Having a successful content marketing strategy is vital for any financial institution. Creating valuable content and regularly publishing it is key to raising brand awareness and reaching the target audience. However, one question that financial organization content marketers often ask is, “Where should I post content?”
If you have ever created an excellent article but then wondered where to share it, you are not alone. There are many options for posting your content. So, how can you select the right ones?
Determining the optimal places for posting and sharing your organization’s content depends on your marketing goals. If you know what you want to achieve, it is easier to work out where that content needs to go.
In this post, we look more closely at the various options open to you when it comes to publishing content. We will examine some of the different channels available and look at how to choose the correct ones for your organization. With this valuable insight, you’ll be well-placed to hone your content marketing strategy for greater success.
What Are My Goals?
There are several marketing goals that your content may need to address. These include:
- Raising brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Improving your site’s ranking for keywords
- Driving traffic to your website
These are just some of the goals your organization could be working toward. Yet, the majority of content marketing strategies focus on at least one of these areas.
The chart above shows some of the potential goals your content marketing strategy may have.
How Do Your Goals Affect Where You Should Post Your Content?
It is clear your content marketing goals affect where you must post your content. Different goals have different target audiences. Those target audiences are using different types of platforms and consuming media in different ways. Therefore, you need to tap into the correct audience by targeting the correct form of media.
For example:
If your organization’s goal is lead generation or brand awareness, it makes sense to post your content on another website. If your organization is trying to increase its overall audience, sharing content via guest blog posts may drive leads. It could attract a new audience to the brand and increase traffic. Should the guest blog site promote your content via social media, your brand gets even more exposure. You can also generate leads and raise brand awareness by posting content on social media platforms.
Or:
If your organization’s goal is improving its keyword ranking, you can post your content in several places. Posting to your organization’s website will help. This is because having more high-quality, relevant content on your site helps Google to view you as an industry authority. This, in turn, makes Google rank your pages more highly. Also, posting to other sites with higher domain authorities than your own helps increase your site’s authority. This, again, makes ranking for certain keywords easier.
These are just two examples of how different marketing goals require different content posting strategies. Tailoring your own organization’s strategy to its marketing goals is imperative.
Posting on Your Website
It is very important for your organization to maintain its site and blog with fresh content regularly. Using blogs helps you get more leads and gives you a better ROI. As long as you consistently publish quality, valuable content, you can reach a wider audience. You can also boost your SEO, enjoy more promotion through social media platforms, and generate more leads and conversions.
Isn’t Your Website Enough?
Creating and publishing articles and blog posts on your organization’s website is important. However, it is not sufficient these days. Your brand’s website is only one place where people may discover your content. These days, they can find content everywhere. The world of content marketing is incredibly competitive.
The above infographic shows just how competitive content marketing can be. Getting your articles, blog posts, videos, and tweets noticed can present a major challenge. Therefore, to gain real traction, looking beyond your organization’s own website is essential.
Sharing content on mainstream outlets, such as Medium and industry platforms, helps to get it seen. The more places you promote your content, the further you can spread your brand’s message.
Where Can You Post Content?
It can be tempting to only think about your organization’s website when it comes to publishing content. Yet, you need to remember your target audience visits many places when spending time online. The chances are your audience is spending very little time on your website or reading your blogs. When your organization needs to grow its audience, it needs to work out where that audience goes when online. Once you know this, you need to share your content there.
The chart above shows that there are many options when it comes to publishing content. Finding the best one to suit your goals and target audience is key to success.
For example, you can target a B2B market the best through LinkedIn. Meanwhile, Medium.com is a useful publishing platform for sharing content and importing posts from elsewhere. Your organization’s website or blog is a vital publishing place for your existing customers to access your content. Facebook and Twitter are excellent places for sharing posts and updates to reach a wider audience.
If we were to list every platform available for publishing content, it would be fairly extensive. It would include:
- Video sites
- Social media platforms
- Webinars
- E-mail marketing
- Paid promotion tools
- Graphic tools
- Blogging channels
New publishing channels also appear on a regular basis. So knowing your institutions specific goals is vital to know where you should focus your efforts. It is also important to understand your audience and to know the content creation resources you have available.
