Content Marketing Series: Distributing Your Content for Maximum Impact
This article is the fifth in a series on how to create an effective content marketing strategy for your business.
So far, our content marketing series has focused on the development phase. But once your content has been polished and packaged, you’ll need a way to share it with your audience. It’s time to talk about content distribution.
In case you missed it, you can check out our best tips on content marketing, defining your target audience, setting goals, building a content marketing framework, and creating content that converts. Let’s now take the next step in sharing your content for the purposes of lead generation, demand generation, and other corporate goals.
What is content distribution?
Content distribution is the process of making your content available to your audience through different channels. This could mean anything from publishing blog posts on your website to sharing videos on social media.
More importantly, good content distribution requires you to think critically about the best ways for your content to reach your audience. Developing a content distribution plan can help you seamlessly share every new piece of content in the right places for maximum impact.
Why does content distribution matter?
The goal of a content distribution strategy is to reach as many people as possible with your message. What good is creating great content if no one ever sees it?
Strategic content distribution helps your content gain more visibility. It can also help to make your content and brand appear more credible if it’s shared through high-profile, trustworthy sources. The opposite is true, too: When your content is shared through suspicious or untrustworthy sources, it can weaken brand credibility.
Taking an intentional approach to distribution is a critical part of an effective content marketing strategy. Ideally, you should know where you plan to promote your content before creating it so you can align your content creation with the channel and audience.
Where and how to promote your content
The question of where to distribute your content should begin with the foundational audience work you’ve done, which defines where your audience spends their time in the digital ecosphere. Meeting your audience where they are is a critical consideration in deciding where to place your content.
Where and how you distribute content matters just as much as the content itself. Your distribution channels typically fall into one of three categories: owned, earned, and paid.
Owned distribution is done through your brand’s own channels, such as your corporate website or social media accounts.
Earned distribution refers to third parties that promote your content on your behalf. Examples include blogs, news outlets, and guest blogs.
Paid distribution applies to the ads you pay for to grow your content reach. Google Ads, social media ads, and sponsored posts are the best examples of these.
Let’s look at some specific ways you can promote your content to achieve your goals.
SHARE YOUR CONTENT ON YOUR OWN CHANNELS
Your branded channels offer a natural home for your content. These include your company’s website, social media pages and profiles, email marketing, and any other outlets you use to stay in touch with your target audience.
A content distribution cadence using your own channels might look something like this:
Write a blog post and publish it on your corporate website.
Share a link and a blurb about the blog on your company’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
Create an email newsletter about the blog and send it to your subscribers.
Ask employees to share the blog with their own social media audiences.
You can repeat this process with other types of content, too, such as eBooks, white papers, videos, infographics, case studies, webinars, and podcasts. This approach is also a part of our “reuse, repurpose, recycle” strategy of optimizing content ROI.
SET UP CAMPAIGNS AND NURTURE STREAMS
Content can also be shared strategically through campaigns and nurture streams. This option usually falls under owned or paid distribution, but it can also be earned.
This is a common approach for lead generation campaigns. Content can serve as lower funnel lead magnets to capture and nurture leads with additional content developed specifically for each stage of the buyer journey.
For example, let’s say you create an eBook or case study that you offer for free in exchange for a name and email address. The lead enters your nurture stream, where you can continue building brand awareness and trust via email with helpful content and resources. You can learn more about the lead’s interest based on the actions they take on your content.
PARTNER WITH INFLUENCERS
One way to expand your content’s reach is to partner with influencers in your niche. Influencer marketing is often considered more effective than traditional marketing because it appears more authentic and honest. Influencers are trusted sources in their niche and need to have their followers’ best interests in mind.
In a content marketing partner strategy, influencers can be individuals as well as other brands. Examples of using influencers for content distribution include:
Using affiliate marketing where influencers earn revenue share based on conversions
Hiring influencers to share your content on their channels
Sponsoring an email, blog post, case study, or webinar on another brand’s platform that isn’t a competitor but shares your target audience
Guest posting on paid membership sites, like the Entrepreneur Leadership Network
Working with influencers is almost always a paid distribution option. You’re offering a fee to the influencer in exchange for sharing your content with their audience.
EARN MENTIONS FROM THIRD-PARTY SOURCES
Earning mentions from bloggers, media, or other third parties typically happens organically (hence the term “earned”). But you can also be proactive about getting published on other channels for free.
For example, if you’re reading an article and believe your content could add value to it, email the writer and propose adding a backlink to your content to strengthen their article. This process can take quite a bit of time and effort because tracking and finding those articles and reaching out to authors is a manual process. However, it can be worthwhile if you ultimately earn backlinks, mentions, or other opportunities to grow your brand awareness.
How Prime 8 Marketing Consultants Can Help
Content distribution needs to align with the type of content you’re producing, the purpose of the content, the intended audience, and their stages in the buyer journey. Taking a strategic approach to content marketing helps you know where and how to publish your content in a timely manner.
Prime 8 marketing consultants can help you build content distribution into your strategy based on your audience and business goals. We take into account small nuances across a variety of channels to help you find your best fit. If you’d like to explore how we can help, reach out to us. If you’d like to explore consulting as a career, check out working with Prime 8 to learn more.
