Expert Q&A: Robyn Pierce on promoting your content online

You may have written the world’s best piece of B2B content. But unless you can get eyes on it, it won’t raise anyone’s awareness or generate even the most lukewarm of leads. With millions of marketers fighting for online attention, how can you make sure your piece stands out?

To get some advice on the art of online content promotion, we spoke to Robyn Pierce, an expert in social media promotion, LinkedIn marketing, paid social strategy, and campaign management.

Radix: Hi Robyn, let’s start with a basic one. Where should B2B marketers be sharing their content? Is it all about LinkedIn?

Robyn: Well, it’s the one social network that absolutely positions itself as a professional network. And from a paid media point of view, there are lots of different ways you can target people based on their professional lives, whether that’s their job title or the company they work for. So it gives you the confidence that you can reach the right people to influence a buying decision.

However, there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about “humanising B2B”. We’re people – we don’t live on LinkedIn, and actually lots of us never visit it. That’s where Meta comes in. About 10 years ago, I was talking at Ignite about how you should ignore Meta at your peril. Lots of people instinctively dislike it, but everyone is on it and it has the biggest global audience. So, I think LinkedIn and Meta are good bookends of a social strategy.

Where you actually put your content will depend on various factors, including budget. Do you have the budget to diversify across multiple channels?

Radix: So that’s the ‘where’. What about the ‘how’? Is there any advice you can give to people about how to share their content?

Robyn: One thing that’s important to remember is that nobody’s on social media looking to fill in your lead-gen form and buy. That’s not what we’re doing on there. So that can be a little bit problematic if you’ve got clients who are obsessed with leads. Marketers want to use lead-gen forms on LinkedIn, and they pay through the nose. But those are still cold leads that need to be nurtured.

I think it’s also a good idea to think about social media as awareness. It’s very good for that and for engagement. It can absolutely help generate leads that you can then bring into nurture campaigns – so it’s useful for that rather than sales-ready leads. You can’t just hand those leads straight over to sales.

Radix: You mentioned awareness. How important is that as part of a marketing strategy – and is it something that can be measured?

Robyn: It’s interesting. B2B companies are some of the wealthiest, most successful businesses in the world that you’ve never heard of, because they don’t spend money on brand advertising. But I think that’s changing. I find the concept really interesting; that mental availability you have for a brand that you already trust. There’s definitely an argument that engagement isn’t the important thing all the time, and it’s about having yourself in front of people and building that familiarity with your audience.

The problem there is how do you justify that investment to your CFO? Because it’s hard to trace the results. And people don’t necessarily stick in the role long enough to say, “Look, five years down the line, here is how much we’ve grown.” There’s a lot of focus on immediate returns.

Radix: Is there a point where awareness can be a negative? If people aren’t engaging with your content, can it just feel like they’re being spammed after a while? How do you avoid that?

Robyn: Some of this comes down to experience. But you can measure something called frequency which will show you the average number of times someone has seen your ad. We often talk about seven being the sweet spot. So someone will need to see your ad around seven times before they take the desired action.

That means you need to find the right size of audience for the budget you’ve got – and make sure your campaign can run long enough for them to see your ads enough times to take action. Sometimes that means you’re better off targeting a smaller audience to reach that frequency. This is something that often gets overlooked. People will attribute a lack of engagement to creative fatigue or all sorts of things, but it’s much more likely that the right people haven’t seen it enough times.

Radix: So how can you work out why people aren’t engaging with your ads? Is there a proven method?

Robyn: Having a testing mentality is the only way you’ll ever work that out. But people can overcomplicate that, too. You need to make sure you only test one aspect at a time. It could be the headline, or the image, or whatever. But if you change more than one thing it becomes very difficult to pinpoint what made the difference. It requires a lot of patience and discipline, and you can test different elements over multiple campaigns at once. But it also requires ownership – whose responsibility is it?

The other thing to look out for is that some platforms optimise themselves, so unless you manually set them to evenly rotate your ads then the platform will automatically choose the one it thinks is performing best, so they might not all get a fair chance to be seen.

Radix: How should an organic social strategy work alongside a paid one?

Robyn: There should definitely be some sort of synergy between your organic strategy and your paid strategy, and each should complement the other. Hopefully, over time, you’ve built up a community for your organic posts, so what you want to talk to them about will be different to what you put on your paid ads. But there will be crossover, and organic posts will support your paid campaigns.

The difference is that organic has lots of jobs to do. It’s not just about promoting your products and services, it’s also about championing the people within your business, your customers, and your values, and promoting opportunities like job roles and grad schemes. Organic social is a really content-heavy channel and it doesn’t often get the investment or resources needed to sustain it.

If you can build a community from your organic posts, it can be useful to push out messages before you turn on paid activity, so you have some initial engagement before you put marketing spend behind it. That can also be a good way to see what types of posts are resonating.

But don’t make the mistake of just using the same content on organic as you do on paid. Sometimes you can do that,  and there’s also no harm in putting money behind a particularly well-performing organic post. But for the most part they should be viewed differently.

Radix: Finally, once your campaign is over, are there any ways to keep driving traffic to your content?

Robyn: Repurposing content is really important here. If it’s something you’ve spent a lot of time on and put a lot of love into, then you want to be able to use it in as many ways as possible. For instance, if you have a piece that’s called Five Hard Truths for CMOs, then each of those truths can become a little campaign in itself. So think about ways to turn your hero asset into as many useful things as possible, like infographics and blogs that can all feed back into it.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on trends. Is a piece you wrote a year ago suddenly relevant again? Can you update a piece based on an emerging trend or new information? There are lots of options, so don’t stop until you’ve explored them all.