Last year was anything but ordinary for businesses all over the world. Nevertheless, digital marketers did their best to promote products and services in a pretty new way, to guarantee success under unusual conditions.
2021 appears to be even more mysterious, as getting back to life after an extended quarantine will change the market somehow. The way people discover brands has become highly digitalized and content-based.
Therefore, a successful marketing strategy in 2021 prioritizes content. Whether you are drafting your first marketing strategy or refreshing the existing one, it never hurts to reconsider your actions and concentrate on content marketing.
To maintain growth, marketers have already started brainstorming and implementing new content marketing hints. Here are some of the best practices relevant for 2021. Furthermore, some of them will cost you minimal time and effort yet bring drastic effects.
Promote blog posts in email signatures
A good old-fashioned blog finds new perspectives for promotion. As your most valuable asset and brightest part of your website, it should be promoted as much as possible. Here is where an oldy-moldy email marketing takes the stage.
However, you can hardly call yourself a true adept of email marketing if your email signature generator does not provide a feature of blog hyperlink inclusion. As a result, email signatures are becoming powerful tools in the content marketing arsenal.
Therefore, all of the best email signature examples feature blogs so the recipients can click into your blog straight from the email.
Post short pieces of content on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s largest business social network with over 750 million registered users. However, if you use it only for building connections, you tap only half of its power. Posting short pieces of content can tap you into another half.
Most users spend between zero and two hours on LinkedIn weekly. Thus, posting teasers encouraging these users to relocate to your website is an excellent way to grow traffic and boost engagement.
Linkedin is the second-most relevant business-related content channel right after email. Furthermore, due to LinkedIn`s specific audience, posting here is your chance to reach out to senior-level executives and staff in managing positions responsible for decision-making.
Use Medium in addition to your blog
Medium was initially designed as a platform for business blogging to share and read articles on various topics. At first, Medium was met with skepticism, but today it has more than 86 million unique monthly visitors.
Apart from numerous independent bloggers, well-known brands use Medium to attract new eyeballs to their companies` blogs. There are e objective reasons to post on Medium in addition to your blog:
- If your audience is here, you belong here too. People interested in your topic might have a solid online presence on Medium.
- Medium is an additional chance to generate engagement. Publishing content on Medium allows going far beyond the list of your standard list of subscribers.
- Regularly contributing to Medium helps to position yourself as an expert within the niche and grow authority.
Email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways to drive new readers to your blog. As a kind of direct communication with your readership adds flavor and human touch to your blogging.
People like visuals. An email newsletter is the most visually appealing and image reach form of an email that can attract readers to your blog. An attractive newsletter design, a brief text, and a teaser button `read more’ work great for blog promotion.
Sending them weekly, biweekly, or even monthly proves you are active and supports regular traffic. Thus, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% retention.
Turn blog posts into YouTube videos
With over 1.5 billion monthly active users watching 1 billion hours of video content per day, YouTube is what you need to promote your business blog. In addition, repurposing your blog posts and turning them into videos will considerably broaden the reach.
Furthermore, 81% of businesses that use video marketing in their promotional strategy see increased sales. Here are simple steps for you to get started:
- Choose the blog post
- Make the list of key takeaways
- Write a short script based on these points
- Use stock videos or images
- Add background music
- Use text effects to insert your script into the video.
Producing and publishing great blog posts is good, but don’t limit your promotional campaign to email marketing and posting on LinkedIn and Medium.
Create eBooks and guides
While social media posts and YouTube videos have entirely taken over the world, there are still people who enjoy reading. Furthermore, these people sometimes prefer reading more profound and massive texts rather than blog posts.
Therefore, creating eBooks and guides is another way to use your blog post material efficiently, win new subscribers, and monetize your blog. Besides, the process of eBook or guide creation is not as complex as it seems at first:
- Choose the relevant topic
- Outline chapters based on your posts
- Work on design
- Add illustrative materials
- Highlight quotes and statistics
- Place CTAs
- Convert in the appropriate format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW, ODF, IBA).
Run a webinar
Due to the past year’s events, online formats like webinars, workshops, and streams have become extremely popular. Video has become the primary available source of direct communication under quarantine restrictions.
In 2021, this tendency continues to be effective, as consumers want to get informed quickly and contact information in digestible formats. To sue webinars to the benefit of your blog, remember to:
- be present at various online events as a speaker, expert, or sponsor
- reuse old topics and articles.
Adjusting your blog information to webinar format can get your blog to a considerably new level.
Conclusion
Quality content has always been vital for building awareness, growing brand authority, and lead generation. After the pandemics, nothing has changed in this respect. However, new effective ways of blog promotion are now dominating.
While you are working on your content marketing strategy, try to consider these trends to use all the opportunities in total. However, rather than chasing all the relevant trends, do your research and conclude what works best for your business.
