For any content campaign you launch, you need to make sure your content is great, that it targets the audience you’re trying to reach, and has messages that drive the audience to action. After that, promotion and engagement are the most important parts of the campaign. A strong promotion strategy will keep your campaign top of mind for your audience, and generate more traffic and leads.

Promotion involves publishing, monitoring content for engagement by your community, and engaging with the community to answer questions and build relationships.

We have a separate article about how and where to promote your content, but one daunting issue for many marketing teams is that content promotion, monitoring, and community engagement are three tasks that can take a lot of time. Consistency is key, when you’re planning your marketing campaign, you need to create a plan that works for your brand and your team. In this article, we’ll share 11 tips for creating a marketing plan that works for your brand.

Tools: Trading Money for Time

There are lots of tools that can save you time. Many of the tools that do this well cost money, some can be very costly at $100 per month or more. These tools automate publication, promotion and monitoring. Some also help you automate engagement, which we don’t recommend.

If you don’t feel you have enough time to perform the tasks in the promotion and engagement strategy you’re developing, look into tools that can help. We’ll list some we like in each of the sections below. 

TIP: Since tools cost money, and subscription fees can create budget stress, work up a return on investment cost justification. Calculate the hours you’re currently spending or anticipate spending on tasks multiplied by your hourly rate to find out costs without tools. Then explain how much time the tool will save performing those tasks. Follow that by explaining what value you’ll add with the hours saved by having the tool. Finally, look at tool features and include new opportunity benefits in your justification. For example, dedicated monitoring tools can find brand and campaign mentions online, and from influencers that you likely won’t know about unless you’re using such a tool. Engaging with those mentions provides new opportunities you wouldn’t have without the tool. 

Publication: Promotion Prep

Publication is the most well- defined task in this mix. You post an article, infographic, or video to your blog, create posts for social media, send newsletters, campaign emails, and emails for influencer outreach. We usually create a mix of text and graphic content for promotion. This typically takes a few hours for each piece of content. 

TIP: Take the time to do this step well. Promotion will happen continuously throughout the life of your campaign and taking extra time during publication can make promotion easier. Think of it as promotion prep. Make sure assets, links, hashtags, and any promotional guidance are centrally stored, and that all team members know how to access and use them. 

Promotion

In our article on publishing and promoting content we recommend sharing a post frequently at the start of its promotion cycle, then moving it into a rotation with other campaign content. You can create an aggressive strategy to promote multiple times a day across several digital channels, or you can use a more focused strategy. 

Consider the following when planning your promotion strategy:

• The channel marketing team and executives use. It’s usually easier to promote content and engage with users on channels you’re active on. That’s where you hang out, it’s a natural fit.

• Use the channels that drive traffic to your site. Use the Google Analytics Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals report to see which social networks actually drive traffic to your site. The networks that drive the most traffic are the ones you should focus on.

The channels that generate leads and customers. If you’re tracking goal completions in Google Analytics, and you should, you can use the reports in Google Analytics under Conversions > Goals, and Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels to see which networks generate leads and customers. Specifically:

• Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path to see the last three steps the user took in completing the goal. 

• Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths to see all the unique paths that led to conversions, the number of conversions from each, and the value of those conversions (if you’ve assigned values to your goals).

• How much time do you have to perform promotion tasks? This is perhaps the most important consideration. Consistency is key in promotion, you need to keep up the drumbeat to keep your campaign top of mind for your prospects. We figure promotion will take a minimum of two hours per week per campaign, and potentially much more depending on the types of assets you’re publishing, the number of channels you’re publishing to, and the more channels you publish on. Create a promotion plan that can be comfortably executed by the team in the hours available.  

TIP: Google Analytics can tell you a lot about how your campaign is going, what traffic it’s driving, and what goals it’s helping achieve. Adding UTM codes to your URLs will help Google Analytics parse incoming traffic from your campaigns, and segment in reports under Acquisition > Campaigns. Use the Google’s Campaign URL Builder or UTM.io’s chrome extension to create UTM enriched URLs to assist this tracking. Store these centrally so team members can use them.

