Creating a Content Marketing Strategy in HubSpot: Promotion (4 of 6)

Welcome to the next chapter of our six-part series on making your content marketing strategy come to life in HubSpot! So far we’ve covered setting goals, conducting keyword research, determining buyer personas, creating long- and short-form content, and linking it all together in HubSpot.

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort putting together your pillar page and supporting content. Now is the time to promote it!

Email

Building an opt-in email database takes time and patience, but the results are worth it in open and click rates, as well as the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you aren’t spamming people.

A full email database of interested people is worth gold. Given that your new pillar page is full of amazing insights and recommendations, your email subscribers are going to want to know about it.

An email can be as simple as text saying, “We have this new resource,” or it can be a fancy HTML with CSS and pretty graphics (learn how to send an email in HubSpot). SmartBug often sees text emails perform better, so you should consider promoting the resource to your email list twice (spread out over a few weeks or a month), once in each format.

The email promoting SmartBug’s pillar page on Buyer Personas looked like this:

Social Media

Social media is simply unavoidable at this point in the game. HubSpot makes it easy to post on your favorite channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram (learn how to post on social media in HubSpot). Your audience and the channel will dictate tone, length, and number of posts.

You could just promote the pillar page, but ideally you should promote the pillar page and all the blog posts over time. You never know what specific topic will interest someone at a specific time.

Pro Tip: Have someone proofread your posts before they go out.

Pro Tip 2: SmartBug recommends the 60/30/10 rule when it comes to social media posting: 60 percent of your posts should be sharing other people’s content; 30 percent should be sharing your own; and 10 percent can be conversion attempts (demo requests, product pitches, and so on).

Pro Tip 3: To keep your social media posts fresh, consider extracting snippets from your pillar page to serve as interesting social media posts (think: stats, quotes, and so on).

Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. might be great places to post as well if your audience hangs out there. HubSpot doesn’t currently support these platforms, so you’ll need to do it old-school style.

Social Media Ads

If your social media blitz is going well, putting some advertising dollars behind it might be worthwhile. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have advertising options; however, Twitter and LinkedIn may be prohibitively expensive for a small test project.

To that end, try out a couple of Facebook ads and see how they do. Facebook gives you many great targeting options, and you can start with nearly any size budget.

Learn more about Facebook ads on their website: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads.

Pro Tip: If you notice a social media post performing well naturally, consider boosting to get it out in front of more people.

Link Building / Guest Posting

Link building can be a full-time job. Seriously. It’s part science and part art. You can spend hours working on it and only get one nibble that doesn’t pan out.

That being said, external links are super valuable and absolutely vital to your website. So, to stack the deck in your favor, try these tips:

1. Start with your partners. If the content you’ve created is valuable, they may be willing to link to it from their blog.
2. Include resources throughout your pillar page with links to other people’s content. After the pillar page is complete, ask those people to link back to the pillar page. Win-win!
3. Are there newsletters or blogs in your industry that would be interested in having a guest post that you would write (and link back to your pillar page)?

If you’re looking for more tips on how to attain inbound links, check out this HubSpot blog post.

If someone says yes to linking to your content, make sure to use unique tracking URLs for the links so that you can see where your pillar page traffic is coming from (learn how to create tracking URLs in HubSpot).

News Release

A news release is an easy win for links and traffic. SmartBug uses PR Newswire for news releases; there are many other wire distribution services, such as Businesswire, Marketwired, and PRWeb. Before you reach out to the media, take the time to prepare your electronic press kit.

To accurately attribute the traffic from the news source, make sure to create tracking URLs for every link in the release (which is usually two: one to the pillar page and one to your homepage).

Learn more about writing a great press release in this HubSpot blog post.

It’s often been said that creating the content is just one part of the battle—at least as much attention must be paid to promoting it. So put as much effort in the promotion as you can muster to get the best “bang for your buck.”

We’ll pick up the next post in this series with following up with leads generated by your pillar page. Or download the whole guide now.

If you need assistance growing a content marketing skillset, check out HubSpot Academy's Content Marketing Certification.