Useful advice and insights from your Subject-Matter Experts are making their way into the universe. When you click ‘Publish’ on a value-packed piece of content you’ve accomplished something big.  Now it’s time to ensure that content is reaching your private equity firm’s target audience.

You will need a thorough strategy to distribute and promote your content so that it gets in front of your desired audiences – after all, that’s who this content plan is about, right? Email will be key here, and that’s where your marketing automation or email marketing platform comes in. Sharing content on your social platforms and to other publications will advance your reach and positively impact SEO too.

Likewise, using a scheduling tool will make it easy and efficient to distribute content as you get into your groove. Remember, this is all about building a well-oiled machine.

How & Where to Distribute & Promote Your Content

The goal here is to create a publishing system that is easily repeatable for each of your content pieces. Here are recommended steps when publishing and distributing your content:

1. Promote Internally & Refine
After you publish your post to your site let it sit for a week or so. During that week you can make any tweaks you’d like and share it internally with the team. Promoting your content internally is a huge win for your organization yet often not purposefully addressed. This can help encourage team engagement with content sharing and even garner suggestions for future posts.

2. Email to Your Subscribers
For external promotion, we first focus on email – the number one way (by a long shot) that content is shared in the B2B world. It makes sense to send your content to your list of subscribers first as they have provided their information.  They deserve special treatment – give them the first crack at your valuable content before it is announced to others.

Laptop with image of an open envelope on the screen with envelopes flowing from it, demonstrating email sending

It’s officially time to work the features of your marketing automation or email marketing tool. You’ve kicked the tires of your tech stack, and now it’s time to get it out there on the road to see what it can do. You have your list or segmented lists of leads, broken up by industry. Some of your posts may strike more generally and others will be industry-specific based on your targeting goals. You’re going to be hitting your audience with a new way of communicating and providing valuable information, which is pretty exciting, so plan a way to introduce your content in that first email you send. Your email should be well branded and give a summary/teaser that points to your full post on your website.

Be intentional about who is receiving what content. You don’t want to send something that has no relevance to your email subscribers and especially not to anyone that you have added to a list through an anonymous lead generated by your website.

To further validate that email is the best starting point – a survey from the marketing software experts at Kapost found that 77% of their B2B customers preferred email for sharing content, followed by LinkedIn & Twitter, which are up next.

3. Post to Social Channels
A week or two after emailing, you will want to get your blog posts out to those following your social channels.  Likely that’s just going to be Twitter and LinkedIn, since most private equity firms are not heavily involved in social media.

LinkedIn – It should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that this is the first social media platform you should use to promote content on. Your audience lives on LinkedIn, right? So of course sharing your posts here is critical. This space is ripe for positioning yourself as a thought leader, and here are some really effective ways to use it.

LinkedIn Profile Page
  • Post your article to your firm’s page – Simply copying and pasting the link as the post, which populates the post’s image, is one way you could do this. But LinkedIn doesn’t want its audience leaving its platform, so one workaround is to post a picture and put the link to the actual article in the comments below. Either way, pull some content from the blog article that will be most captivating for your audience for the post caption, compelling them to click the link and finish reading the article.
  • Personal Page Post by Subject-Matter Experts – Although you can’t post articles to a business profile (like you can to your personal profile), you might incorporate personal article publishing by your Subject-Matter Experts into your plan. If you have one or two thought leaders that are really driving the content, articles can be published under their name – thus giving broader reach and more authoritative credit to the content.
  • Use Hashtags – Whenever you post your content to LinkedIn use hashtags, as they will elevate your reach to those following the topics you’re adding value to. Be conservative with those hashtags – use no more than four that are relevant to the actual content of your post. So although you may have some fundamental hashtags like #PrivateEquity or #PrivateCapital, you should be changing them up based on each piece of content.
  • Use Groups – You are probably members of groups on LinkedIn that you’re already utilizing to generate leads. This is an excellent space to offer up your content that matches the nature of what group members are looking for.

Twitter – If you don’t already have one, get a Twitter account set up and start building your follower base. Like on any social media platform your company is using, purposefully choosing who to follow is where you begin. That would include: prospective portfolio companies who are in your niche and their associates, other alternative investment thought leaders and influencers, and of course your team.

