Image of content with a crown

Content Promotion Ideas: 30 Creative Examples of Companies Promoting Content

Our authors research and recommend the best products. Learn more about our process. We may receive a commission on purchases made from our links.

Like a lot of people, I really love examples of things as a means of learning. In-depth case study content is one of my favorite types to consume. I really enjoyed reading both Jon Cooper’s original post on creative link building and his follow up post.

Along those same lines, we asked 30 marketers to share an example of creative content promotion they’ve either observed or executed recently. Every example may not be a great fit for your business and your content, but hopefully some of the ideas will shake loose a great content promotion idea that hadn’t occurred to you yet.

“What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?”

See answers from the 30 marketers we talked to below:

Meet Our Panel of Marketing Experts:


Tom TreanorTom Treanor

Tom Treanor is the Director of Content Marketing and Social Media at Wrike, a leading SaaS project management and collaboration platform.

Creative content promotion starts with creative content…

At Wrike, we developed the infographic, “10 Reasons the Death Star Project Failed“, in order to trigger social sharing in all the typical sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – in addition to more niche sites like Pinterest, StumbleUpon and Reddit.

The infographic tied two themes together, project management and Star Wars, and successfully extended our brand’s reach online.


Markelle HardenMarkelle Harden

Markelle Harden is the Director of Content at Get A Copywriter, a copywriting services company for agencies and content marketers.

The most creative means of amplifying or promoting content that I’ve seen lately comes from…

The community at Inbound.org.

They’ve built a community for their audience, and prospects participate in the free forum. Moderators initiate Q&A sessions between industry leaders and other members of the forum, and it generates quite a buzz within the community. The moderators do an excellent job of promoting all of the participants on social media channels. If you’re a marketer and you’re looking for some social love, Inbound.org discussions are the place to be.


David SmithDavid Smith

David Smith is co-founder/co-creative leader of advertising agency, Immortology in Chapel Hill, N.C. Previously, Smith has been executive creative director of Carton Donofrio Partners, Baltimore, co-founder and chief creative officer of The Republik, Durham, N.C., and group creative director/senior partner at J. Walter Thompson’s flagship office in NY. His work has been reported on in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, LA Times, NewsMax, Adweek and Ad Age and featured on shows including Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, CMT and CNN/FN.

The key to getting content shared to going contagious is…

To begin with a surprising and hard-to-ignore concept. Given that, the rest will follow. In other words, the medium is not the message; the message is the message.

One example would be Dirt Devil’s Scarily Successful Exorcist Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGb8pMIeY6w. Dirt Devil wanted to market their vacuums to a new audience – men. To get the word out that Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners are supernaturally powerful, they created a video designed to get men’s attention. In an incredibly well-done spoof of the Exorcist, a screaming woman is sucked up to her ceiling and dragged across it back and forth by an oblivious elderly lady in the apartment above, vacuuming her floor with a Dirt Devil.

The video was seeded on international horror blogs, shown at horror film festivals and run on international TV shows with over 70% male demographics. With over 28 million views, the video has raised awareness of Dirt Devil among men by 39%.

A second example would be Turner Network Television’s (TNT) Dramatic Ambient Ad, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316AzLYfAzw.

TNT’s ambient extravaganza executed in a small-town square in Belgium is a riot – literally. Instead of creating a traditional ad, TNT’s European agency DGM, created a fully immersive brand experience to cleverly demonstrate their promise of We Know Drama. In a modern twist on a Candid Camera prank, the agency placed a large button and a sign that said Ĺ’Push To Add Drama. An unwitting man does and all hell breaks loose from a biking accident to a fistfight to a gunfight – all to the surprise, fear and delight of bystanders.

A link to the video was first uploaded on the creative director’s Twitter account and the video spread like wildfire around the creative community. Major media outlets picked it up from there and in less than a week it had amassed over 29 million view on YouTube, 3.8 million shares on Facebook and 120,000 tweets.

