Make it part of your delivery process

If you’re really invested in being a valuable resource for your audience, the marketing of your content is as important as the marketing of your products and in an ideal world the two would be happily intertwined.

TOMS Shoes provides an excellent example of this. There are a lot of great reasons to buy TOMS. They’re comfortable, reasonably priced and for every pair you purchase they’ll give a pair to someone who really needs one.

In the box you’ll also find ideas of ways you can get involved, one of which is a suggestion to host a screening of their documentary, For Tomorrow.  

It’s an inspirational story and a simple way to encourage a regular stream of actively engaged people to help get the content in front of more people.

Consider it as an educational resource

While working for Monster a few years ago I helped put together some animated career advice videos. It was part of a campaign to communicate what can often be a grey topic in a more interesting way.

Soon after posting them, someone from a university in Brazil got in touch to ask if they could play the videos to their class – absolutely!

This got us thinking, every university in the world potentially has a batch of students who want to come to work in the UK, so we started actively marketing the videos to higher education organisations across the globe, using the content as a way to draw in traffic from talented people eager to get a foot on the career ladder.

Remove your branding

Have you heard of Robert Galbraith? You may know him (or her) better as J.K. Rowling – this was the moniker she used when publishing her first non-Harry Potter novel to provide a blank slate to see the real reaction of audiences.

It’s something that literary figures have done through the ages and a tactic your brand could also do to see the true value of what you put together.

Everything you produce comes with certain audience preconceptions, so take away everything that connects it to your company, then publicise it somewhere like reddit.com/r/sideproject or launchsky.com 

Honest feedback will allow you to go away and develop the polished version that slots into your core website.

Put it on your homepage

This doesn’t sound particularly inventive, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses put together lavish content-led campaigns, then fail to publicise it on their most valuable real-estate.

Don’t be satisfied with giving it a cursory nod in the corner, put it front and centre.

If it interferes with plans to promote a sale or another commercially vital period, delay the launch until you have a clear window where you can give it the push it deserves. Make sure you involve every team from around the business so everyone gets the importance of what you’re doing in relation to the wider business objectives.

In a busy online world where people are bombarded from every direction with things to look at, differentiation is your most valuable weapon.

Integrated campaign planning makes sure this is addressed at the outset and considering distribution early on in the concepting phase means you’ll never left with a great creative piece of content, but some very uncreative ways of publicising it. 

What are some of the out-of-the-ordinary ways you’ve attempted to get a web page noticed?

For more, see our new content guide, 100+ Practical Content Marketing Tips: A how-to guide for editors, writers and content creators which presents the lessons we’ve learned from ten years of writing for this blog. 

image credit: JD Hancock