Mock Up of a Twitter profile to demonstrate the display

These are the accounts that you want to reach with your content and those who will also help you with sharing it out to others.

Twitter opens the door to a different type of marketing of your content. Its general format lends itself nicely to posting up links in a conversational tone, all peppered with your expert insights. If you are going to build your Twitter presence well, you should be engaging with the content other people are creating, too. This means re-sharing tweets, commenting when appropriate, and the like.

Like with any social media presence, not every post needs to have tons of engagement to make your efforts here worthwhile. Showing up consistently to share your latest insights via your blog, sharing content that aligns with your goals, and engaging with those you follow, will help you make the most of this platform.

Regarding hashtags – carefully pick one or two that smoothly fit into your post content. Although you are permitted to use more, you are more limited on characters here than any other platform, so be especially strategic about how you integrate hashtags in your tweets.

What about Instagram? If you’re already active on Instagram, that’s great – it can provide a picture of your firm’s culture, which plays a part in establishing trust. This isn’t the place where you focus on your blog content, though. Here, you should be promoting content that is more graphic and culture-focused – like an end-of-the-year piece or one that hones in on your firm’s culture. It’s not where you’re likely to find success with niche industry pieces, however.

4. Bake in Automation Where You Can
If you are using a marketing automation platform be sure to take advantage of its workflow and automation features. For example, if a user is reading one of your posts about a specific industry or service, you can send a follow-up email a week later that appears to be a personalized email introducing yourself and providing some other helpful materials you have for that industry. It’s possible that they’ll reply, but at the least they will open the email, stay on your list, and be nurtured by the subsequent useful materials you send to them for their industry.

Create a Publishing Plan for Every Post

It’s officially time to open your content publishing tool and start thinking toward the future.

However you utilize your content publishing tool, the fundamental point here is that you should be setting a method for distributing and promoting content. Not every tool will automate for each platform you’re using, although different plug-ins and workarounds can assist with that.

Having a roll-out plan for your posts over the course of two to three weeks will help you get the deepest reach possible. A regular schedule will also give your audience an expectation of when they should be hearing from you.

The calendar below displays the schedule for distributing and promoting one piece of content, based on researched best practices. Some A/B testing can be used to discover what works best for your audience and is always recommended for assistance with refining the process.

Here’s our breakdown for the schedule:

Content Calendar example for the month of July
  • Blog Post Publishing – This is the first action to set off the rest of the chain. Research shows us that Monday at 10 AM is a good time to introduce new content to the web – and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Publishing the post may even get some traffic on its own, and you can keep an eye on analytics to see how it’s performing. Allowing some space between when you publish and distribute provides time to catch any edits and make sure your post is in the best shape for broader distribution.
  • Send That Email – Try out Saturday at 10 AM (a proven time for a strong email open rate) of the same week your post was published. Email as your first distribution step provides a perk to your subscribers of having early access to your expert’s insights.
  • Share with Twitter –  Wednesday at 9 AM is among the best times of the week to use this particular channel. Set that post for the Wednesday following the week you published the post.
  • Share on LinkedIn – Although general B2B advice is to post to LinkedIn before or after working hours or during a lunch break, you should get an idea of when your audience is most likely to be engaging. With LinkedIn already as the main social space for private equity firms, you may already have that sense within the context of your own audience – so start by posting at that time.
  • SME Published Article to LinkedIn – If they’re on board, your Subject-Matter Expert behind the blog post can publish the content to their personal profile. With their personal profile being affiliated to your firm, and the inclusion of proper mentions (think: “Here’s my most recent post for [Insert Your Business Name Here]”), this is just one more chance to expand your content’s reach in a meaningful way. This bonus step is one that you can gauge to be a fit for your firm or not. As always, adapt to what fits your firm best.

Repeating the Distribution & Promotion Process

One of the major benefits of this machine that you are building is that the process outlined above will naturally get easier and easier over time. It will take time and practice to get into the rhythm, but you will land at a schedule that works for you. There will be tune-ups and repairs along the way, of course, based on how you analyze and measure your content’s success. Those will only be small maintenance points in the scheme of your content strategy, however.

Next – Step 5: Measure and Adapt