A third example would be Volkswagen’s Delightful Fun Theory Campaign, http://www.thefuntheory.com

DDB Stockholm created an absolutely brilliant campaign to change people’s perceptions about driving environmentally friendly cars. Turns out that a lot of Europeans are not so excited about driving small hybrid cars with underwhelming, under the hood performance. They’re perceived as boring. So boring in fact that all the gas savings and doing good things for the planet simply aren’t enough to get people to buy them.

Through a website, a contest and quirky but powerful ambient gameifications DDB set out to prove that doing good doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, it can be quite fun.

They installed a musical stairs in a metro station to prove more people will take the stairs if taking the stairs is more fun. They proved people will litter less when there are trashcans that have sound effects of crowds cheering when trash is thrown into them. They even got drivers to slow down by rewarding non-speeders with the chance to win big bucks through a lottery funded by speeding fines.

To spread the word, they created videos of the fun theory in action and sponsored a global contest with big prizes for those who submitted the best fun theory ideas.

For its efforts, VW grew its market share in eco friendly cars from 8% to 14.7%, an increase of 87%. Its sales of the Passat EcoFuel rose by a whopping 106%. Overall, Volkswagen Sweden raised their share of the auto market from 10% to 13%.


Matt FieldingMatt Fielding

Matt Fielding is SEO Manager at Bolton-based search marketing agency Bring Digital.

When it comes to the most creative means of amplifying or promoting content…

I’m a massive fan of using egobait to encourage influencers to share your content, thereby extending your own reach by exposing your content to an already-established audience. By including these well-known people in your content, mentioning their articles or quoting them, you increase the likelihood of that person sharing your content with their followers.

I recently updated an older post to mention a well-known marketing tool and tweeted the owner to let him know. He then became aware of the article and tweeted it to his followers, who included the organiser of a popular search marketing conference who contacted me to invite me to present at the event. As well as a huge spike in traffic and social media shares, I gained real-world exposure from appearing at such a prestigious event.


Kate ProykovaKate Proykova

Kate Proykova is Managing Director of Hop Online, an SEO and Content Marketing Agency. Before joining Hop Online in the summer of 2012, Kate was part of the success of SiteGround.com, one of the top Web hosting brands. Long before Google Panda and Penguin Updates we launched, the SiteGround team was investing in a long-term content marketing strategy which paid off huge.

We’ve launched hundreds of Content campaigns and I’d share here some best practices for content promotion:

  • Quote or mention someone — it could be a company or a person and reach out to them when the post is published. They will be happy to share the post.
  • Write something controversial or negative — people tend to comment when disagree with you much more than when they like your post.
  • Use great custom visuals — people love to share great images and if you customize them properly, you’ll get your message spread.


Kevin CullenKevin Cullen

Kevin Cullen is Creative Director at Ulysses Media, a boutique public relations agency with clients in financial services, technology, non-profit, and entertainment. Kevin has spent the majority of his career in senior marketing, communications, and public relations roles for global firms in financial technology.

One of the more clever uses of content marketing promotion that I’ve seen is…

A campaign created by Thompson Reuters a few years back.

TR had just revamped one of their data products and had just hired a Subject Matter Expert to run the business. At a global industry event, they distributed postcards within the conference welcome packet, simply stating something to the extent of “Do you need to know the effect of today’s announced corporate actions on your portfolios? Do you need to know the exposure risks of the underlying securities in your derivative products? No. You just need to know Paul.” The postcard had web site information for the appropriate product sheet pages. In addition, an associated social media campaign ran in parallel, on LinkedIn and Twitter, with links back to TR’s product pages.

It was quite clever in that if you knew Paul – as many of us did – who is a very well respected as well as a very affable guy, you not only immediately felt you were being let in on the inside joke but you also realized that TR was very serious about this product. For those who did not know Paul, I expect that at the very least their interest was peaked. They probably also wondered if their own operations team were looking into these issues. Now they at least had a single name – only a first name, in fact – with whom to follow up.

