Well done gang! You’ve nearly made it to your Frodo at the top of Mount Doom moment. That means you’ve found your audience, researched content they will love, scoped out the competition, came up with your ideas and created the content. Yaaaaaay. But your battle to save Middle Earth (publishing your content) isn’t over . . . so how do you reach your audience?
1. Spreading your message on social
You’re creating your content, but now it’s about making sure it reaches its intended audience. Think about where your audience plays on the internet and make friends with them. Go back and take a look at our social media guide for you to judge which platforms are best for your audience. To help you organise your distribution push from one place we recommend: Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck (Twitter only) and Sprout Social.
2. Influencers and reaching beyond your network.
This is a really great way to spread your message as readers engage better with content that is approved from a trusted source (think Richard & Judy's bookclub) - start off with lower level influencers or even people within your networking circle to at least get the ball rolling. Once you’ve tapped all your contacts dry, look into following all the people who are following your competitors, follow their followers and so on and so forth.
BUT if you have a small amount of change available we would suggest looking in to Facebook & Twitter adverts - target your competitors fans and create your ideal audience persona’s, use images and photos to increase engagement ultimately, always ensure that you have a call to action (CTA) driving people to like / follow your page. Or if you still prefer the “organic” approach we really think you should check out Audiense; it’s a powerful paid for tool that lets you discover users who match your targeted keywords.
3. Testing titles and images
Testing, testing, testing and more testing! Never stop testing until you find the right combination of title, time and image that has the most amount of engagement. Did you know Upworthy write over 25 versions of their titles just to measure and see what increases audience engagement? Madness but obviously it works well! Oh and the same goes for hashtags, Linkedin or Facebook groups or any other things you can do to figure out who it is that engages with your content the best.
As an example, we’ve found that on Twitter - #startup is a really well received hashtag for Twitter, headlines that say “see” instead of “watch” are engaged with better and generally posts with strong images work really well.
4. Posting frequency
I don’t want to sound like a politician here, but once again post, post, post and post some more. Posting your content once is terrible, posting twice is better than nothing but posting 3 times or more is exactly what you should be doing. We all know spamming can turn people off, but let me put it in perspective, the only person that cares about what your page looks like at this stage is you. You need to hammer home to yourself (and your team) that you need to be everywhere and be as loud as possible, especially on Facebook as your content is only sent to a certain amount of your audience at a time. You need to be loud and proud about your content so posting more and everywhere will only reap you benefits.
Do you have more ways to increase the reach of your content? Then drop us an email! We may be a London production agency but we are all ears for your opinions and suggestions and want to collaborate you! Make sure you sign up to our mailing list in the footer too!