Everything You Need to Know About Content Distribution
You create top-notch content for your brand but still don’t get the expected results? So maybe you’re doing something wrong… Creating content is not enough to achieve great success and expand your audience, you still need to distribute it properly. How to plan the right content distribution strategy and which channels can you choose from? In this article, I will answer all your questions about content distribution. Let’s dive right in!
Table of contents:
- Types of Content to Distribute
- How To Create An Effective Content Distribution Strategy?
- Content Distribution Channels
- Conclusions
Types of Content to Distribute
For many years marketers around the world believed that only a blog has real power, and they focused mostly on creating blog posts. Fortunately, times have changed and today you have a much wider type of content to choose from. Your choice will depend primarily on your budget, target audience, and goals you want to achieve.
Here are the most common types of content:
| blog posts | ● the most popular content format used by almost every company
● a place to share knowledge with your audience ● perfect for educational, promotional, and product-related content |
| infographics | ● an effective form of knowledge sharing
● an eye-catching content format that immediately attracts users’ attention ● shareable |
| how-to guides | ● help users and give more information about your product or service
● mainly presented as a short video or article |
| webinars | ● educational and highly informative content format
● ideal for product demonstration |
| podcasts & interviews | ● one of the most convenient types of content
● entertaining and educational content |
| case studies & success stories | ● presentation of your achievements and successes
● promotion not only of your brand, but also of your clients |
| videos | ● entertaining content format
● can be distributed on different platforms ● types of video content: unboxing, testimonials, brand videos, live videos |
| ebooks | ● highly informative content
● an effective way to win new newsletter subscribers |
How to Create an Effective Content Distribution Strategy?
You already know what types of content you can choose to distribute. Now it’s time to plan your distribution to make it as efficient as possible. Do not forget any of the steps I will list, and I am sure that your content distribution strategy will exceed your expectations:
1. Discover your audience
This is really one of the key elements of content marketing. After all, you don’t want to create content for any audience, but for your audience. Keep in mind that if you do not properly identify your potential customers, your content distribution strategy will be worth nothing.
At first, you can create a proto-persona, i.e. a persona created according to your intuition, not factual evidence. At a further stage, I advise you to create a real user persona, i.e. an ideal recipient, based on real data collected, for example, from Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights or focus studies.
If you would like to learn more about user personas in marketing, we prepared an extensive guide for you.
2. Conduct a content audit
Just because you’ve started planning your content strategy now doesn’t mean you haven’t published something before. Maybe you have already created some interesting blog posts, infographics or social media posts. In this case, it is good practice to audit your current content to make sure it does not harm your further activities.
There are many tools available that will help you with content audit:
- Screaming Frog – crawls your current content and collects the list of URLs in one place together with relevant data such as title tag and meta description,
- SEMrush – lists the length of your content, the number of backlinks as well as social shares,
- Ahrefs – indicates content gap and keywords you can use in your content.
3. Select content distribution channels
Some people say that choosing content distribution channels is even more important than your content itself. And I completely agree with them! Even if you create great and creative content but publish it on channels that don’t match your audience’s preferences, you’re actually losing your potential. And that would be such a waste…
Below, I present all the most important content distribution channels, thanks to which you will reach more people. I divide them into 3 essential categories: paid, owned, and earned media.
4. Choose types of content
Since you have chosen content distribution channels, it is time to select the best types of content. Above, I have presented content formats, which are currently on top and give you the greatest potential for future success.
Also, remember about the content you already have. Of course, you don’t have to remove it, especially if you’ve already spent quite a lot of time creating it, but I recommend you update your current content (unless it is evergreen content, which has great potential to generate continuous traffic).
5. Set KPIs and goals you want to achieve
Without setting goals, you won’t really know what you’re striving for. So set your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) and specify metrics that you will monitor regularly to determine if certain goals have been achieved. In the table below, I present sample KPIs with metrics just to give you an idea in which direction you can go:
| KPIs | Metrics |
| user engagement | ● comments
● average time on page ● page per session ● bounce rate ● social shares |
| brand awareness/recognition | ● mentions
● share of voice ● reviews |
| SEO | ● backlinks
● mobile traffic ● CTR |
| sales | ● revenue
● ROI ● leads generated |
6. Plan the distribution
If you plan to publish your content regularly, and the editorial content calendar is absolutely a must. Here, a vast variety of tools can come in handy. Even free software such as Google Sheets or Google Calendar can help you to organize the whole process of publishing new content.
Other great calendar tools to try out are, for example:
7. Create your content
You’ve already done a lot: conducted research, selected channels, and content types, planned a publication, so now you can finally get down to work. Remember that good content should also be optimized for search engines. How to do this? On our blog, you will find a guide that explains in detail how to write content that ranks high.
