Should you promote your content? Absolutely! Advertising content accomplishes two things: either you draw in new clients who are interested in your content or you direct existing clients to a useful yet free service which strengthens your relationship with them. Content is a positive thing, especially if it gives readers industry/company specific information or even access to promotions and giveaways, so doing it right can be a great benefit to both you and the client.
Promote Your Content – Keep the Client in Mind
Unless you’re a fan service or an artist, you shouldn’t be posting too much about yourself. People come to your shop to find the services or products you sell and look to your content to find what they need to buy and why, so you should help them decide what they need. For example, if you’re a home repair store you should promote your content of How-To articles and regularly educate your customers on different kinds of caulking or how to properly pull tiles off of concrete. If you aren’t providing a service your customers want, they’ll go somewhere else looking for it, which last time we checked was the exact opposite of what you want.
Advertise in the Right Places
This part requires a bit of research, but if you’re passionate about your industry then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to figure out. Whether you’re a general store or a trade shop, you will have a target demographic and that’s who you want to promote your content to. To get to the majority of them, you’ll have to think like a customer and try to imitate their patterns when they search for information online. Check out forums that Google sends them to, and webpages, shopping sites, blogs, How-To sites and so on and so forth. See where search engines send the most traffic and then plant your flag where the data is densest. Advertising is great for your business, but it’s a complete waste of time if you’re not getting in touch with your people.
Direct Traffic
Once you finish making your content and locating your demographic hotspots, it’s time to make your landing page. A landing page is the initial site that a link in an advertisement sends you to, and it’s one that should be as simple and as easy to maneuver as possible. Advertisement links should rarely (if ever) link back to your home page. Instead, they should take the potential customer to a page with three or four large, easily identifiable buttons that break your whole site into several little pieces, like “home repair”, “how-to”, and “hardware” if you’re a home repair store, for example. This lets the potential customer get to your products faster than any other method, and the more time they spend shopping, the more time they spend buying. Designing a quality landing page is just as important as generating quality content.
Should you promote your content? Yes, but you need to do it right. The two golden rules are 1) keep it informative and 2) keep it simple. If you can get a hang of the balance between those two then you’ll see your traffic-customer ratio skyrocket. Just tinker with the digits a bit and see what pops out after a bit of trial and error.
