Marketing offers are vital to the inbound approach to Content Marketing. They allow you to showcase your expertise and position you as the go-to resource in your industry. They help you convert website visitors to leads by providing educational and informative material related to your business. It goes without saying that the process of compiling these offers is time and resource-intensive, from the copy development to design and packaging.
Naturally with that amount of effort involved, you want to get your offer in front of as many prospects as possible. You can achieve this by following the BEST formula for marketing offer promotion. Let's get to it!
Your blog is the great real estate to promote your marketing offer. A good trick is to create a blog or a series of posts that relate to your offer content. Aim to provide just enough information to be appealing (and valuable as stand alone content) as well as indicating that deeper information is available in your offer. Link to your landing page a few times throughout your post and have a clear call-to-action button at the bottom of your article for greater impact. Check out our blog here to learn more about the ideal blog format.
This post is a good example as the content is related to lead generation. For that reason, I offer our eBook 115 ways to Grow your Business - check it out!
Remember that you also have space in your blog sidebar to offer alternative offers too!
Email marketing can be very effective for presenting marketing offers. Generally speaking, the contacts on your database are leads that have already engaged with you on some level and therefore are receptive to further communication and offers.
For offer promotion to be effective via email, you should take time to carefully segment your lead base and select those who would find the offer most valuable and applicable to their stage in the buying cycle. You don't want to be sending a bottom of the funnel offer to a brand new lead that requires a little more nurturing.
The beauty of email is the ability to personalise the message, giving your audience a sense that this an offer selected specifically for them.
Social media is a fanastic channel for promoting out your offers. Depending on your offer and audience, select the platforms that they will most likely be looking for information and schedule tweets, updates or posts to go out regularly for a set period.
Let's not forget the fact that the actual landing page of your offer should include social media sharing buttons so that people downloading your offer can share with their followers too. It's also a good idea to include sharing links within your offer too.
Technically speaking this should be forums but I couldn't find a synonym that started with T! Considering forums are made up of threads I'm letting myself off the hook.
Find forums (or threads) where people are asking questions that your offer addresses and present it as a potential resource for them. You need to be careful with this approach as you don't want to simply be posting the offer and leaving it as that. (On some threads, you may even be warned or banned for spamming with this approach.) Rather spend time building a reputation for being helpful and resourceful as opposed to pushing for sales. That way when you do respond with a 'self-serving' offer, readers will appreciate that it will be worthwhile.
That wraps up my BEST approach to promoting your marketing offer, a very important aspect of the lead generation process. How do you go about promoting your offer? Let me know in the comments below.