Clever content promotion is vital to the growth of any online business, and marketing strategies must find innovative ways to set their brands apart from others. Sometimes looking at what other brands are doing to attract the attention of consumers can provide you some brilliant content promotion ideas.
With that in mind, here are 12 powerful content promotion examples you can use to supercharge your digital marketing this year and into the future.
1. Using powerful imagery
Making an impression with word-based content alone is getting harder, and today’s consumers typically prefer high-impact visual content to words alone. According to research, almost 60% of senior executives prefer watching a video to reading online text.
With video creation services, you can create engaging videos from photos, video clips, and music — and it’s easy to create marketing videos formatted for IG/FB Stories, too.
Regardless of the product or service, you’re promoting, a powerful image or video concept can make a big impression. Sometimes, thinking outside of the box is critical.
That said, sometimes it’s simple, especially in the case of a product being highly visual in impact. Take pizza, for example. Few people wouldn’t look twice at the sight of a hot, fresh slice of pizza oozing with delicious, melting cheese if they’re hungry.
Pizza Hut maximizes the power of imagery in its social media posts and marketing campaigns, drawing attention to its content and promotions with compelling imagery.
2. Including guest blogs and valuable tips
Including guest blogs in your content can vastly increase your reach while providing an abundance of engaging and relatable content.
So long as the guest posts are unique, high-quality, and vetted, they can be a great source of additional value-adding to your audience, driving conversions to your site.
Home Depot is an excellent example of this, as everyday DIY-ers offer relatability and exciting ideas, tips, and tricks to add to the wealth of information that Home Depot offers.
Providing high value in the form of tips, hacks, and ideas gives people a tangible reason to return to your site again, which can catapult brand awareness and create firmly raving fans.
3. Providing valuable resources
As well as providing a wealth of tips, tricks, and information, any valuable data information can become a highly impactful way to drive masses of traffic to your site and send your SEO soaring.
Shutterstock is an excellent example of this. It has not only tapped into their expertise to make a ‘Creative Trends Report’ but has enhanced this valuable resource with stunning visuals and interactive music and video components.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, this compelling infographic has brought about over 6 billion visits to their site, as well as thousands of social media shares.
4. Involving influencers
Collaborating with others is one of the most powerful content promotion ideas in this list.
Getting social media influencers involved in your content promotions is a sure-fire way to gain additional online attention, as you can tap into their social reach and expand your brand awareness considerably.
There are also some additional ways that you can further utilize this avenue of marketing.
When you combine the marketing message with a movement or cause — something that has the power to spark an emotional reaction — then you take your influencer impact from a simple product endorsement to an inspirational message that can gain far more attention.
Olay has done this brilliantly with its #FaceAnything campaign. By combining the far-reaching chops of 9 leading social media influencers, they focused on an empowering message that could mean many things to many women.
Ultimately, it cleverly tied back into their facial skin range while inspiring female empowerment to send their positive brand awareness through the roof.
Further Reading: Influencer Marketing Strategy for 2024: A Comprehensive Guide
5. Keeping your content varied
While you may be primarily known for one or two particular products or services, you can cast a far wider net with some clever content promotion.
When you cleverly broaden your online content to appeal to multiple audiences, you can increase your conversions and achieve far more brand followers. Cracker Barrel is an excellent example of this.
Even though they are primarily known for cooking and old-fashioned memorabilia, they keep their content and offerings far broader. In doing so, they have amassed an online audience interested in a far more comprehensive range of things.
By incorporating articles and content that focuses on anything from recipes to holiday decorating tips, they keep a broad spectrum of consumers interested while boosting their SEO as they do.
Further Reading: These are the 23 Types of Content Marketing Your Business Needs to Know About
6. Setting social challenges
Finding novel ways to create promotional content actively is a great way to drive up brand awareness and conversions. If you can find a way to incorporate a positive message into that, then all the better.
Focusing on global issues, such as sustainability, but in a fun way can grow your digital marketing footprint and bring your brand into the spotlight.
Leading jeans brand Levi did this brilliantly with their #7Days7Ways social challenge. They asked people to style their trusty Levi’s jeans differently every day for a week and use a trending hashtag in their posts.
That campaign helped position the brand as sustainability-conscious while encouraging people to wear and share their brand more. The campaign shows that business ethics is vital to their brand.
7. Personalizing
Now and again, an ad campaign comes that reaches further and broader than is typically seen. Coke’s personalization campaign example is undoubtedly one of those.
Coke knew what it was doing when it launched its “Share a Coke” campaign. Their strategy was to take what was already a global brand giant and allow consumers to feel part of it by personalizing their bottles.
After researching the most popular Australian names, they first added them to Coke bottles in Australia in 2012, followed by Britain in 2013. The labels said, “Share a Coke with” followed by a commonly used name, allowing people to buy their favorite drink with their own or a friend’s name on the bottle.
This campaign was so popular that it soon spread worldwide and eventually featured in no less than 80 countries. So, what made it such a success?
