There is so much content out there, now that Google has made the creation of quality content mandatory for high rankings. It means that creating great content solves only half the problem; the real job is getting that content noticed by the right audience at the appropriate time, which is extremely important if a business will achieve its goals.
Content amplification is that arm of content marketing that is concerned with pushing blogs, articles, infographics, web pages and other content/messaging onto discovery platforms.
These platforms include social media sites and other high –traffic networks, where your target audience will be attracted by your headlines, come to consume your content and hopefully convert to help you achieve business goals.
Benefits of content amplification tools
Content amplification spells huge benefits for everyone involved. The following are just a few examples:
- For marketers: providing something valuable to your target audience enables a marketer to unobtrusively develop meaningful relationships/engagement with the audience, which results in higher ROI than conventional advertising.
- For consumers: Effective content amplification places the consumer at the center of control regarding what he/she chooses to consume while simultaneously adding value and addressing their daily issues.
- For businesses: Engaging unobtrusively with consumers by solving real-life issues through high-quality content is a great way to build brand awareness, attract links and hence increase traffic and conversions rates that will ultimately improve revenue generation.
Why should you care about content amplification?
The first step of learning effective content amplification is accepting these hard realities:
Your content is not special
Yes, you’re creating excellent, in-depth, well-articulated content, but so are a billion other sites on the Internet. No matter how good it is, you’ll need active promotion to get your work before the audience that matters. Consider this: in just 24 hours, there are over 4B new Facebook posts, almost 500K new WordPress posts, over 100K hours of new YouTube feeds and over 144.8 B new posts.
Great content does NOT promote itself on merit; this is the greatest fallacy in content marketing.
You are not special
Unless you are Justin Bieber, Buzzfeed, Wall Street Journal or The Oatmeal, you don’t have a drone of audience hanging onto your every word – unless you worked to do that. Unless you have the kind of following, reputation and resources that they have, you won’t get too far with just push-publishing.
The ugly truth is that people care about who wrote a piece, even more than the piece itself. That’s why even terrible content from the right influencer can spread like a bushfire. But for the rest of us, you have to work extra hard to build trust and credibility before your content has a chance of pushing itself.
Sharing is the least of your goals
Unless you are in the content business, share numbers are not your goal. Your goals begin with what happens after the content is shared – leads, links, subscriptions, brand awareness, sales, etc. Ultimately, you want to ensure you content is not just reaching a mass of people, but rather a mass of the right people. For that, you need active, strategic promotion.
Introduction to Content Creation
The foundation of content amplification is content creation. The first step is to work in creating great, targeted, relevant and value-adding content that will be the basis of your content amplification strategies.
Types of content
There are many types of content you can write, and you need to delve into as many different types as you can to cater to a wider demographic, even within your target audience segment. You don’t have to do all at once, but you should be afraid to venture into a new field just because they’re new to you. Create a schedule to plan how often you will churn out different types, and stick to it to add spice and variety to your blog.
Below are just a few examples of these:
- Infographics – this is a visual representation of data/information, and it is very popular across the board since it condenses a lot of information into simple, interpretable figures and stats. Infographics are shared up to three times as often other content types.
- Memes – these are easy to make, hilarious and have huge potential for virality. However, they’re more geared towards a social audience rather than for your blog.
- Videos and podcasts– there’s a host of choice on video content, but the key is to ensure the video is of good quality and delivered succinctly and memorably. Videos can be exceptionally persuasive if done well.
- Guides and how-to’s – in-depth, detailed, practical piece with text and relevant images. Visual elements are important to enhance the comprehensibility of this type of content.
- Book and product reviews – opinion pieces on various books and products that people in your niche would be interested in. Share both good and bad aspects, and why they made it to your list, which gives a better understanding of you and humanizes you before the audience.
- Opinion posts (rants) – these are extremely effective in building discussions and engagement, but they must be used very carefully. Ensure comprehensive research to avoid putting your foot in your mouth and losing credibility with the audience.
Useful tools and resources for content creation
Creating content doesn’t have to be as taxing anymore; there are many ways, tools and resources to get high-quality content without breaking your back. These content amplification tools can also help when working on visual-based content, which is where most people have a major problem.
For research
- Google Drive Research Tool – helps you conduct Google search while on your Google Drive window.
- Site:search – this is a Google search option that limits only to specific websites. The site search formula is “ site:domainexample.com [search query] ”
- Google Search Console – formerly Google Webmaster Tools, GSC is helpful for data augmentation related to SEO and keyword research.
For writing and editing
- Evernote – the free version is extremely helpful for everything from the creation of to-do lists to writing entire article content and editing. It’s also available as an app for mobile allowing you to sync work across devices.
- Word2CleanHTML – useful for those who create drafts on Word and other word-processing software rather than the CMS. This tool helps filter and fix those little quacks that happen on HTML when content is copied from external sources into the CMS window.
- Grammarly and Correctica – apart from human editors, you need a grammar tool to triple-check your content prior to publishing. Both tools are free, and Grammarly can even check for plagiarism.
- Write My Essay – dedicated to providing all services related to content creation, in case you want to outsource content creation rather than do it yourself.
25 Tools and Resources to Make Content Amplification much easier
Once you have your high-quality content, you are now ready to embark on content amplification. Below are 25 tools and resources you can use to get your content noticed by the right eyes:
- Contently
Contently is a content creation, optimization and distribution company in New York City. You can use the expertise of more than 30,000 content specialists to move your content through paid distribution, email, and social media channels. Contently is trusted by a few major brands, including American Express and General Electric.
- Buzzstream
Buzzstream is a software suite specially designed for B2B content marketing specialists, and it enables content amplification via social media, PR, and link acquisition. It is popularly used by both large and small businesses to jumpstart outreach, build credibility and track communications throughout online platforms.
