PLanning
A good promotion plan begins with audience research and the development of targeted messaging. You’ll notice throughout this piece that the more effort you invest in intelligence and structure, the smoother and more effective the rest of your campaign will be.
Define Audience Types
Multiple types of audiences can potentially share your content.
The first is content collaborators, which can range anywhere from a partner helping create the content, to an influencer whose quote you’re including, to a respected member of a community you ask for feedback.
The second group is your bread and butter promoters. These are the journalists, bloggers, and business owners who will link or share your piece.
Finally, you’ve got your amplifiers. They are the audience that will be reading your piece and sharing based on personal interest or to establish credibility in a field.
The type of audience you choose to engage will have a huge impact on timing (ie, if you want to collaborate with a major player you need to begin reaching out EARLY).
These audiences are also going to have wildly different goals and you need to determine those to send outreach with the right contextual triggers that will get them to work with you.
Conduct Research
Once you’ve determined the types of audiences you want to leverage for content promotion, you’ll need to break things down and do some research to determine what messaging will resonate.
At the end of your research, you’ll want to have a good idea of the following things:
- Topics and types of content that resonate with your target audience(s)
- The linking/sharing behavior of your outreach targets
- What you can offer of value that will get you the link or share from each segment
There are numerous ways to conduct this research.
If you are gathering data first-hand through surveys, interviews, or proprietary data analysis you’ll want to allow at least a few weeks to get everything ironed out.
Of course, you don’t always have to be so formal.
For instance, at BuzzStream our planning stage usually involves a discussion of who we’re creating the content for and what their needs are. We use analytics data from previous pieces, information about what we’ve seen performing well on social, and insight from conversations we’ve had with customers to guide our content.
Once you’ve got enough data on your audience, you should try to segment your targets by the type of messaging and value delivery that will most resonate with them.
Determine Messaging Segments
Generally, groups that need to move fast will create unified messaging that will make sense for a large contact list, tweaking in minor ways as they go along. Paradoxically, this approach can increase the amount of time it takes to achieve your outreach goals because generic messaging is usually unappealing.
Segmenting your communications is the best way to increase the response to your content promotion campaigns.
To get segmentation right, you’ll need to refer back to your audience research. In particular, you’ll need to make sure your messaging is contextually relevant and demonstrates value.
Developing personas can be very useful here, particularly if you’re managing a large outreach team. I’d recommend you keep a shared doc and make note of the personas you’re targeting for each campaign, so teammates can refer back when they engage in similar future campaigns.
To show how segmentation can significantly impact outreach messaging, here’s a run-through of different questions/criteria for two segments targeted for the same piece of content:
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