Personalization makes people feel unique, meaningful, and included. They inevitably considered the names most familiar to the demographic most likely to get on board with the idea. Still, generally, it is a far-reaching strategy as everyone wants to feel included.
Focusing on the notion of ‘sharing’ also solidified this stellar marketing idea, evoking an emotional connection to the brand and encouraging people to not only buy one with their name on it but for someone else as well. It was a novelty idea that proved to be a big hit.
Further Reading: Content Personalization Defined: 9 Ways to Use It for Marketing
8. Educating
One way to engage an audience is to offer them ways to better their skillset. Canva is an excellent example of this, having created its own unique online design school.
Canva is a popular online graphic design platform that enables its users to create images and animations of professional quality for use on their blogs and social media channels.
But, to go one step further, they now also offer a range of courses via their design school that enables users to improve their skills in graphic design from the comfort of their own homes – and without the hefty costs of completing a degree.
Canva is an excellent example of how interactive content marketing that offers educational benefits can highlight the usefulness of a platform. It’s great for credibility, too, positioning the business as an authority in the industry.
9. Build trust through honesty
McDonald’s is one of, if not the most successful fast-food chain on the planet, yet it always carried with it the whispers of questionable ingredients. It’s such a long-standing brand now that it has weathered a myriad of conspiracy theories regarding the quality (or lack thereof) of the ingredients they use and how they source those ingredients.
For a long time, McDonald’s continued to thrive despite these rumors. However, today’s consumers are becoming increasingly more conscientious of what they consume and what businesses they support, so McDonald’s decided to take some action to change public perceptions.
Through a very cleverly designed campaign, McDonald’s Canada took on the challenge of answering approximately 10,000 questions from customers. They stepped out from behind their famous golden arches and shared their truth in a display of somewhat radical transparency and honesty. The public loved them for it.
You can alter the public’s perception and win or restore trust and belief in your product and brand by telling your story authentically. Doing so also gives consumers a sense of superior customer service by engaging with them on their terms and giving them the information they want and need to make their own decisions.
There is little doubt that the information shared by McDonald’s Canada would have been largely (if not wholly) favorable to the brand’s reputation. But the campaign was nevertheless well-executed as a show of commitment to being transparent regarding their products.
10. Take the high road
Of all of these content promotion ideas, this is the one that might be most difficult to replicate.
During the pandemic lockdowns, so many businesses were struggling, and people worldwide began to experience a sense of solidarity not before seen in our generation.
Burger King was one of those businesses that used these conditions to bolster that sense of community support further. By encouraging their customers to feast on some of their competitor’s food in a show of solidarity, Burger King’s campaign, titled “Order From McDonald’s,” caused shock, fostered compassion, and drew a great deal of attention as a result.
Whether this was a highly strategic move or a genuinely heartfelt plea — probably a bit of both — it went down a storm. This campaign is another exceptional example of how prioritizing higher values can enhance the reputation of a brand.
11. Virtual shopping experience
L’Oreal Paris is a giant in the world of makeup, innovating lipsticks and foundations for many years alongside its famous range of skincare. The brand now features an interactive content marketing approach called ‘Signature Faces’ to stay relevant in today’s highly digitized world.
Signature Faces uses technology that allows consumers to test different lipstick shades virtually from the comfort of their own homes. This interactive tool uses artificially intelligent filter technology to offer a practical and efficient lockdown option for shopping online, and it’s also highly convenient and fun to use.
In creating interactive, virtual experiences for consumers, businesses can actively put the needs of their customers first. Making it fun and shareable also adds a novel twist that maximizes its effectiveness. It also aids customers in deciding to buy a product, especially as it causes them to focus more on which one to buy instead of whether to buy one at all.
12. Tell stories
Everyone enjoys a good story, something they can believe in, get temporarily lost in, be inspired, or feel moved. Telling stories evokes emotion and engages audiences, and it can be a great way to draw people in and have them coming back for more. That’s why blogs have become such a phenomenon.
Microsoft has honed this skill and used it to build stronger relationships with its audience and brand users. The blog – aptly called ‘Stories’ – features various feel-good stories that move people to feel more emotion and, therefore, more trust with the brand.
The humanness of stories told well can reach and connect to customers like little else, and it also, in turn, builds trust and a stronger relationship. After all, humility is contagious.
Further Reading: Brand Storytelling: How to Tell Stories That Will Increase Conversions
Wrapping up these content promotion ideas
It is beyond frustrating to develop great content only to have it sit there unvisited. Content promotion ideas are imperative to a solid marketing plan, as content creating is only half of the battle.
There are so many ingenious ways to significantly further your reach and get consumers’ attention, so consider them all and be prepared to think outside of the box for the best results.
Think about how you can evoke emotion, inspire, encourage interaction, create a social movement, be more transparent, shift public perception, and give your consumers what they most want.
Further Reading: The 12 Most Useful Digital Marketing Skills to Invest in For Your Future
Author Bio
Luke Fitzpatrick has been published in a variety of publications such as Forbes, Tech In Asia and The Next Web. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturing in cross-cultural management and the pre-MBA program.
Hero photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