I obviously do not have access to TR’s specific ROI metrics on this but I can state that sales of the product increased and that they surpassed their targeted annual quota for it.

I thought this was at once a simple and powerful use of content marketing promotion. I just wish I had thought of it.


Sandip SekhonSandip Sekhon

Sandip Sekhon is the CEO & Founder of crowdfunding website GoGetFunding.com – ranked by Forbes as one of the top fundraising sites in the world.

A creative and more importantly, the most successful content marketing strategy we’ve used is…

To look at the most popular content of competitors / industry news sites.

We then create a better or updated version of that post. Next, we move onto promotion and this is where analyzing the competitor post really comes in handy. We see who shared the original post and let them know about ours.

We also use tools such as Majestic SEO to see who has linked to the original post so that we can reach out to them too. This really seems to be an underutilized strategy that works brilliantly.


Megan BozmanMegan Bozman

Megan Bozman is Director of Marketing at Verne Global. Megan is responsible for creating content and messaging as well as market research and analysis. Over the past fifteen years, Megan has held roles in product marketing, content marketing, and sales for various B2B technology companies.

One of the most creative and memorable content promotion pieces for me was…

Verne Global’s “The Green Data Center Problem” animated video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBRStNUyIA4.

The exciting part about this was that it’s an animated video that has humor, but yet it still tells the story of what the problem is and how Verne Global solves it.

The video was developed to highlight the issues surrounding traditional data centers, including the rising cost and unpredictability of the power supply, as well as the increased carbon emissions-and bring awareness to the impact that data centers are having on global climate change and how carbon-free alternatives are becoming available.

The video also brings light to the alternative solution offered by Verne Global, an innovative developer of energy efficient data center campuses, including the industry’s first 100% dual sourced, renewably powered data center in Keflavik, Iceland.


Corey BarnettCorey Barnett

Corey Barnett is the Founder of Cleverly Engaged Marketing, helping local Texas
businesses and agencies connect with their audience online.

The most creative means of amplifying or promoting content that I’ve seen starts with…

Creating Content That Promotes Dialogue.

Yes, you can buy Facebook advertising and pay for content promotion on outbrain, but if you simply create content that connects with your audience and encourages a dialogue, you’ll find success.

I’ve used this technique myself. Case in point, I had a local insurance client in a small city of Lubbock, TX. Instead of talking about insurance (something too many other brands do is talk about themselves and their services by the way), I wrote an article about the city where the client was located.

Here it is: http://hettlerinsurance.com/2015/02/05/top-reasons-lubbock-best-place-live-2015-2/

It was something simple about the top reasons to live in Lubbock, but it earned 500+ shares on Facebook, and lead to several clients. Because it was a long form blog post and the first to connect with an audience it also increased the average time on site from 3 minutes to 7 minutes!

The reason it was effective, is because the audience (those who live in Lubbock) are often sour about living in Lubbock while several are passionate about being here! There’s truly this divide on the topic and it played out on the client’s Facebook post, with over 70 comments, people either defended the city or argued why it wasn’t a great place to live.

Applying this technique can work for many other companies and brands, it’s just that most are afraid to!


Paul SalvaggioPaul Salvaggio

Paul Salvaggio is VP of Marketing and Operations at digital marketing agency, Backbone Media, Inc.

What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?…

We just completed a 6 month marketing campaign that focused on mega-content production and amplification of content. We embarked on this campaign naturally to drive visitors to our site and generate leads. However we also wanted to experiment on different ways to create and amplify content and feel our methodology and amplification strategy was exceptionally creative.

Here is our rationale, methodology and amplification, results, takeaways:

RATIONALE:

For many of us, writing down our professional thoughts for the world to read and judge is painfully time consuming. In fact, I find many of our technology, manufacturing, bioscience and software clients refuse to even write at all. Think about it. Asking a busy engineer to be a part-time journalist is like asking a pig to fly. It just will not happen. The problem, however, is that the most interesting and engaging content lives with these thought leaders-your executives, engineers, partners, brand advocates, and customers. In terms of amplifying content, this is the very content your target audiences want to share most. The question becomes: how do you tap into this goldmine of content?

