Content distribution is ground zero for your content marketing program – the point where you out your goals, audience insights, tactical choices, and creative executions to the test. You may have spectacular content available for your readers. However, there is no point in creating it if they don’t read it.
You need to understand how and when your users like you to deliver your content to them. Therefore, you need to modify your content and promotional tactics just enough to cater to the needs of different audiences. Read on to find out the importance of proper content distribution and how you can invest your time more efficiently.
Content Distribution is Critical for Your Content Marketing Efforts
The primary goal of any marketing campaign is to increase the traffic flow to the company’s website. Then this traffic needs to convert into buyers or returning users at least. Now, the best way to do this is to appeal to a larger section of users.
However, everyone has different preferences. The content or the overall information that you would like to provide to your customers needs to be catered accordingly to these varied tastes and delivered to more customers.
A considerable misunderstanding exists among many people that if you create more content relevant to more people, then you will get more traffic. However, if people aren’t aware that your content exists, there will be no increase in traffic.
In that case, you need to give more focus to content marketing than content creation. Consider a scenario where you create 200 blog posts and another one where you create 500 blog posts. The same time that you put into creating the extra 300 blog posts can be used to advertise or market the 200 already written. This promotion would not only increase your reach, but it will also raise the conversion rates of your audiences.
In this post, we shall explore the various methods you can use to distribute your content.
Free Content Distribution
Free content distribution methods come under the umbrella of ensuring that your content reaches more people who already like your content. You can promote your content without pulling out your credit card to make things happen, but it will take time to make it work effectively. Here are some actions to take to ensure that you can make free distribution methods work for you.
Grow A Network of Target Audiences
The most critical step before you start promoting your website or content is to form a network of people with whom you can share it. However, this network shouldn’t consist of just anybody. If you do this, you aren’t promoting your content; you are just spamming people. Your audience network essentially needs to be your target audience or like-minded individuals.
For example, if you are running a website about car parts, you need to create a network of car enthusiasts or businesses who are in the industry. Trying to add people with no interest in the industry will drive up costs and reduce conversion rates.
Create Multiple Promotional Posts
Once you have created your network of like-minded individuals, it is essential to market your content to them. However, when it comes to most online forums, there are high chances that your posts get pushed to the bottom by other posts thus minimizing the exposure that it can get.
Unfortunately, not everyone in your target audience will be online at the same time. So you have to ensure that your promotional posts are available to others at different times. Depending on the forum you are planning to share it on and what kind of post you have, this time can vary from a few hours to a few days.
However, promoting the same post multiple times has its disadvantages. Your users who have already viewed the post and your content on your website may get annoyed by this, and you might lose them. To prevent this from happening, you need to change the image of the post and probably the caption too.
A sit down with some professionals can help you decide what the correct time will be to post the new content ad exactly how to market it without annoying others.
Republish Your Content in Hubs like Linkedin, Medium, or Tumblr
Posting on your blog and then promoting that post will lead to some people reading it. However, this depends entirely on your conversion rates. Imagine if there were sites with 100 or 1000 times more monthly visitors than you which let you post on them for free.
Situations like this are where content republishing sites like LinkedIn or Medium come in.
You can post on these websites by merely creating an account with them. All the posts are well organized, which means that you may not even have to promote your posts. The website will do it for you by identifying people who are interested in similar content.
Answering Questions
Another great way to publicize a current post is to answer various questions throughout the net. Websites like Quora or Yahoo answers have a treasure trove of questions which are perfect opportunities to promote your post.
All you need to do is find out a question on these websites which have a connection to some of your content. Then, you can answer the question in brief and link out your content as a more in-depth answer.
The best practice is to ensure that the question you are going for is a trending one and thus will generate more leads. However, don’t be afraid to promote less popular posts as well.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a great way to link back to your content. Guest posting is where you create a post for another website around their theme. However, this post has some relation to an article or some other content on your site. So, while you are creating the content for them, you have to subtly (but not too subtly) suggest the readers visit your website through a link for more information.
This arrangement works so well since the site you are working for gets high-quality content for free while you get a link back to your website. Not only does it help with SEO but also enables you to gain access to several more visitors than your site currently has. Depending on how good the content is, you might get much more traffic to your website.
Again, professionals will be able to help you select the best site for this and will also negotiate on your behalf.
