Post, Ping and Pray is *Not* a Content Marketing Strategy
They create something.
They post it somewhere.
They ping their social channels.
Then they breathlessly ask, “How’d we do?”
Then they move on to the Next Thing.
Back in the day it was a (so-called) “viral video” cuz those were cool. More recently infographics have been all the rage. We’ve seen renewed interest as well in well-designed e-books and slideshows. The content changes but the marketing strategy rarely evolves – beyond the addition of new outposts, e.g.:
“We’ll tweet it; we’ll post it to Facebook; we’ll upload it to (YouTube or Slideshare); we’ll post it to our LinkedIn page; and,” most recently, “We’ll also pin it on Pinterest! (And Path! And Gentlemint! And– )”
Ping! Ping! Ping!
Parry’s post makes a nice case for promoting your content more than once per channel (in a non-annoying, helpful way, ‘natch). And it’s spot-on that more than one Ping! is totally appropriate.
But if you make the resource investment in content creation you need to make an even bigger investment in marketing that content.
That might mean committing to editorial placement …That might mean tapping a paid content syndication network (see all those “Related Stories” at the bottom of most online articles you read?) … That might mean running a contextual SEM campaign on Bing or Google … That might mean running social ads that drive more users to your content (either to one of your brand’s social outposts or to one of the places where you’ve earned a spot for that content, such as an external blog post or online mainstream media hit) … That might mean an email marketing campaign to your opt-in fans … That might mean a special outreach effort to your known Ambassadors, asking them to spread the content across their own social graphs … etc.
Now, sit back and re-read that last paragraph. Slowly, this time. Don’t just skim it. Think about the exponential value you might attain for each piece of content you’ve taken the time to create, if you also took the time to market it appropriately and vigorously.
Posted on: March 5, 2012 at 12:06 pm By Todd Defren
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I completely agree with this post. Many companies think that as long as they have a Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages, they are a part of the social media world. These companies need to realize that they not only need to post on these pages, they need to interact and engage people as well. Each social media website has a different audience, and these companies need to post content specific to these audiences. What works on Facebook may not be appropriate for Pinterest or Twitter, or vice versa. Even once this has been figured out, creating engaging content is only a part of the equation. As this post states, marketing this content is vital to seeing an ROI on social media.
The topic of Pinterest was recently brought up in one of public relations classes at the University of Oregon. I myself have not joined Pinterest, but I know that lots of companies use it to get their product out there. To me, social media is like word of mouth. But, you still need to do the research before throwing your company onto every social media site. Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook may not ALL be appropriate for what your company is aiming to do.