METHODOLOGY:

Here was our solution: Leverage a thought leader’s most accessible skill-talking-to produce large amounts of cross-media marketing assets (video, blog post, Slideshare, image quotes, tweets, linkedin post, pinterest pin, Facebook post) which we call mega-content.

AMPLIFICATION:

Although we did launch a press release and budgeted for a small amount of paid advertising, our promotion strategy relied heavily on the influencers socializing the content to their own networks. To increase the odds, my team developed a promotion packet for each thought leader with links to their video and transcripts, suggested tweets, a sample blog post, and links to social collateral like a SlideShare and a Pinterest pin. As a result, the majority of thought leaders shared the content on multiple channels. A few thought leaders also blogged about the initiative and Jay Baer actually likened it to “harvesting” which I thought was a great way to describe our efforts. His post “Capture Content First Format Content Late” continues to drive qualified traffic to the site.

RESULTS:

  • Traffic to our website more than doubled throughout the six month period.
  • Subscribers to our email list more than doubled.
  • Quality of subscribers improved and included more corporate emails.
  • Leads generated increased 250% as a result of this initiative including a handful of referrals from the participants themselves.
  • Quality of leads improved and included more corporate emails and phone numbers.
  • A new mega-content production service debuted on the heels of my operation team’s successful execution of this initiative – http://JustTalkB2B.com

TAKEAWAYS:

  • Get the information out of the heads of the people in your organization first via a recorded phone call and then reformat it into cross-media assets like blog posts, podcasts, videos, SlideShares, content apps, and so forth.
  • When creating a content strategy, Align with thought leaders, partners, customers and employees who have a relatively strong network and influence to optimize amplification.


Bojana IlicBojana Ilic

Bojana Ilic is Marketing Coordinator at Humanity, Inc., a business management software company.

What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?…

Many of our clients come from the retail and hospitality verticals, so for Valentine’s Day we created an interesting infographic about how this holiday impacts those industries. In order to promote our content and gather leads, we made a dedicated landing page, where visitors could download the infographic and sign up for a $100 amazon gift card giveaway contest we were running to promote the infographic and get leads.

We also reached out to retail and restaurant associations to let them know that we had created a piece of content highly relevant to their readers.

Submitting the infographic to various infographic-dedicated websites is a great way to promote your piece, as many of them will publish relevant, high-quality content.

All in all, this program gave us more than six times the social media shares of any other article or material we created in the past, while helping us to get more than 300 new leads in the process.


Maciej FitaMaciej Fita

Maciej Fita is the Managing Director of Brandignity, a full service internet marketing company.

I have two examples of really creative content promotion that have really stuck in my mind for years now..

1. Dollar Shave Club Video: This video cost them $4500 dollars and single handily drove in millions in revenue and put them at the top as a premier shave blade provider. The video itself changed the game for them.

2. Grasshopper Phone Service: Back in 2009 (I believe) I received a chocolate covered grasshopper in the mail. It made me instantly check out the company. I’ve been a customer for 5 years now just from that grasshopper.


Justin KerbyJustin Kerby

Justin Kerby is a Co-Founder of Cave Social, a digital marketing agency with offices in Fort Lauderdale and Toronto. He specializes in search engine optimization, content marketing, and media buying.

We’re always looking for new ways to promote content here at Cave Social, and one of the more creative tools we’ve used to promote content is…

Wistia.

Wistia is a video player that gives marketers the ability to customize their video – for our clients, we often will put a call to action at the end of the video to receive a free e-book, article, or blog post. By placing aesthetically pleasing calls to action at the end of our videos, we can promote new content to relevant viewers.


