Content can attract, engage, and retain customers. But even the best blog posts or podcasts sometimes go unnoticed. The problem is not necessarily content quality but lack of visibility.
Here are seven channels to present content to customers and prospects.
7 Content Channels
Search engines. Content and search engine optimization are seemingly inseparable. Content informs or entertains prospects, and search engines enable its discovery. Moreover, SEO often initiates the topic. A marketer identifies keyword phrases to target and then creates the content.
Search engines — Google, Bing, ChatGPT, others — remain a top way to promote content.
Email newsletters. Content and lifecycle marketing (email) are also intertwined. The Hatch Chile Store, for example, publishes recipes in an email newsletter to retain customers.
The Hatch Chile Store uses recipes and email to retain shoppers.
Social media marketing. Content is the fodder for social posts. Social media marketers often divvy up blog posts into bite-size bits of content. Some of those posts link back to the source, promoting it.
Consider a seller of print-on-demand goods. It publishes articles about classic science fiction films and novels to sell its products and then excerpts the articles into social posts.
The seller recently posted a two-part thread on X. The first provides a summary without links since the X algorithm tends to favor posts without them. The second, below, is a comment on the first with a link to a relevant product category page.
A second post on X is a comment containing a link to the product category page.
Advertising. Content marketers might advertise a high-converting page, knowing that a percentage of visitors will buy, subscribe, or both. Software-as-a-service companies often use this tactic. For example, HubSpot advertises courses, such as “Create a Must Follow YouTube Channel,” which drives sales.
HubSpot advertises its Academy courses on Facebook and Instagram.
Posting and reuse. Content marketers can post, repost, and reuse content. Some marketers describe this as “free syndication.” A marketer could republish content (or versions of it) on X, LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack, along with a link and the phrase, “Originally published on…” A guest post could have a similar tactic.
Paid syndication. A paid service such as Outbrain or Taboola can feature content as “recommended reading” on other websites, often alongside articles from major publications.
Influencer marketing. Finally, it’s now common to pay influencers to promote content.