Building an online store is just the beginning. You’ve designed your site, set up checkout and shipping, and launched—but the customers you expected? They’re not automatically showing up. Success requires intentional effort to attract and engage your audience.
The same principle applies to your content marketing efforts. Publishing blog posts, tutorials, and resources on your website is only half the battle. Without a content promotion strategy, even your most valuable content may never reach the right audience.
Content promotion bridges the gap between creation and connection, ensuring your carefully crafted content finds its intended audience and drives meaningful business results. Here’s how it works.
What is content promotion?
Content promotion—sometimes called content amplification—is the process of getting your content in front of your target audience. It includes content distribution, or sharing your content across multiple channels (potentially repurposing it for different formats), and content syndication, where you publish your content on third-party platforms, such as social media networks and partner websites. Content promotion can also include paid strategies like advertising campaigns that expand your content’s reach, boost visibility, and increase engagement.
For example, bike brand Cowboy’s video series exploring the lives of its customers (Cowboy Cycle Club Presents) lives on its YouTube page, but the company also promotes each new video across its social media, including Instagram and LinkedIn.
An effective content promotion strategy works hand in hand with your overall content marketing efforts. When you start with high-quality, valuable content focused on your target audience, it becomes much easier to amplify its impact.
Channels for content promotion
Marketing and advertising are complex strategic processes. The good news is that they’re also transferable skills: You can deploy many of the same tactics and channels you use to promote your products or services as part of your content promotion strategy.
Here’s how businesses use six common channels for content promotion efforts:
Blogs
A blog is a versatile long-form publication channel fully controlled by your business (i.e., an owned media channel). You write articles, share videos, or showcase collections of photographs on your blog, and use other promotional channels to drive customers to your posts. Because your blog is under your domain name, increasing blog traffic also results in more organic traffic to your site and can boost your domain authority.
Social media
Social media platforms are also popular content promotion channels. Although social media use spans all demographic groups, different social channels cater to distinct audiences, content formats, and communication styles. For example, Facebook is an all-purpose social media platform particularly popular with individuals aged 25 to 44, while TikTok is a video-based social media platform popular among 18- to 34-year-olds.
Social media marketing proves especially effective for businesses targeting younger consumers. A 2024 Forbes Advisor and Talker Research study found that 46% of Gen Z consumers use social media as their main search engine.
You can create content specifically for social media in video, text, or image formats, or use these platforms to direct followers to your blog, YouTube channel, or other content pages.
Email marketing
Your email marketing list is another owned media content promotion channel. Common strategies include building an email marketing list and using it to provide customers with informational, entertaining, educational, or promotional content. Many businesses also use it to drive audiences to other content promotion channels. You might include a link to a recent blog post or social media post and a prompt to follow your business’s social media accounts, for example.
Email marketing can be a particularly effective channel for ecommerce businesses that use email for two-way communication with customers. Since customers are already in their inbox when they receive your content, they can easily navigate to your site on the same device or reach out to your business directly.
Online communities
Online forums like Reddit, Quora, 4Chan, and Medium provide internet users a space to discuss shared interests. Many smaller sites also host popular forums: The Long Hair Care Forum has nearly 200,000 users, and BabyCenter’s Pregnancy community has more than 420,000.
Forums can be a great place to connect with customers experiencing the problem your company solves, and they’re an effective content promotion strategy for businesses that serve niche target audiences. You can use a search engine to find relevant communities: “plant care forum” returns Reddit’s r/houseplants and various National Gardening Association forums, among other results.
Search engines
Search engines are another key content promotion channel. Any business can use search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine advertising to promote content, but these content promotion tactics are particularly valuable for businesses with clients who conduct extensive research during the customer journey. Examples include B2B businesses and companies that sell technology products, appliances, financial services, or any other complex, high-dollar, high-stakes product or service.
Paid advertising
Paid media is an effective way to accelerate your business’s content promotion efforts. This includes social media advertising, native advertising that blends in with the other content on a page, pay-per-click advertising, and paid search. Paid strategies are particularly popular with businesses that have difficult-to-reach target audiences and high average customer lifetime value.
8 content promotion strategies
- Repurpose content
- Cross-promote
- Scale your social media content
- Guest post
- Pursue content partnerships
- Partner with influencers
- Become a forum authority
- Perform an SEO audit
Content promotion success can boost awareness and help you build authority with your target audiences. Here are eight effective content promotion strategies for ecommerce businesses.
1. Repurpose content
Creating valuable content requires significant time investments. You can maximize return on investment for your content creation efforts by repurposing content across platforms, which saves time while expanding your content’s reach.
You might reformat resource center documents, frequently asked question (FAQ) sheets, and infographics into blog posts, for example, or turn a blog post titled “11 Science-backed Tips for the Perfect Chocolate Cake” into multiple social media posts that go into detail on how different leavening processes work, when room-temperature ingredients matter, and why you should always weigh with a scale instead of measuring. You could also create a brief informational video, a podcast, and a handy infographic for your newsletter subscribers.
Erika Geraerts, founder of Australian beauty brand Fluff, explains how repurposing content helps her small business maximize marketing dollars. “There are so many platforms and so many mediums that a brand can participate in,” Erika says on a recent Shopify Masters podcast. “It’s just so much to ask, especially for a small business with limited resources or funding.”
Fluff focuses on maximizing content reach for its podcast, Pretty Hard. “For us, it’s all about repurposing that content: filming all of our podcasts so that we can put them up as Reels or on TikTok, taking some of those conversations and repurposing them into blog content, etc.”
2. Cross-promote
Cross-promotion is a content promotion tactic that works hand-in-hand with content repurposing. You’ve probably seen it in action: You encounter a social post about innovations in running shoe technology that prompts you to click through to the company’s blog for more info.
Most companies use social posts to drive their social media audience to owned media channels like websites or blogs. You can also cross-promote between owned channels or even within a channel. This practice is known as internal linking, and it helps users who are already engaging with your brand find more content.
For example, that blog about next-generation super shoes might contain internal links to related articles (such as one about deploying shoe tech in training), a link to a resource that helps runners choose the best shoe, and an invitation to follow the company on social media for more relevant content.
3. Scale your social media content
Social media reaches diverse audiences across different channels. Users stay highly active on their preferred platforms, making a social media promotion strategy one of the most effective ways to get your content in front of a broad target audience.
To successfully scale your social media content, identify which platforms your target audience uses and prioritize those channels. Audience research can help you hone your efforts. Then, activate your team to create genuinely appealing content that showcases your expertise and is entertaining. While (AI) content creation tools can help you brainstorm ideas, if you want to encourage people to engage with your content, focus on creating real moments—highlighting the human elements of your business.
You can also promote content through paid social as a quick way to increase reach. This can help you build your social following, boost engagement with key resources, and, in some cases, target specific objectives like newsletter sign-ups. Paid promotion programs vary by platform, so review your channel programming for specifics.
4. Guest post
Guest blogging involves partnering with other brands to share blog posts (and other content types) by creating valuable content for their audience. Also known as guest posting, guest blogging involves reaching out to other brands and offering to create unique, relevant content for their site in exchange for a backlink.
You can also propose a content exchange. Instead of creating content from scratch, you provide content from your archive. Your partner posts it along with a backlink, and you do the same for them.
5. Pursue content partnerships
Content partnerships are another collaborative content promotion tactic. You team up with a brand with aligned or complementary interests and work together to create content that provides value to both target audiences.
A woman’s multivitamin seller might collaborate with an app that tracks menstrual cycles to create a series of articles about the changes that occur in a woman’s body and how specific activities and nutritional choices meet certain needs during each cycle phase. They might even add a partner specializing in wearable tech for women to produce an extensive guide to athletic performance and recovery in menstruating women.
6. Partner with influencers
Influencer marketing is a powerful and flexible paid promotion channel. You’ll identify relevant influencers, collaborate with them to create content that complements their tone and style while delivering value to their audience segments, then pay them to share these posts with their followers. This tactic can be particularly effective with hard-to-reach niche audiences.
Although Fluff doesn’t rely on traditional influencer partnerships to promote content, Erika recommends connecting with influencers who share your brand’s value system. “I think it’s about finding what your definition of an influencer is and different ways to work with them,” she says.
Gifting is one strategy that works for Fluff. “We gift on the basis that we just want people to have our product who we think align with our values and brand representation or aesthetic,” says Erika, adding, “we have no expectation that they will post.”
7. Become a forum authority
Many forums restrict promotional activities (such as linking to your site), and some ban promotional content entirely, so research a forum’s rules before posting to understand both explicit and unwritten guidelines around self-promotion.
For forums that prohibit promotion, create unique, valuable content specifically for the platform. Responding to a user query about how to reduce hair breakage with a link to your hair strengthening serum won’t earn you any fans in the Long Hair Care Forum (and it could get you banned), but a detailed response in which you share your knowledge of the compounds clinically proven to reduce breakage, how they work, and what to look for on an ingredient list provides real value to potential customers.
The key is to establish yourself as a business owner and speak from that position of authority, naturally motivating audiences to seek out your other content.
8. Perform an SEO audit
SEO involves improving your site’s structure and content to increase relevant organic traffic. An SEO audit can help you identify issues with your site and provide a plan to boost search engine performance.
You can optimize on-page SEO by conducting search volume and keyword research, improving off-page SEO with guest-posting and other backlink-building strategies, and using a free site analyzer like Screaming Frog to identify and fix technical SEO problems.
Content promotion FAQ
What is content promotion?
Content promotion is the strategic process of getting your business’s content in front of its target audience. Social media marketing, email marketing, guest posting, and paid ads are all popular content promotion strategies.
What is an example of promotional content?
Promotional content is any content that endorses or highlights a product, service, event, or brand. Sustainable lifestyle and accessories brand United by Blue’s blog post on how it makes its soy wax candles is an example of promotional content.
What is the role of content marketing?
Effective content marketing establishes a brand as an authority in its field, communicates personality and values to potential customers, and maintains top of mind awareness with relevant audiences. By giving away something of value, it helps businesses build rapport with their ideal customers and encourages word-of-mouth marketing.
