Promoting complex information online – learning from advertising and using the information spectrum

How can you best ensure that any complex or detailed information you communicate is shared not only efficiently, but reaches a wide, yet relevant, audience?

A lot of people are wary of buzz-terms and vaguely dodgy analogies, and quite rightly. However, it can be useful to think of the promotion of your information in advertising terms.

Information as product

Your content/ideas/data/findings/reports are your product. Your website, where people can access and download the content, can be thought of as the shop. So the overall aim is to get people to your website and get them reading, downloading and using your content – essentially ‘buying’ your product.

A fundamental aspect of this approach is to make it obvious why your product is relevant to your audience, who are the shoppers in the advertising analogy (which I feel I may be stretching a little but you get the idea!). Basically, give them a good reason why should they visit your shop and ‘buy’ your content in particular.

Relevant vs recent

It’s also helpful at this point to think in terms of relevancy over recency – don’t feel you can only promote your latest posts – think in terms of topic and the wider context. For example, tying in your information and content with existing campaigns like local or national awareness campaigns, or linking it to current events, can be really effective in engaging a relevant audience and showing the value of your work to the discussion.

Meeting your audiences’ information needs

The audience you’re marketing to varies widely depending on the topic and nature of what you do, however it is generally important to offer a range of content to meet the information needs of varying audiences. In traditional advertising you might run different adverts across different media: a newspaper advert for an audience of commuters, a television advert aimed at a specific demographic of viewers and a radio advert for people driving on the school run for example.

So, to use this principle to promote online content, and to really maximise your reach, it is helpful to offer content along what I call the information spectrum.

I developed this diagram when I worked in academia, but the concepts are easily transferable to any kind of complex information-sharing endeavour.  You can see that as well as producing a report and a matching exec summary, you may also want to consider blogging on the topic, using data visualisation and infographics to make the information more accessible and then finish it off by using social media.

This ensures that people with varying levels of interest and expertise have accessible pathways into your work and you’re not just relying on the same old email networks (even though, in the days of the Great Social Media Trash Fire, it seems much more prudent just to send an e=newsletter).