TIP: Monitor promotion execution and make adjustments as needed by adding hours for promotion, or reducing promotion tasks in the first two weeks of the campaign. If your promotion team is feeling overwhelmed consider reducing the number of channels you’re promoting on, or hiring additional staff or interns to help with promotion tasks. 

TIP: If you’re adding new channels as part of a campaign then monitor them closely to make sure you’re getting the value out of your promotion. 

TIP: Promote content on both business and personal profiles of employees. Having employees share campaign content on personal profiles extends the reach of your campaign to the connections of your people. 

The following tools can save hours during promotion:

• Google Analytics to monitor traffic, sources, and network referrals generated by your campaign. 

• A UTM URL builder like Google’s Campaign URL Builder or UTM.io’s extension.

• A social media publishing tool that can schedule and automate promotion steps such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse or many others.

Engagement

Engagement is the social part of social media, and it should be prioritized at all times, especially during digital marketing campaigns. 

When people engage with your content, on your website, social media, or other channels by commenting, and sharing, it gives your brand the opportunity to:

• Showcase your brand’s knowledge, culture, and willingness to help.

• Turn the people who engage with you, and their connections, into leads and customers.

• Drive conversations about your brand and industry that provide more opportunities. 

You should monitor:

• Social channels for comments, shares, likes and follows. 

• Blog posts for comments. 

• The internet for brand and campaign mentions including industry blogs and social channels, influencer blogs and social channels, and media outlets.

Engagement is a wildcard, it can take five minutes to review channels and tools for comments if there is no engagement, or five hours to respond to comments, answer questions, and work with the community you’re building through your campaign. 

TIP: Most people today expect brands to respond promptly to engagement, we recommend looking for notifications and alerts three times a day at a minimum, morning, after lunch, and just before the end of day. 

You have the following options for monitoring for mentions on channels you own:

• Use native apps to review notifications on social networks and blog posts. These apps are free, and do a good job of notifying you, but you have to access, and use each app independently which can be time-consuming, and doesn’t offer a unified way to assign response tasks or track responses.

• Use social media management tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, or Sprout Social and many others that provide a unified inbox that provides a single place for monitoring and responding to engagement. In addition, some tools allow you to assign response tasks.

These tools above work well to monitor the channels you own, but you need a different type of tool to monitor channels you don’t own. To track mentions of your brand, or keywords on industry, influencer, or media blogs you can use tools like Google Alerts for free, or paid tools like SEMRush and BuzzSumo that offer mention monitoring as part of their tool sets. You can also invest in dedicated brand monitoring tools like Mention and Brandwatch which offer more robust tracking of mentions and allow for response management, task assignment and follow up. 

TIP: Engagement is how you generate value in digital campaigns, so whatever tools you choose, native apps, fee based social media and monitoring tools, spreadsheets, or project management software, assign and track monitoring and response tasks, and make sure people have the time they need to perform those tasks.

TIP: Since engagement can be time-consuming, spread the load. Triage is often centralized to one, or a few marketing team members, but you can bring in more people to help with responses including salespeople, subject matter experts, and executives. Assign responses to the people who are best equipped to explain your brand’s value in the context of the engagement. Salespeople can be particularly helpful because this engagement can be the start of the sales process. A word of caution, people who engage with you are not usually looking for help, so salespeople should take an “always be helping” approach and in doing so, answer questions, educate and advocate. 

TIP: If you get lots of questions and discussion, consider scheduling a webinar or an online roundtable discussion. It’s a great way to address a lot of questions and perceptions. It also gives you the opportunity to capture leads and a bunch of great information about your prospects!

TIP: Capture relevant information from engagements. This can be feedback about perceived capabilities and features, feedback on pricing, perceived value, common questions, answers, and issues that are top of mind for your audience. Capturing this information will help you generate more content ideas for answering prospect questions, addressing perceptions, and help you refine your value proposition for your audience. 

Conclusion

Remember that consistency is key for both promotion and engagement. You must keep your campaign messages top of mind for your audience, and respond when they engage with you. You must do this with the resources and hours you have available. If you have difficulty, use some of the tips we’ve mentioned to scale back promotion, or augment engagement resources. Defining a promotion plan that works for your brand is part of planning a marketing campaign and is covered in our ebook: SEO Analysis for Lead Generation.