Donna ChildressDonna Childress

Donna Childress is a Writer and Communications Strategist at Yoko.co, a Website Design Firm and Tactical Interactive Agency based near Washington DC, and also the founder of Childress Communications LLC. Previously, she was an editor for highly targeted direct marketing e-mails for 9 million subscribers at LifeMinders, Inc. and a writer and webmaster for Jaffe Associates and its national law firm clients. Her work has served AARP, American Forest Foundation, National Confectioners Association, National Council on Aging, National Association for Area Agencies on Aging, U.S. Department of the Navy, and many others.

What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?…

The Republic of Tea has a Tea 101 email series that sings on execution. It walks through types of teas, how to steep a hot cup, etc., with beautiful photography and delicate artwork that bring to mind the relaxation and taste of tea.


Peter MoellerPeter Moeller

Peter Moeller is the Director of Marketing for Scarinci Hollenbeck, a 5 office 55 attorney law firm in NY/NJ/DC. He is the key driver of firm marketing initiatives including the implementation of a full scale web 2.0 lead generation platform. He leads a marketing team, vendors, and technology to drive business growth and increase brand awareness.

My experience with content marketing always had to be creative, because I am in an industry most people probably don’t want to read about – “Law”. Here is an example of creative content promotion that we worked on…

When I began our content marketing strategy, we implemented a very large scale offensive attack on the internet – We created 8 websites took on 3 columns and started pumping out around 150 pieces of content a month. It was argues. I was lucky enough to be in a department that provided me an adequate budget to complete some of the tasks at hand, but being an entrepreneur and a gorilla marketer at heart, I knew other than paid sponsorships, I had to figure out a way to propel our content out to the masses.

We created a massive “free” social media campaign that spanned every known social platform for both the public and specific to the legal community. I forced our 50+ attorneys to turn over their social “profiles” to me and allow me to run them. We had hundreds of accounts that we would share and promote our content with. All the while we were building relationships, connecting to new people, and driving a social brand awareness to our practice.

The effort changed the perception to our firm, it has solidified our web presence as a leader and it now allows us to shift gears and promote material to thousands of people connected to us with a few processes. It has garnered great feedback from existing clients, adds value to potential clients and has brought in dozens of random clients we would have otherwise never been exposed too.


Kathryn LagdenKathryn Lagden

Kathryn Lagden is a Digital Strategist with 15+ years’ experience managing online operations, digital marketing, and social media for various clients and companies. Kathryn is an active member of her school’s parent council and blogs at Home Room Mom.

One creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content that we do is…

We create summary posts that incorporates content from across the web, including our own, to help room parents plan and organize class parties. We always get permission to include images in our summary posts, this starts the relationship with other sites and bloggers.

After we publish the post we follow up with a personal email to each person letting them know the post is up and inviting them to share it with their audience. Being genuine, courteous, and simply asking for the share is often all it takes to amplify our summary posts and get them shared beyond our own community. We also share on social channels with a shout out to folks we included in the summary.


Brad HinesBrad Hines

Brad Hines is a Digital marketing strategist, Writer, and Founder of HungryKids.org, a not for profit grassroots organization dedicated to raising awareness for world hunger and poverty relief.

One of the best tried and true content marketing methods is to…

Offer users a tool, or an infographic even, of quality information, where in order to use it, the viewer is incentivized to share it.

This is where growth hacking meets content marketing. For example, there is a tool I like for unfollowing people on Twitter called Manage Flitter. When you joined, you are automatically following their own Twitter account. Most people are okay with this as they just got use from them back.


Alexander RuggieAlexander Ruggie

Alexander Ruggie is the PR Director for 911 Restoration, a home restoration company that specializes in disaster recovery solutions while providing homeowners with a fresh start.

Normally I would take an opportunity like this to promote something that my company has done, but in truth, my favorite piece of marketing ever is…

The Red Bull Space Jump. It truly exemplifies their “gives you wings” advertising in a way that entertains, inspires, and strikes awe into everyone from the kid who wants to be an astronaut to actual astronauts.

This stunt, broke records at the same time as breaking our traditional concept of what marketing can really be in a way that won’t be forgotten for viewers, Felix Baumgartner, or Red Bull for a very long time.


