Marketers and influencers produce tons of exciting material to keep their audiences interested yearly. Creating stunning photographs, films, blogs, and other content formats is simple with the resources at our disposal today.
However, even if we produce a ton of excellent content without a distribution plan, our target audience won’t be aware of them.
The most crucial component of content marketing is content distribution. It establishes a brand’s likelihood of success.
You can learn the methods and resources you need to get your content in front of your audience from our Ultimate Content Distribution Guide. You’ll have a practical content distribution strategy that you can implement quickly and effectively by the end of the tutorial.
What is content distribution?
Content distribution is known as publishing and promoting your material over various online channels. This is how your target audience will come across and use your material.
We frequently believe that the dissemination of material happens after its creation. We organize a fantastic photo shoot. Make amazing pictures. Later, you can worry about what platform to publish it on. This strategy is incorrect.
Any content marketing campaign must start with content distribution. Before conceiving the material, you should plan for the distribution channels while developing a content strategy.
This guarantees you make the most of your time and resources to produce the most lucrative and valuable content.
Importance of Content Distribution
WordPress users publish more than 5 million blogs per day. However, Ahrefs says Google does not account for more than 90% of visits to online content. This suggests that some websites never appear in Google searches and receive no organic traffic.
What’s the prime suspect? Zero backlinks.
Backlinks are connections between websites. These are crucial SEO ranking elements that support Google’s positioning. Using content distribution as a backlinking strategy is one option.
Distribution of material enables brands to stand out in a sea of overwhelming content. Likely, what you’re saying isn’t entirely original. If your intended audience is not seeing all of your content creation efforts, it is pointless. Your content distribution needs to be spot-on if you want to win the content war.
Content distribution raises brand recognition, strengthening brand loyalty and authority. The more channels your material is published on, the more shares, mentions, and backlinks it receives on social media. This boosts website traffic, which helps with conversions and revenue growth.
How to Create a Distribution Strategy for Content
1. Do some audience research.
Getting your material in front of your audience—and not just any audience—is the primary goal of content distribution. You can’t accomplish this well if you don’t know where they are and what they prefer to read. Research your target audience so you are aware of precisely who will be consuming your material before you continue to develop your plan.
Gather demographic information first from your clients, email subscribers, social media followers, and website visitors. Consider your audience’s gender, age, income, geography, level of education, and other relevant factors.
You can get this data via your social media analytics software or Google Analytics.
Then, ask your clients, email subscribers, and social media followers for direct feedback on your present content and distribution initiatives, and inquire with them about their needs and pain issues.
Create your buyer persona using these two pieces of information. As you develop the rest of your content distribution plan, your buyer persona(s) serve as models of your ideal clients and content consumers, representing their needs, wants, and motivations.
2. Audit your content.
There may already be some of your written work online, including blog articles, videos, social media posts, and more. Even though your new content distribution plan doesn’t call for getting rid of that content, you should conduct an audit to determine whether it is assisting or hindering your distribution efforts.
When you review your current content, you’ll be reminded of the subjects you’ve previously covered and the ones you can elaborate on.
Three key components make up a comprehensive content audit:
- Log your content first. You have the option of manually logging your content or using a program.
(We advise the latter, mainly if you’ve been posting content on many properties and channels.) You can crawl and gather your content using programs like Screaming Frog, which compiles each URL, title, and description into a spreadsheet. You can crawl 500 URLs in the free edition.
- Evaluating the impact of your content.
Material length, social shares, and backlinks will all be listed when SEMRush crawls your content. By highlighting any content that needs to be revised, updated, or deleted, this information may help you evaluate the impact of each piece of content.
- Determining the holes in your material.
By undertaking keyword research to find new keywords or phrases to add to your content, you can also find any gaps in your material using the Ahrefs Content Gap tool and improve its performance for additional terms.
3. Pick your channels for content distribution.
This stage comes before content development and target audience research because your content distribution methods may be even more crucial than your content.
You’ll have a far better notion of how to get your content in front of your followers and buyers once you know who your target audience is. Depending on your analysis, you may publish on forums and communities like Reddit or Quora, and you may even pay to promote your material on those websites.
Alternatively, you can decide only to distribute content on social media platforms, or you might decide that traditional PR is your best option.
