Content marketing has become a hugely popular marketing strategy in recent years. Brands have learned that simply publishing free content can help earn loyal customers. But as more and more brands engage in content marketing, it gets harder and harder to get recognition for it. Social media is still technically free but platforms have wised up and changed their algorithms so that brands that don’t pay to promote posts are much less likely to be seen. It’s free to start a blog but to get readers, especially early on when you don’t already have a large base of followers. So how do you jumpstart your content marketing campaign? Here are five strategies that can help you cast a wider net with your content marketing efforts.

Text your SMS subscribers

If you already have your customers’ permission to text them, that means they’ve entrusted you with their mobile phone number. It means they’re already loyal customers. When you upload a video to your YouTube channel or post a new blog article on your website, why not text your mobile subscribers to let them know. You can even use the SMS channel as a content marketing channel on its own. Provide a one-sentence synopsis of a larger content piece and text it to your SMS list along with a link to the full piece.

Harness the power of social media

Through a combination of paid and organic advertising, social media can be a powerful outlet for your content. As mentioned earlier, the algorithms that social media platforms use to prioritize different posts change occasionally so you can be more effective if you understand the current algorithms. To maximize your effectiveness you’ll want to experiment with audience targeting and do some A/B split testing with different audience limiters and different times of day.

Partner up with influencers

Since your audience will be small at first, it’s always a good strategy to team up with people who have a larger audience to help you spread your content. Influencers are key people who your audience already follows online. If you’ve done plenty of research on your audience, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who their influencers are. Influencers will be more receptive to helping you distribute your content to their audience if you’ve established a relationship with them first. A great way to do this is to engage with their posts on social media, share their content with your audience, submit guest blog articles and invite them to submit a guest blog article. You can also invite them to do an interview which you can live stream or upload to YouTube.

Consider paying for article placement

You can write your own press releases when you want to spread newsworthy information to relevant publications but unless your brand is already a brand in your field, you may have a hard time getting the bigger publications to bite. At least at first, you may have to be willing to pay for article placement in the publications that your target audience actually reads.

Make your content contagious

This last tip has to do with the content itself. The real goal of content marketing is to get it to “go viral.” When your content goes viral, you don’t really have to do anything to spread it far and wide. It will spread organically as people forward it along to their friends and family. Creating content that’s contagious so that it spreads on its own costs you nothing but it’s tricky to accomplish. It’s more of an art than a science and getting content to go viral depends a lot on luck or factors we simply don’t understand. You can give your content the best chance by keeping it short and making it funny. Also make sure that you make your content easy to share. Blog articles should include social media “share” buttons at the top to facilitate sharing.