Mansi GoelMansi Goel

Mansi Goel is the Chief Content strategist for Digital Marketing Firm, WiseCalvin.com.

What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?…

We have a sister company, WorkoutTrends.com, where we all health enthusiasts write on health and fitness. Through trial and errors, we found out that visual content (images, videos, gifs, infographics ) fetched us far more visibility and loyal user base than any quality of text content.

Once, we realized that, we focused our energies on infographics and the result was more than 10k shares on one infographic !!! Here is the link to that infographic (http://workouttrends.com/nurse-night-shift-burnout). We have a traffic of close to a million visitors monthly mainly because of the workout videos we offer on our blog.

How we achieved this?

Any great content marketer knows that the trick to get your content the relevant exposure is to serve it to the right audience, at the right time, in the right format. We did just that.

Format, we kept it more of visual and interactive. Audience, we fished deep on every social network and forum to select those that are passionate about health and are actually info-mongerers. Once we found out the places where our audience hung out, all we did was sync our watches with theirs and schedule the posts accordingly.

All this while, we made sure that the copy of the post was as inquisitive as possible to engage and generate curiosity.


Zach HammerZach Hammer

Zach Hammer is the Marketing Director of The Snyder Group: Team Driven Real Estate, a team of Real Estate professionals specializing in all aspects of the Las Vegas residential market.

The most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content I’ve seen is…

Through content upgrades.

The basic idea is that you’re leveraging the targeted audience of “people who are reading this article” to promote the post in exchange for an upgraded aspect of the article.

The upgrades can be as simple as a checklist based on the post, a swipe file of examples, a pdf version of the post, and infographic, etc… Anything that takes that exact article, one step further.

People can then get access to that bonus by Tweeting the article or sharing on facebook. The Service Paywithatweet.com makes this super simple.

In our industry, https://placester.com is doing a great job with these types of content upgrades on their blog.


Dan ScalcoDan Scalco

Dan Scalco is the owner of Digitalux, a digital marketing company in Hoboken, NJ that specializes in SEO and content marketing.

One of the most creative means of content promotion that I see often but rarely hear people talk about is…

Community engagement on forums, specifically Reddit.

Reddit is a great place to host an “Ask Me Anything” (reddit.com/r/ama) whereby the community can ask you questions on a variety of questions (what you do, your business, etc). I suggest going to sub-reddits (the name for the various communities that make up reddit) that pertain to what you are trying to promote and asking the moderators of that community if they would be open to letting you host an AMA. If you’re a dermatologist, try http://www.reddit.com/r/skincareaddiction. If you’re a social media expert, try http://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia. There’s a sub-reddit for everything!

When your AMA is live, let the content you are promoting come second to the questions you’re answering. Only “plug” your content when it is natural to the conversation you are having.

My favorite example of this strategy in use is how the CEO of CreditKarma.com hosted his AMA – polite, courteous, and answered every question honestly.


Paula ConwayPaula Conway

Paula Conway is the Founder and President of Astonish Media Group, a strategic media company based in New York City. She is also an author and journalist.

We create content for many partners, including American Airlines Asia and the New York Daily News. We also create content for our own clients on a daily basis, using the media to leverage the content regularly, so we are experts in this area. Here’s my favorite example of creative content promotion…

We recently provided this article, bylined by our client, 5 Critical Tips for Growing Your Social Media Fan Base. Once published here, we sent it out widely to bloggers and editors. It then appeared in 16 separate publications (and still counting) including the Nashville Business Journal, Tennessee State News, Gremln.com, and Social Times.

We then used this entrance with Social Times to get this article published about the client’s new social media website, Sqeeqee.com. The relationship includes providing relevant content, building your client as an expert, building media trust, and knowing which content to move out, and when. To this point, we are still getting placements on the “5 Critical Tips for Growing Your Social Media Fan Base”and consumers are still commenting to the article about Social Networthing. This is amplification.

