In content marketing, distribution is one of the most critical aspects of your strategy. If you produce great content but don’t distribute it effectively, you will not get the desired results. In this article, we will discuss content distribution and how to create a distribution strategy that works for your business. We will also cover different channels you can use to distribute your content and examples of successful content distribution campaigns.
What is Content Distribution?
Content distribution is the distribution of content to the target audiences to achieve a marketing goal. For example, the goal could be building brand awareness to generate leads or even sales.
Content distribution is putting your business in front of the right audience. You need a well-written content distribution plan to make the campaign cost-effective.
However, it is not as easy as it seems, especially when you are new to content distribution. If you are not cautious enough, you could waste a lot of marketing spending. Forrester reported that a significant share of marketing spending goes down the drain because it does not reach the intended audience. The understanding of content distribution is the key!
Types of Content Distribution
The content can be distributed through various channels such as social media, email, or even paid ads. Naturally, the distribution channels will differ based on the business goals.
There are two types of content distribution:
- Organic: When you distribute your content without spending money, organic content distribution is called. The most common method of organic content distribution is through social media platforms.
- Paid: Paid content distribution is when you use paid channels to distribute your content. This could be anything from Google AdWords to Facebook Ads.
Both organic and paid content distribution have their pros and cons. While organic is free, getting your content in front of people takes a lot more time and effort. On the other hand, paid content distribution is faster but can be expensive.
The best way to decide which content distribution method is best for your business is to first understand your goals. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can create a content distribution strategy to help you reach your goals.
Content Distribution Channels
Content Distribution Channel refers to your platform to reach your target audience. It is the method or process of sharing content with your audience so they can see it.
There are three categories of content distribution channels. They are given below.
1. Earned Content Distribution Channels:
Earned Content Distribution Channels refers to the platforms you use to reach your target audience that don’t require payment, such as social media. Earned content distribution can make your content go viral, improving your search ranking.
How does this work? Earned content distribution involves the promotion of content through third parties. For example, it could be word of mouth (a customer telling others about your brand), product reviews, and retweets. Other earned media distribution examples include articles, press coverage, guest blogging, and forums such as Quora or Reddit.
Anything whatsoever that distributes your content without you is earned content distribution. You might need an outreach tool to help with guest blogging.
Before you earn media distribution, you must have initially created an online presence even for the third parties to be aware of you.
The paid and owned media distribution are the building blocks of earned media distribution.
2. Paid Content Distribution Channels:
Paid media distribution involves making certain payments to promote your content on different platforms. PPC is an example of paid media distribution channel, i.e., you pay a token amount of money every time someone clicks to view the content.
Besides PPC, other examples of paid content distribution include paying Instagram or Twitter influencers to help promote your content, Facebook advertising, and display ads across different websites.
However, paid media can be a complete waste of money if the owned media distribution is not good.
3. Owned Content Distribution Channels:
The word “owned” means you have total control over your content on different distribution platforms, including blogs, email, websites, email campaigns, and social media.
One of the best owned-content distribution channels is Pinterest Marketing. Pinterest is your best friend if your product or services suit the community.
Another best-owned channel for content distribution is email subscribers. These are the highly interested people who want to get emails from you. But not spamming content, but rather something that adds value. We recommend GetResponse as the best tool for building your email subscribers.
Moreover, update your website or blog with SEO articles to rank your content on the first page of search results. It is vital!
How to create a content distribution strategy?
Many marketers miss this, which is probably why they are not getting results. Hence, this needs your full attention and concentration!
1. Know Your Audience:
The essence of content distribution is distributing content not to random audiences but to target audiences. Therefore, the first thing is to know your audience.
Your audiences are the people searching for the keywords, your website visitors or social media followers, your email subscribers, and your customers. Use tools like SEMrush, Facebook Analytics, and Google Analytics to analyze your audience.
Besides, you can request feedback from your customers, social media followers, and email subscribers. From the feedback, you can know what they expect from you and how to position your content to suit their needs.
2. Audit Your Content:
After knowing your audience, the next step is to audit your content. This will help you see your content type and what more you need to create.
Use a content audit template to check what kind of content you have, the topics you’ve covered, the content format, and the issues you need to create.
You can check this guide on content audits from Moz.
You need to audit your old and new content. You can either do it manually or use a tool. Content auditing also helps determine if the range provides the expected value to your audience.
3. Set Your Goal:
Your content distribution strategy must have a goal. The goal can be anything; brand awareness, website traffic, conversion rate, or social media engagement.
Your goal will help you determine the content topics to create and the platforms or channels to distribute your content.
4. Choose Your Content Distribution Platforms:
The next step is to determine where your audience “hangs out.” These are the platforms or channels they use frequently.
The platforms you choose for content distribution should be able to help you achieve your goal. For example, if your goal is increased traffic, you need content distribution platforms to generate traffic to your site.
Social media, email newsletters, and paid ads are popular content distribution platforms.
5. Create Your Content:
Your content distribution strategy will be incomplete without content. Hence, the next step is to create your content.
You can go ahead and create your content after knowing your audience, auditing content, and selecting the distribution platforms to distribute your content.
Media statistics show that 60% of marketers post content each day. It also shows 992 Instagram posts and 8,982 tweets in one second. This means that for your content to be the talk of the town, it must be unique and good.