Regardless of the channels you select for distributing your material, be sure they are compatible with the tastes and habits of your target audience. Also, remember to maximize the relatively cheap and under your control owned dissemination channels, such as your blog, email newsletter, and social media profiles.
Even if data suggests that your audience prefers news sites to company blogs or forums to social media, never ignore your owned websites as they represent your brand and product. Set aside time as you complete this phase to learn about organic social media marketing, email newsletters, and blog optimization so that you can attract more readers.
4. Select your content categories.
After choosing your distribution methods, think about the kinds of material you’d like to produce and have the means to do so.
Most businesses decide to publish all of their material on their blog before repurposing and republishing it.
Blog postings are widely read, simple to distribute, and easy to localize (i.e., translate into other languages). Additionally, nearly half of customers read a company’s blog before purchasing. For these reasons, we advise starting a business blog before broadening your content categories to distribute on other platforms. Think about the many materials we covered at this article’s start and plan how you’ll reuse and distribute them.
5. Define your distribution KPIs and objectives.
Setting goals lets us see where we’re going and what success might entail.
Setting objectives for your content’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and the resulting metrics should be part of your content distribution strategy:
Choose the most appropriate metrics for each channel because these metrics may differ according to your distribution method (for example, you can’t measure comments on your email newsletter or top exists on your social media advertising). Establishing a baseline for each channel may take time, mainly if you haven’t used it before.
Use these metrics to create SMART objectives for your content.
Here’s an illustration:
- Specific: By promoting backlinks from other reliable websites and blogs, I wish to improve the organic traffic to our blog. Our search engine ranking will rise. As a result, increasing organic visitors.
- Measurable: 30 new hyperlinks to our blog would be great.
- Achievable: We already create ten new backlinks each month without a deliberate strategy, so I think we can make 30 new backlinks this month using our plan.
- Relevant: This objective fits in with our larger organic content marketing plan and may increase our earned media due to press coverage and contributions from outside bloggers.
- Time-bound: Please get me these backlinks by the end of the month.
6. Create an editing schedule (and include distribution).
For content marketing and distribution to be successful, extensive planning is necessary. An editorial content calendar can be helpful in this situation.
One can be made using Google Calendar, Google Sheets, or Excel. Additionally helpful are programs like CoSchedule, Asana, and Trello.
Your team can stay on the same page and work toward shared objectives with your editorial calendar and content distribution plan.
Additionally, it provides a schedule for the projects your writers and editors will be working on in the upcoming days, weeks, and months.
Your editing schedule might resemble this (using this post as an example):
Your content distribution strategy and objectives belong to your editorial calendar. This is how it may appear on your editorial calendar:
Observe how sections like “Publish Destinations” and “Repurposing Plans” have been added to the right-hand columns. Your editorial calendar should be the focal point of all your distribution and content generation strategies.
7. Create your content.
It’s time to start creating your content when you’ve done your audience research and content audit, chosen your distribution channels and content kinds, and built your editorial calendar.
Your resources, team size, industry, and brand will all affect the type of content you can produce, so read our Guide to Content Creation for the most pertinent suggestions.
As you work on your new content, check out these tools:
- AnswerthePublic, which can help you flesh out topics and understand what your audience is searching for
- Canva, which can help you build gorgeous infographics and images
- Vidyard, which is a video hosting and publishing platform made for marketers
- Anchor, which is a free podcasting tool for beginners
8. Calculate and evaluate your outcomes.
Always keep an eye on the outcomes of your material distribution. Do you still have in mind the KPIs, measurements, and SMART objectives you created in step five? It’s time to remove those.
After you’ve published your material, check Google Analytics, your social media analytics dashboards, and your blog performance depending on where and how you distributed it. Establish a regular measurement and analysis schedule (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) to create a baseline and identify the metrics you can improve in the next week or month.
Whew!
That being the case, what does it take to develop a content distribution strategy? As your content efforts and team size grow, refine this approach; these rules may alter.
Conclusion
Without an effective content distribution strategy, great material is wasted. Don’t let your efforts go in vain. By making a deliberate distribution investment, you can be sure that your audience will see your material.
As a result, brand awareness, affinity, conversions, and income will all rise. Wasted content will vanish thanks to the tools and techniques mentioned above.
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