- Cision
The content marketing suite by Cision is intended for top tier websites with engaged audiences to drive traffic to content and increase brand exposure. It’s an easy-to-use tool for PR campaign strategy enhancement. B2B marketing teams can use this tool to reach the largest audience possible by targeting channels frequented by potential customers.
- Edgar
The Edgar app is intended to offer optimized visibility for businesses’ posts on social media. Given that most updates will only be seen by a fraction of your followers, Edgar app is set to automatically repost archived content, and it uses algorithmic analysis to schedule update posting at the most optimal high-traffic times.
- Buffer
Buffer is a tool for social media management and is popular as an easy tool to maintain the freshness of your LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter profiles and share content on these platforms. Using Buffer, you can set times for your social media posts, which enables you to post at the optimal times for your followers located across different time zones.
- OnePress Social Locker
This is a WordPress plugin that is set up such that viewers can access full content only after they have shared it on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. For otherwise engaged audiences, you can use OnePress on select posts. It is an easy-to-install plugin that is very affordable – just $24 – even for startups.
- Outbrain
Outbrain is a convenient traffic-driving tool that enables content promotion by embedding links with high-authority publishing sites. Each time you browse the web, you’re likely to encounter something from Outbrain. It’s simple to sign up, all you need is to commit a specific budgetary allocation and leave the work to Outbrain.
- Storify
This tool helps you to collect content from social media, pages and blogs throughout the web into a single location. It also makes content viewer-friendly and connects you to related, story-worthy sources while you’re creating content. There’s a free and Business Pro version, the latter with enhanced privacy, customization and support options.
- Listly
Listly is very useful to advertising your content by sharing, publishing and planting lists to help viewers gain quick access to relevant and related information and links (your own included). It is a widely held resource for content marketers, mostly for its ability to link audiences with relevant, interesting information.
- PR Newswire
PR Newswire is particularly intended for the newsworthy content, being a high-authority news source. It offers subscribers up-to-minute videos, press releases, audio and images to help them stay current. Also, it is useful for content distribution and to boost the social visibility of updates and scheduled content.
- Taboola
This is a content discovery tool intended to recommend your content to high-authority/quality, related third-party websites. When the visitor clicks on your content, it will be viewed through YouTube, social media, your site or another third party site. It also includes analytics and free resources for campaign optimization, performance stats as well as one-on-one support to enable business goal achievement.
- Gravity
Another content distribution tool intended to create a personalized web experience for visitors. This is done using their Interest Graph technology, which organizes content according to relatable interests. It analyses your content and only shows it to interest readers in the form of personalized endorsements. They also have free browser extensions for readers who recommend your content as they interact with other parts of the web.
- Zemanta
A tool that enables automated aggregation and indexing of your content, which is then distributed in the form of in-stream ads, promoted recommendations, sponsored content and in-text links in select, quality third-party sites. It includes a dashboard with analytics on performance and efficacy of your content and match content display with viewer interests.
- SimpleReach
This tool enables content distribution and measurement. Their analytics tools offer insights into real-time content performance, with predictive tools to determine which are likely to perform best. Real-time reporting and prediction enables you to know in advance which content is likely to drive highest engagement and traffic, so you can focus on those.
- Triberr
It’s a social network of influencers and blogger, grouped according to interests. Members join and can share content with the group to drive social shares and comments. There are both free and premium options, the latter allowing access to more features and larger tribes. It includes features for Influencer Marketing campaigns.
- GaggleAmp
A social media marketing tools which helps content distribution with your key players i.e. customers, employees and partners. A group is gathered and they agree to share company-originated content within their social accounts. It also offers powerful social activity analytics, including ROI information on traffic, engagement and revenue generation.
- Zapier
Zapier provides a single platform that connects all your web apps, where you can automate and coordinate tasks. Over 300 aps are supported, and then you can set up automated events and triggers (called Zaps). The dashboard allows you to monitor activity and manage all your apps. It can also be applied for content distribution, given that it includes most popular social networks and CMSes.
- AddThis
AddThis gives website administrators a chance to build traffic by making it simpler for user to share content. It provides for increased audience engagement with users not on the site, and allows content distribution on most social networks and third party platforms.
- ShareThis
It’s a comprehensive solution that allows site users to share content with their networks through a number of channels, including email, IM, SMS and social media. It also provides insights and real-time analytics for social intelligence needed by content publishers, developers and brands.
Through its publishing platform, LinkedIn allows marketing teams to post content to the site, which posts are useful in increasing traffic to the brands social media profiles and official sites. Companies on LinkedIn can maintain blogs on the site to create a strong signal as industry leaders.
- Facebook Ads
Facebook ads on average reach 91.3% of your target audience, unlike other online ad campaigns, which means you’re getting a good deal for your investment. Ads may be targeted according to demographical characteristics, location and interests among other options.
These tweets are deployed to potential followers and current fans of the brand. You need to have compelling content, which will be shot at the right audience using a variety of filtering options on Twitter. Targeted users receive the tweets on their timelines.
- MailChimp
A free/premium email marketing/web-based platform that enables content sharing through email newsletters. There are pre-designed templates for newsletter creation making it easier to use. It can be integrated with WordPress and Twitter to enable you build email lists throughout the web. Also includes tracking and metric analytics capabilities.
- Hootsuite
This free/premium social network dashboard enables management of multiple social platforms and profiles and measures performance of content shared to the various platforms. All major networks are supported with provisions for additional integration with other networks through their HootSuite App Directory.
Conclusion
You are now armed with all the tricks and tips to create and sell high-quality content. Go forth and be great!
The post 25 Content Amplification Tools for Marketing Professionals appeared first on Ron Sela.
by Kenneth Waldman
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25 Content Amplification Tools for Marketing Professionals
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