However, content creation will become easy when you know your audience. Then, your content can revolve around your brand.
6. Distribute Your Content:
The next thing after content creation is content marketing distribution to distribute the content to the right audiences.
You can post your content on different distribution channels such as social media, blogs, guest posts, forums, and communities. However, be sure to optimize content for each channel.
Social media is arguably the best distribution platform for content market distribution; Facebook, for instance, boasts 1.73 billion daily users.
Social media channels allow you to run ads and target specific audiences; you can use this to market your content.
7. Measure your performance:
Track how your content is performing on each distribution channel you have your content on. You can track the performance with Google analytics and social media analytics.
The analytics will help you determine if your content achieves the desired goal. If not, make the necessary changes to your strategy.
It’s advisable to track your content performance weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
Content Distribution Execution Plan
You have made significant progress toward your content distribution goals with a good strategy. But, a system is not worth the paper it’s written on unless you have an execution plan to back it up. So, here are a few tips on creating an effective content distribution execution plan.
- First, you need to have a written Content Distribution Strategy. Then, communicate that to all the team members with explanations.
- Second, prepare the content distribution execution plan for every week or month. The plan can be in calendar format or project management format.
- Third, define the daily expected execution for each of your team members. Ensure that, in total, your team is covering all the channels with the expected frequency of communication.
- Fourth, prepare the RACI matrix. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. There will be one responsible person and a separate accountable person for every task. This will help you assign tasks to your team members and keep track of progress.
- Fifth, measure and analyze the results regularly. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not working. Finally, arrange weekly review meetings where each team member shares their activities, outcomes compared with goals, and plans for improvement in the next week.
You can create an effective content distribution execution plan by following these tips.
Content Distribution Examples
Let’s explore successful companies that owe some of their success to content distribution. It is better to learn from the best.
Content Distribution by Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is one of the few companies with great marketing plans.
We can’t get enough of this content for the best content from Coca-Cola.
The beat is a popular Coca-Cola video content for the London 2012 Olympics, where the brand used music for storytelling.
Our focus is not on the storytelling but on how the campaign yielded 25 million video views; it became the second most talked about after the game. In addition, coca-cola got extra 1.5 million Facebook fans and 21,000 Twitter followers. The content also got 245 million search impressions and other successes.
Coca-cola creates and distributes content across relevant media, and people cannot help but view it. Thus, their audience increased even in the owned media. But, of course, it was the most talked-about after the game (earned media).
In the “Share a Coke” campaign, people had a chance to have a customized coke. This resulted in a 7% increase in sales, and their social media channels witnessed a boom.
Moreover, the campaign illustrated earned media distribution, with people talking about the brand naturally.
Intel’s content marketing Ideology
Another example of content distribution is Intel’s content marketing Ideology.
According to Alyson Griffin, VP of global marketing at Intel Corp., Intel wants to meet its audiences with the right content. So they use varieties of distribution platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to reach the target audiences.
Their idea of using a social media channel is to create exciting content even if it does not generate a lead. If the reader could find it appealing and share the content, that would be a success!
This is a perfect example of maximizing content marketing distribution.
Content Distribution Tools
Now that we’ve covered the basics of content distribution, let’s look at some tools that can help you with your content distribution strategy.
Social Media Distribution Tools:
- We recommend TailWind for content distribution on Pinterest.
- Canva is another tool for content creation and distribution. All come in one package.
Article Distribution Tools:
There is no one-stop solution for article distribution. First, you can use SEMrush and Ahrefs to find suitable sites in your niche. Then you need to use tools like Hunter to identify and verify the email addresses of the website owners. Finally, you can use G-suit or Office 365 to outreach the website owners.
FAQ
When it comes to content distribution for businesses, a few essential methods work well. One of the most common ways to distribute business content is email marketing. This can be done by sending out a regular newsletter with links to your latest blog posts or articles or sharing new content in an email blast with your list of subscribers.
Please read this article for other effective strategies for B2B Content distribution.
There are several ways to distribute content for marketing purposes. The most important part is to have a distribution strategy in place and to use the right tools and channels for your content.
One of the common ways to distribute content is through social media. Social media platforms are a great way to reach a large audience quickly and easily. Many social media distribution tools, such as Hootsuite and Buffer, can help you manage your social media accounts and content distribution.
Another way to distribute content is through paid content distribution. This is where you pay a platform or service to distribute your content to their audience. This can be an effective way to reach new audiences, but ensuring that the platform you choose is relevant to your target audience is essential.
Some common content distribution channels include social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; online classified sites such as Craigslist and Kijiji; and online directories such as Yelp and Google My Business.
There are also many content distribution platforms that businesses can use to reach their target audiences, such as Content Marketing Institute and HubSpot.
Paid content distribution, such as through Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, is a common channel for distributing content.
When creating a content distribution strategy, businesses need to consider what channels will work best for them to reach their target audience.
Conclusion
Content distribution is about distributing content to the right audiences through various channels. First, you need to have a good content distribution strategy for effective content distribution.
Content distribution strategy is strategically distributing content marketing to the right audience for maximum results. This article has provided tools and examples to help you create a content distribution strategy for your business.
If you have questions about content marketing or distribution, feel free to comment below. We would be happy to answer any of your questions.
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One response to “Content Distribution Strategy with Examples & Tools”
Thank you for the detailed Article! Helped what I was looking for