This equals two pieces of relevant content from one source body that is still working to get more content placements.


Michael EpsteinMichael Epstein

Michael Epstein is a successful CEO turned Online Marketing, Web Development & Business Strategy Consultant at GetOnlineWithMe.com.

One great creative content promotion example I have was with my previous company…

We turned unique content into a press-release format and ended up getting significant coverage. We might put a fun or interesting twist on one of our products and document it in a blog style article, but then promote the post with a press release.

One example was for one of our products we created which was a mouse pad with a Teflon surface for really smooth movement. Around the 4th of July, we created a post showing us using the mouse pad to grill hamburgers on an outdoor grill. It was a fun way to demonstrate how the surface was so slick. We then created a press release for the article talking about how we used a mouse pad to grill hamburgers for a 4th of July BBQ. We ended up some great press in large industry publications which generated backlinks, traffic and direct sales. It was like doing outreach, but in a slightly different format that catered towards news publications.


Kyle ReyesKyle Reyes

Kyle Reyes is the President and Creative Director of The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique marketing firm focused on helping your business grow in the digital age.

The most creative means of amplifying or promoting content that I’ve seen is the use of…

Facebook targeted ads and dark posts to promote content.

The brands that use this tactic allocate a small budget to a piece that they know will have a high level of engagement once people are exposed to it…then they serve it up to an extremely targeted demographic and encourage engagement.

For example, they launched a video for one of the orthodontists they work with. They were opening a third location so they shot a really quick “construction” piece with the owner, her husband and her kids. They allocated a $50 budget towards a highly targeted demographic. People started engaging with it like crazy, and within two days they reached well over 26,000 people.


Kindra FosterKindra Foster

Kindra Foster is the President and CEO of Foster Executive Writing & Editing, LLC., a multi-industry, multi-medium writing and editing firm.

Surprisingly, the amount of traffic to my blog entries exploded when I began…

Listing a short tantalizing clip from the blog below my email signature.

I tried it on a whim, and it turned out to be one of my most successful promotions. It will only work if you send a lot of email to a lot of people. Companies can require attachment to all employee email. One of the benefits is that you are promoting to people who already know you, so the length of the read tends to be longer. And of course the blogs have to be good. 🙂


David ProchaskaDavid Prochaska

David Prochaska is the Founder of MarketRiser, an online resource for online business, internet marketing, and entrepreneurship, and Digital Marketing Director at Fidelitas Development. He believes in helping others provide value to the internet through content marketing.

One of the most creative examples I’ve seen of content promotion is…

The app that Charmin created called Sit or Squat.

The way Charmin amplifies their brand is genius. Everyone has been on the go and needed to use the restroom. Every time someone opens the app to see where a clean restroom is, they are shown the Charmin brand. It’s the ultimate top of mind awareness campaign.


Edd WilsonEdd Wilson

Edd Wilson is the Digital Account Manager at Impression, a digital marketing agency based in Nottingham that delivers outstanding SEO, PR, PPC, web design and mobile marketing campaigns for clients.

We’ve done a lot of great content marketing projects for some of our clients in the past 6 months. Here are a couple of examples that stand out…

*Movement of Data*
http://www.akita.co.uk/movement-of-data/

We created this content for our IT support client and the concept is to explain how data travels around the world in a visual way. This piece got featured on Hubspot along with many other popular publications, we also managed to get a lot of social for this piece.

*Water Softening Guide*
https://www.harveywatersofteners.co.uk/water-softening-consumers-guide

This long form content piece is based around the explanation of hard/soft water a long with the health benefits. We believe the main feature of this piece is the interactive map which allows the audience to see if they have hard water in their area. We’ve recently been in touch with a lot of beauty publications and authors due the impact that hard water has on skin and hair.

We have also been speaking to companies with hard water related products. This would add a totally different angle for the promotion of the campaign. Overall, we really like the idea of the tool helping people with their research.


