You may have come across the term “content amplification” and are wondering what this is exactly. It involves promoting your content across marketing channels with the aim of driving traffic, encouraging interaction and increasing engagement with your target audience. It can form part of your overall content marketing strategy to broaden your audience, establish your brand at the top among consumers in your industry, and drive leads and sales.
What does it involve?
Content amplification involves using a variety of digital marketing techniques such as:
- Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, promoted tweets on Twitter etc.
- Google Ads
- Influencer marketing
- Press releases using a platform like PR Newswire
- Content Distribution Networks
- Email marketing
Several of these methods are usually employed to formulate an amplification strategy.
Perhaps you’ve created an infographic you are really proud of and wish to amplify this out to a wider audience, a great blog post, a case study or success story or a YouTube video etc. Any piece of high-quality content you think will benefit your brand can be used.
Preparation is key
As always planning and preparation are important prior to the launch of any amplification campaigns to ensure your content is amplified at optimal times when your audience is most likely to see and engage with it. The social platform you choose to advertise on should also be carefully selected, content that generates strong engagement on one social platform isn’t necessarily going to see much engagement elsewhere. There should also be Key Performance Indicators (read our recent article on this here) clearly defined so success can be measured and further optimisations can be made for future campaigns.
Amplification rate
In order to measure how successful your content amplification strategy is, you can calculate what is known as the “amplification rate”, which is the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks. The idea is the higher your amplification rate, the further your content will reach and a higher number of followers willing to associate with your brand. This is particularly useful on for example a Twitter marketing campaign to promote a new service being offered; the first step would be to add up the number of times the post was shared i.e. retweeted, repinned, during a specific time period. The next step is to divide that number by your total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get your amplification rate percentage.
Why use content amplification?
There are almost 5 million blog posts posted each day online, all competing for attention from online users. Among these are many high-quality posts but there is also generic content which doesn’t provide much value, therefor its important the content you choose to amplify is strong and of a high quality to encourage strong emotional connections with your audience.
BuzzSumo, a service that helps discover the best engagement, content and outreach opportunities, analysed the level of content engagement with 1 million posts and the results showed 50% of randomly selected posts received 8 shares or less on social media. This proves why its important that not only high-quality content is published, but perhaps why imore time should be spent on promoting content than initially creating it to maxmise engagement.
If you have some great content you want to push out to a wider audience and build your brand, please get in touch with us for more information.