Search Engine Optimization
Probably in this day and age, SEO comes standard with almost every content created. However, some people forget the power of SEO. Essentially you are modifying your post to ensure that the search engine picks it up for specific keywords when entered by the user. The ultimate goal of SEO is to appear on the first page of google and preferably in the few titles.
SEO helps drive a high amount of organic traffic to your website. If you do SEO correctly, you won’t need to promote your content as much. Google promotes it for you if it feels you have relevant information for the user. The best part about this is that it is a one-time investment of resources. Once your post is optimized, you don’t need to worry about it. You will keep generating organic traffic to it.
Paid Content Distribution
Free content distribution methods save you a great deal of money. However, they are more time-consuming and target a lesser number of people than the paid methods. As the headline says, you will have to pull out your credit card for this method of distribution, but it will get your message to more people much faster than the free distribution methods we mentioned earlier.
Here are some actions to take to make paid content distribution work for you.
Create Social Media Sponsored Posts
Nowadays, the easiest way to get paid publicity is to create ads in social media. Most of the people in the world use one or the other form of social media. By doing this, you can target a large number of people in one fell swoop.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are great examples of this. Based on your targeting settings, they will display your ads to your target audience. In short, all you have to do is give you advertisement to these sites, and they will even do the targeting for you. Facebook has some fantastic features for people willing to do business on social media.
Reach Out to Influencers in Your Field
Recently there has been a massive trend of influencer marketing. Influencers are individuals or groups of people (public figures) who have a huge fan following. These fans are greatly “influenced” by these public figures. Thus, paying these influencers to advertise something can lead to a lot of lead generation.
Now, these public figures don’t need to be very famous or anything. They only need to be known to a significant amount of people in their field.
For example, I know someone who had a few roommates who loved first person shooter games. They saw a prominent YouTuber playing the same game suggesting that they should use some software to improve their accuracy. Guess what happened? Suddenly, his roommates downloaded the software that was recommended by this “Influencer.”
There are influencers available in almost every field, which is what makes this form of marketing such an attractive one.
Create an Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate marketing is kind of like a mix between influencer marketing and guest posting. What happens is that you let someone advertise for you on his or her websites or video channels. In return, you give them a cut of the sales when you realize one of their users is who bought from you.
This form of marketing is great because it guarantees that you are only paying after you see results. In most other methods of marketing, you pay someone to market for you, and there is no guarantee of results.
Advertise The Old Fashioned Way (but online)
Last but not the least is good old advertising. Circulating ads through various vendors can help you generate brand awareness. This mode of marketing has access to the most number of users. Unfortunately, it does not guarantee the same type of results that affiliate marketing does.
However, you can decrease the losses by using marketing tactics like retargeting or using only PPC ads which ensure higher success rates.
Content Repurposing
Content repurposing is essentially making rather significant changes to the format of your content and in many cases the delivery. However, the core content remains the same.
What this does is saves you the time to research for additional content (something that usually takes a fair amount of time). You could convert your content from one form to another and serve a broader audience in the process. Some common repurposing examples are listed below.
Videos and Guides
For some people, videos are better than guides or vice versa. Converting one to the other can help increase the number of people you market your content to while making it more appealing. Recipes are an excellent example for this – you could have a video on youtube making something from this recipe, and have that same recipe on your website as well.
Videos and Informational Articles
Similar to the previous example, sometimes videos are better, especially in the case of informational articles. So, if you are trying to explain a concept in your website, try doing so with a video to increase your user base.
Infographics and Data
Infographics are a great way to convey information with a great deal of data to people. Moreover, these infographics can easily find a place in most of the social media websites like Pinterest or Tumblr.
While repurposing, it is not necessary to convert only one form to the other. You can turn a single post into infographics, videos, or even podcasts. The ones listed above are a few of the many possibilities. If you sit down with us, we will guide you on which repurposing tactics to you and which channels to use to distribute it.
Wrapping It Up
The rate of content creation is increasing every day. However, most of this content doesn’t see the light of day because their creators didn’t spend enough time marketing it. At the end of the day, the number of people that look at your content and how many people act on it matter.
With all the opportunities available to help you spread your brand’s value far and wide, there’s no excuse for letting your best assets wither and die in obscurity. Distribute your content wisely and promote it conscientiously, and your brand will enjoy a significant performance boost with every piece of content you create.
However, even with this information, it can still take a lot of time and energy to get everything in place for your content distribution strategy, regardless of which strategies you plan to use. Let us take that burden off of your shoulders so you can concentrate more on tasks that only you can do for your business.
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