Just because there are many platforms available to choose from doesn’t mean they are all suited to your organization’s needs. You shouldn’t expend your efforts on something that won’t reach your target. Once you understand your audience and your goals, knowing where you need to publish will be easier.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the places where you should consider publishing your content.
Guest Blogs
Writing guest blogs in your niche represents an ideal opportunity for sharing your brand’s view on many topics. However, you need to identify platforms where your target audience already has a presence. Check your audience’s social feeds. Find out what websites are popular with your audience and begin there.
This site enables you to republish your blog posts as LinkedIn articles. This is helpful if your brand already has a strong base of subscribers for articles on this platform. Users can subscribe to posts and receive notifications every time you publish something new. This means people will see your content more easily.
Promoting content via e-mail may be an older tactic, but it’s still an effective one. E-mail subscribers are loyal to your organization’s brand. They’re three times more likely to share the content you publish on social media than your visitors from different sources. Usually, you’ll also get more clicks from e-mails than social media posts.
You should never overlook sharing good quotes from your most recently published content on Facebook. As long as the image displays properly, and the quote is relevant to the target audience, it can drive traffic.
YouTube
When it comes to today’s most popular forms of content, videos are becoming increasingly popular, as shown in the chart below.
YouTube is an incredibly popular form of social media these days. You can harness the power of this medium by creating engaging and informative video content. Live videos, how-to guides, and other valuable content aimed at your target audience are sure to be popular.
Should I Publish Content on As Many Platforms As Possible?
Although your content might be top-notch, you shouldn’t necessarily use every social media and blogging platform to publish it. There are some questions you should ask first:
- Does the platform fit with my organization’s niche? If the answer is yes, the chances of attracting strong leads and the correct audience are high.
- Does the target audience spend time on this platform? Define your target audience. Then, find out where your audience members spend time online.
- Will having a presence on this platform help the organization to meet its content goals?
It may seem like publishing everywhere is the ideal solution. However, there’s a downside to your content being everywhere. In fact, being everywhere could actually lead nowhere. Spreading your content too thin is never a good idea.
Each platform requires focused effort and time dedicated to learning each new audience. If you focus on many channels, you become distracted from what truly matters. It also wastes your time, leaving you unable to be fully present on any platform. The key is to find the places where your content has to be. You can then target your content toward those channels.
The Importance of Targeted Content Distribution
Content marketing professionals say that a major factor in their strategies’ success is targeted content distribution. Choosing your distribution channels won’t just save you resources, energy, and time; it’ll also benefit your audience. Your audience will enjoy your very best content. Why? You have created it by paying attention to your audience’s needs and wants.
Of course, there’s no single set of publishing channels that are beneficial to every organization. Therefore, you need to determine which ones are right for your organization. However, it’s important to remain focused and to avoid spreading your content too thinly. Focused and valuable content is the way forward to benefiting your readers.
Creating A Strong Content Marketing Strategy for Publishing Content
If you’re going to publish your content in the right places, you’ll need to develop a plan. This is where your content marketing strategy comes into play.
Thirty percent of marketers do not know what successful content marketing strategies look like. Another 29 percent are unsure. This means that learning what makes a successful strategy is key to your competitiveness.
Having a written plan for your content marketing makes an enormous difference in who you reach and how. It doesn’t have to be complicated to draw one up.
- Define your goals for producing content.
- Carry out your research into your target audience.
- Brainstorm content types and ideas.
- Create your content based on your brainstormed ideas.
- Publish your content in the places that you’ve already determined will be the most successful.
- Continue to create high-quality content consistently and regularly. Be intentional and specific.
Finding Places to Publish Content That Work for Your Organization
There are many challenges facing content marketers today. One of the greatest is where to publish the content that you produce. At the end of the day, though, only you can decide where to publish your content. You must base your decision on the needs of your organization and its specific goals.
When you decide on the right channels to suit your organization’s goals and audience’s preferences, you won’t waste time. You’ll be focusing on the most effective platforms through which to publish your content. This will prevent you from expending energy and effort on pointless channels and spreading your content too thinly.
With planning and forethought, you can effectively choose the right outlets to suit your target audience. Publishing your content through those channels will help you reach the correct people. As a result, you will be in a better position to reach your marketing goals. You’ll be able to reach a wider audience, boost your keyword ranking, and drive leads and conversions.