Here are some tools that will help you with content creation:
- AnswerThePublic – to find excellent content topics which your audience is searching for,
- Canva – to create visually pleasing infographics and images for your articles or social media posts,
- MakeMyPersona – to create your buyer persona,
- Grammarly – an online writing assistant to make your content grammatically correct,
- Hemingway – to make your content more readable and clearer,
- Unsplash – to find great free images and photos.
8. Distribute your content
Finally, you can show your content to the world! Optimize your content depending on the selected distribution channel and type. For example, other optimization practices apply to video content than to blog posts.
9. Analyze the effectiveness of your content distribution strategy
The last stage that you can never forget! If you want to find out whether your content is actually effective and brings the expected results, then you must regularly check the selected metrics. Choose the right routine time and conduct the analysis on a weekly or monthly basis.
If you see that the goals and KPIs have not been achieved for a long time, maybe it is a signal that something needs to be changed? Maybe you should choose a different type of content or try out new distribution channels?
Content Distribution Channels
Believe me, when it comes to distribution channels, you have a really huge choice. At first, it may even seem a bit overwhelming. There are 3 basic types of content distribution channels:
- owned media,
- earned media,
- paid media.
Below I present them all in detail.
Owned Media
Website / Blog
This is a good place to start especially if you have a low budget for your content marketing strategy! If you want to create your own content, your website and company blog will be the cheapest and easiest place to distribute it.
What is important, here you have complete control over the entire content distribution process: what and when you publish, which keywords will be included, how your content will be presented and who will see it. Moreover, a company blog is a great way to boost your SEO and increase the number of keywords that your website will be displayed in the organic search results.
Email newsletters
It is a great way to generate leads, yet still not so much appreciated by marketers. There are several reasons behind it: it is quite difficult to do email marketing properly when it comes to technical aspects, as well as simply content creation. But once you find a great email marketing software and build a list of subscribers, you can share your content there.
Email marketing is really effective, especially since here you share content with users who have subscribed to the newsletter, i.e. already have an interest in your brand.
Social media
When it comes to social media, you really have plenty of different platforms to choose from. Among the most popular are: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. But there are, obviously, so much more. You should simply choose those platforms that have the greatest potential to reach more people.
Why is social media the best choice for content distribution? For several reasons:
Let’s stop for a moment at the last point. As I mentioned, social media has a huge potential especially because Google simply trusts brands that remain active on various social media platforms and use them to communicate with users. Here, I gathered some essential data about the most popular social media platforms just to show you that they really have enormous power:
November 2020
Earned Media
Guest posting
You can start cooperating with other well-known brands in your industry or bloggers who have alarge reach and offer them guest posting. It is a great way to meet new people, build positive relationships with them and present yourself as a specialist in your field. Make a list of relevant bloggers and contact them with an offer to create content for their blog.
Reviews & recommendations
Users simply love to share their recommendations with others and recommend the products they use. And this is another great idea for content distribution. Why? For you, it is practically free, as it is the users who generate the content themselves, and what is more, it does not require much time and energy from you. Sometimes, all you have to do is simply encourage users to recommend and share your content, and they will take care of the rest.
Social media shares
This way of earned content distribution is quite similar to the previous one. In this case, users distribute your content on various social media platforms by sharing it with others. And believe me, users love to share high-quality content that they consider valuable.
To make it easier for them, you can add social media buttons – clickable icons added most often on blogs that allow users to easily share your content on their private social media profiles.
Paid Media
PPC
If you plan your PPC (pay-per-click) strategy well, you can effectively increase the number of leads generated. In this model, you pay when users interact with your paid advertisement that appears in Google search results.
If you would like to start a Google Ads campaign to gain new customers fast and distribute your content effectively, our SEM specialists may help you with that!
Sponsored articles
Sponsored articles are a paid long-format content published on different domains (usually with high SEO parameters and massive web traffic). It is a popular content distribution channel for several reasons. Thanks to sponsored content, you can:
Influencer marketing
This is one of the most expensive forms of content distribution, but many brands cooperate with powerful influencers who then distribute their content among followers and promote their brand and products. Offer cooperation with well-known personalities, which are very popular and valued in your business’ niche. This strategy, using social proof, can guarantee you a rapid and efficient distribution of your content.
Paid social ads
Above, I mentioned paid ads in the search engine, but remember that you can promote your content in various social media platforms as well. Through Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, you will be able to create and share ads that will make you reach a much wider target audience.
Conclusions
As you can see, creating the content itself may not be enough to achieve success with your content marketing campaign. You should also choose the appropriate content type and content distribution channels that have the greatest potential to reach your goals and KPIs. I hope that from now content distribution will no longer be problematic for you.
If you are looking for experts who will plan a long-term content marketing strategy for you, which will be loved not only by users but also by Google crawlers, feel free to contact us. Our SEO specialists will be happy to help you!
And if content rocks your world and you want to learn more about it, be sure to check out our other articles: