Ten Tips for Cross-Promoting your Content, Part II

Here’s Part II of the post I started on B2B Bloggers, the excellent resource run by Jeremy Victor:

The story so far:

We learned about the importance of cross-promoting your content to the people who have already engaged with you in some way or other. And we saw how using auto-responders, web ‘Thank You’ pages, outbound email and a personal touch can be really effective. Read the whole story here.

Now here are the next five tips and one BONUS TIP as a reward for wading through the other ten:

6) Use your email footers
You’ve got lots of people throughout your company sending out lots of emails to a whole range of stakeholders. I’m always surprised how many companies waste this opportunity or simply use it to broadcast a general message.

Email footers can be as targeted as any other kind of communication and one great use is to cross-promote your back catalog.  Different departments can get different promotional footers that reflect their audiences.

7) Do a Round-Up blog post
Every quarter or so, do a blog post that gives readers a guide to your entire back catalog of content or the pieces you produced since the last round-up.

We all forget how perishable our posts really are. Once they’re in the Archive folder, they rarely see the light of day. Forget the risk of repeating yourself (a risk that most marketers are far too sensitive too) and drag out that great content again.

8 ) Exploit your web forms
Most forms need to be focused on one desired action (see Tip 1). But others are fine for cross-promoting content that is relevant to the form’s purpose.

So a simple tick-box at the bottom saying, “Please also send me the Nine Rules of Rope-Making” can’t hurt can it? And it just might inspire a new generation of rope-makers.

9) Go back and revise your web copy!
I am always amazed how infrequently this is practiced: You publish a great new eBook on The Future of Left-Handed Security Software and you promote the hell out of it.  But you never go back to the nine web pages on your site that talk all about Security Software and Left-Handedness and revise them to cross-promote the new content.

We used to have a term for this back in the ‘hood: ‘Dummy-head’.  Don’t be one.

10) End your webinars with a commercial
Webinars attract your most engaged prospects. And the end of a webinar is where the really committed can be found.  Over 90% of webinars end with a single URL (see Dummy-head above). You should end each webinar with a quick summary of the great pieces of content waiting for your audience to download.

Bonus Tip 11) Cross-promote within your new content.
The best place of all to cross-promote content is inside your latest content. Our Content Marketing Workbook plugs our Holy Trinity of B2B Marketing (as does this sentence).

We end every new eBook or white paper with a Resources section that cross-promotes our other goodies and any other resources we feel are relevant. This is a service to your reader not a crass exercise in pimping (well, maybe a bit of both).

So there you go. Ten tips plus a bonus. You’ve come this far, so now do two things for me: drop some comment love below to share your own thoughts on this arcane art; and start practicing some of the ten tips tomorrow.

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Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: sl-fotografie