percent of users don’t get past the first page of search. For your business to gain traction, you need to market your content where the most action is.

With more than 5 billion searches made a day, competition to get your content ranked is high. That’s why performing keyword research is a must if your content is going to get the amount of shares you want.

Use Google Keyword Planner to search for phrases that are relevant to your audience’s needs.

By researching which keywords are gaining traction and are a hit with users, you’ll be able to then make those topics the central focus of your content. Focus on long-tail keywords as they generate 70 percent of traffic according to Moz.

3. Utilize social media

With Statista reporting more than 77 million users on social media, it’s a no brainer that your target market is on there too. Use it to create a direct line of communication with users who match your buyer personas and would be an ideal customer. Social media is a great way to connect with potential customers on a personal level and warm them up to your brand. It also boosts your credibility and shows you care about their needs.

Choose the right platforms to market your content on. Find out where your audience is active and stay active on them too. Read your visitors to know how they like to be interacted with and what speaks to them in an effective manner.

Take advantage of marketing automation so that scheduling posts is easy and doesn’t waste precious time. Use hashtags in your posts so that users searching those keywords will be able to see your content and promote it themselves. Search keywords on different social channels and see what questions people have so you can help them and introduce your brand.

Over to you

Creating high-quality content and then marketing and promoting it to death is key for a successful business. Your content is the gateway for visitors to convert to paying customers, and if you don’t create a promotional strategy, it’ll never see the light of day. Focus on keywords, target the right audience, and take advantage of social media to boost your lead generation effectively.