Content Distribution

Your company, your practice, you as a service provider have a story to tell and you have heard from everywhere that this story needs to translate into content. This translation may be through various forms of media such as social media posts, newsletters, articles, info graphics, images and videos. To tell your story you start to assign time and resources to building up your content, amazingly so you start generating some great content, your stories are coming to life, your organizational announcements are presented well through a Press Release, your new product launches have a great video to go along with it and you are excited to release all of this material to the world.

So you go ahead and start putting it up on your social media accounts, add it to your email newsletter and wait for the “visibility” to start pouring in. Now sometimes if this is not done right and mostly every content marketer has faced this – you are greeted by the proverbial pin drop silence on each of these platforms.

That is where you start to doubt your efforts in the great content you have developed. You wonder was it really worth, putting any of it together. Now this is the main mistake an organization or a professional offering a service can make – assuming that content creation is equal to a content strategy. The elements of a content strategy must include a clearly mapped out and relevant Content Distribution strategy. If this is not included more often than not the pin drop silence is going to be a reality.

Keys to building your distribution strategy

Budget for it

With content creation becoming so prevalent, with multiple tools and templates available for creating content on the fly, the real  investment required is on the effectiveness of your content distribution. So ensure you have a budget for this since this is what is going       to help you get the visibility you need and without this, it will be as good as you not having created the content at all.

Identify clear distribution points and metrics

Knowing your key distribution points is essential when building your overall content strategy, the reason for this is your content must get built keeping the nuances of these distribution points in mind. If you intend to use Facebook to maximize visibility – then you are better of using a video and ensuring that the content is light, has some humorous undertones or has high motivational appeal and is highly shareable, similarly if you are looking at LinkedIN – Relate to professional experiences or workplace issue resolution and keep it slightly more formal. Email Newsletters are another way of reaching out to your audience. The success of these emailers is rooted in the extent of effort which has gone in to building your list and how engaging you can make your email content.

If you want a platform which has built in authority and gives you access to credible news coverage then you would draft a Press Release and attach the media / content created with it. By using a Press Release you would be able to distribute this news through a News Distribution Provider and get credible media coverage across multiple news website, journals and maybe even print media. It all depends on how you want your information to be seen. You can check out how Press Releases can really position your brand.

Also define how you would measure your metrics and what are your targets and performance indicators. The budget and metrics go hand in hand each platform has a typical cost attached to distributing your content and can help you gauge what your budgets should be to achieve your goals. Typically key performance indicators would be:

  • Average Time spent on Landing / Content Page
  • Views / Clicks / Engagement
  • Click through Rates / Quality Scores / ROI

Using these metrics you can tweak your platform usage and your content and can actually come up with a winning strategy which uses less than the average budget you assigned to your distribution.

Build and Diversify

Have a long term plan and ensure that you test each and every platform, a content distribution strategy must include organic, paid, earned and Guest media. Use all channels and continue to promote each aspect of content – well distributed content has the ability to give you returns over a long period of time.

You can also choose to build a blog or a knowledge platform of your own; this can really help you get Guest bloggers come to your site in exchange for you posting on their blog. This exchange gives you huge visibility to different market segments and traffic slowly builds up as you grow more and more of your guest blogging relationships.

While there are a few other aspects, if you keep track of these 3 main options and ensure they are being followed through, you will see the number of views, clicks and hits that you get consistently build and soon start to soar on their own. The process and the consistency to continue to follow this process is essential to success, this strategy is not meant for short term explosive results but more for repeated and long term returns. The best of content needs that push to make it that epic, viral and visibility maximizing piece that you are looking for, so if you are busy creating your content, now is the time to take stock and articulate your content distribution strategy.