Jaime NetzerJaime Netzer

Jaime Netzer is a nationally published journalist and is also Content Editor at The Zebra, where she helms the insurance industry publication Quoted.

What is the most creative means of amplifying or promoting a piece of content you’ve seen companies use (or have used yourself)?…

I think creativity in content promotion often stems from originality of ideas first. We’re a digital car insurance agency—like a Kayak for car insurance—and it’s always a challenge for us to brainstorm exciting content in an area that, frankly, most consumers would rather not think about. But this is where creativity is key for our marketing department.

My coworker recently had the idea to conduct an experiment of sorts: He gave up his car for a month and relied only on ridesharing instead. The goal was exploratory: We wanted to see what it felt like on a day-to-day basis to live without a car. He ended up saving money and learning a lot about what a mess insurance is for rideshare drivers—a perfect tie-in for us.

After the month was up, we wrote a post, “Uber vs. Lyft: 5 Things I Learned About Giving Up My Car“, summarizing what we’d found. Confident in the strength of the post, we used a multi-pronged approach to promote it. We knew that we had, for all intents and purposes,*created* news, and that the idea was relevant from multiple angles to journalists: There was the local angle, the insurance angle, and the human interest angle. We pitched all three, individually, to curated lists of press contacts we spent weeks building.

The results were impressive: We had TV mentions on stations in Houston and Austin, features in the most relevant business publications, including Insurance Business America and Insurance Journal. Because we’d invested time and resources into making a compelling summary of the experiment, had several publications, including Business Insider, simply republish the piece whole. The end result was more than 100k views and counting of the story, and many hundreds of social shares.

To understand how to promote a story, we tried to think hard about what might actually be compelling for a journalist or reader, and to pitch the idea that way.


Yaniv NavotYaniv Navot

Yaniv Navot is the Performance Marketing Director at Dynamic Yield, a leading SaaS-based solutions for real-time website personalization and optimization. Yaniv is an experienced search marketing expert, with a focus on web analytics and conversion optimization.

One of the most creative (and effective) means of amplifying a piece of content is to…

Think global and prepare a content marketing strategy for multilingual distribution.

Getting the content professionally translated is just one strategy to choose from, but here’s another direction to consider: Reach out to relevant blogs and outlets in foreign languages, which are highly aligned to the subject you’re writing about. Offer them to translate your content and republish it on their website. The power of translated content can get you massive traffic spikes, conversions, global brand awareness and let’s not forget the valuable SEO values.

As an example, here is an article that was originally published on the Dynamic Yield’s digital marketing blog: 5 Reasons Why I Stopped Following A/B Testing Case Studies. The article was translated and republished on the Russian website Siliconrus.com. The entire translation was done by the mother tongue Russian journalists at Siliconrus, with zero budget from our side. As a result, we got some nice, targeted traffic and even a few interesting leads.


Neha MittalNeha Mittal

Neha Mittal is the Head of Strategy and Business Development at Arrow Devices, a leading provider of verification IPs, validation solutions and debug tools to SOC and ASIC companies worldwide.

Typically the following steps help any content get maximum leverage for us…

  • Step 1: Look at previous blog posts, and analyse what type of posts have got maximum page visits – from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. Also check for which ones got the maximum back links. You will see a trend /theme coming out for sure.
  • Step 2: Plan more content around that theme.
  • Step 3: Post it on Social Media and ask your employees/ friends to share/retweet and like/favourite your content.
  • Step 4: Write to websites that have previously shade your posts, and tell them about your new post.
Tom Demers
Tom has over ten years of experience in search engine marketing, including as the Director of Marketing for search marketing software provider WordStream, Inc. Prior to working at WordStream, he was an in-house SEO specialist and SEO Manager, worked as an SEO consultant for a search engine marketing agency, and has done independent organic and paid search engine marketing consulting for numerous clients. Tom lives about a half hour outside of Boston. You can get in touch with Tom via Email at tom at MeasuredSEM dot com, or you can follow him on Twitter @TomDemers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *