“Create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you create.”

This advice from social media marketing thought leader Derek Halpern may go against the grain of your preconceived content marketing strategy. The quality of content that your brand distributes across social media, email and so on must be top notch above all…right?

Truth is that yes, any content that you are willing to put your brand’s name to needs to be at best epic, at a minimum thoughtfully developed, well-crafted and designed. But even the most masterful piece of content that seemed certain to get traffic and leads gushing in can can prove a marketing dead end. This is where expanding and promoting content can help to push it through the bottleneck.

1. Re-purposing content

Any business taking content marketing seriously is already likely to have a stack of white papers, ebooks, blog posts, even videos within its armoury. Getting these seen and consumed by the right people, at the right time can however, be a challenge. There is little more frustrating than having a series of brilliant content that just isn’t getting downloaded.

In a recent post for the Content Marketing Institute, Patrick Whatman of Mention discusses (in detail) the process of repurposing content and working with other brands and/or influencer partners to push it out. Content promotion is one element that people don’t talk about very much and when it is mentioned, it’s even rarer to hear how to actually do it effectively – so I’d encourage you to read Whatman’s post.

2. Pushing content further

Content marketing vanilla-style involves publishing a blog post, say, seeding it on a couple of social channels, and perhaps following up with an e-mail round robin.

What a waste when it has SO much more potential to travel. For example if it’s a podcast you create, push this out on to Apple iTunes or even YouTube. Soundcloud is also growing fast for audio distribution.

LinkedIn is another viable publishing platform and with 250 million monthly active users (as of January 2018), it’s a useful tool for stirring up interaction, with LinkedIn Groups proving particularly valuable for engagement.

With a little outreach, guest posts on other sites with relevant audiences can be an excellent way to maximise your content and build brand awareness; just be sure to create/tweak for original content if so required.

3. The promotion toolkit

In passing, every marketer has a favourite set of tools for expanding content – Majestic SEO, Buffer and Moz are amongst our favourites. When choosing an SEO tool, look for one that rates sites in terms of link acquisition and what specific pages are popular. Most SEO tools produce simple weekly reports on site growth and most also have a YouTube tutorial video to get you up and running.

4. Tried and tested formats

Assuming your basic content is in place, there are several classic format options that will have your original investment working harder for you. This is where marketing turns curation; round-up blog posts (with links to partner’s blogs if you’re short on supply) or a mash up of the pick of your collected e-books as a “best of’ compendium are popular for a reason.

Infographics are another excellent way to repackage information and, thankfully, there are several cost effective options to produce infographics in a short time. Slideshare has been called content marketing’s ‘sleeping giant’, and with 70 million monthly users hungry for easily digestible content, it’s an as-yet under-tapped channel for generating traffic and leads.

There will obviously be some degree of investment in design and copywriting involved in repackaging content in any of these ways.

In his recent article, Whatman suggests aiming higher still, partnering with others in a ‘you share my content, I’ll share yours’ relationship. If you also throw in links to each others’ reciprocal sites in exchange for pre-existing content, there could be much to gain for minimal effort.

If you’ve already spent valuable time and effort on creating stellar content, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t repurpose it, refresh it and maximise its impact.

Are you sitting on dormant content that could be repackaged to effectively attract new leads?