Marketers at the top of the food chain are always looking for new ways to innovate.
Understandably, they need to do so because the web is littered with lots of hubbub.
In a bid to stand out, most of them have employed content distribution tools to reach more audiences.
If you’re looking to grow your business, the time is now to ramp up your approach to content distribution.
What is Content Distribution?
Content distribution refers to the process of promoting content to online audiences in a number of media formats. To effectively do this, you need to make use of these channels:
- Owned Content Distribution – this refers to distributing content to web properties in your possession like a blog, social media platform, email newsletter or a microsite. As an entrepreneur, it’s important that you have a system that’s completely in your control and not subject to the rules or doings of others.
- Earned Content Distribution – this happens when you’re able to get someone else to vouch for your brand. The recommendations you get from product reviews, shares, guest article contributions, and press coverage can go a long way in making your brand credible.
- Paid Content Distribution – this involves paying to access a larger network of customers. To ensure that you get maximum returns, it’s essential that the ads you pay for actually lead back to your owned media. Ideally, you want your owned content to be captivating, relevant, entertaining and add value to your users. Some examples include are pay per click, paid social media advertising, and paying influencers to share your content.
Content Distribution Tools
1. Setup a Content Distribution Network
Ideally, your content distribution network should be comprised of the people who care about what you have to say. To grow your network, you can:
- Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry and connect
- Reach out to fellow bloggers directly and share some of their posts
- Maintain contact with people you met through face-to-face networking to advance your efforts
- Keep commenting on other blogs to make the acquaintance of new people
Importantly, you need to nurture the relationship you have with your audience. With a stable relationship in place, it’s much easier to receive endorsements and support.
That said, you shouldn’t slack and get satisfied by simply sharing and retweeting content from others. It’s necessary that you come up with relevant content of your own and publish on a regular basis. Once you do this, you’ll discover that people in your industry get to appreciate what you’re doing and are willing to give you that much-needed push to get to the next level.
2. Social Scheduling
Consistency is key in the modern marketing scene. To ensure that the content you produce gets maximum attention, it’s necessary to schedule posts. When you do this, you’re bound to notice a spike in shares and visibility of blog posts.
To hype your content, you can choose to play around with different captions, hashtags, and imagery. With time, you’ll find that your content is being seen by more people. Some of the top social scheduling tools include Loomly, Buffer, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and Sprout Social.
3. Answer Queries Raised
If you’re focused on creating content that solves problems in society, then it’s probably a good idea to get on Quora. This is because it’s widely regarded as the number one site to get your “how-to” and “why” questions answered.
Since millions of people ask such questions on a daily basis, you can become an authority in your field once you prove that you really know your stuff. A good way to do this is by providing detailed answers to questions whilst city and sourcing your blog posts.
Having revealed this, it’s notable that Quora goes above and beyond the art of getting answers. If you happen to have writer’s block, you can source ideas for future blog posts from the platform. The clarity you get from the platform will inspire you to pen current topics and problems your audience experiences.
4. Visual Element
While you can use blog posts to inform your audiences about your brand, people are becoming more visual.
As such, it’s necessary that you find a way to condense the content of your posts into image or video formats.
By embracing such mediums, you’ll be able to entertain more readers and engage better with them.
Some tools like Canva and Piktochart are actually great at creating graphics for your blog posts. Incredibly, they’re also free of charge which means you can advance your marketing efforts at zero extra cost. To get started, you can compile interesting quotes and statistics and then translate them to visual formats.
5. Guest Posting
If you happen to be adept at content creation, guest posting is a pretty natural way to grow your reach. This is because it doesn’t disrupt your existing way of working.
To get yourself before new audiences, you need to invest your energies in finding publications that your target audience reads and trusts. Once you agree to the terms, you can then focus on creating fantastic content.
Contrary to popular opinion, backlinks aren’t everything when it comes to guest posting. Rather, it’s important that the actual content your post has some credibility. The more you’re able to guest post, the more clout your blog will be able to get. The aim should be to get as many people as possible to willfully promote you.
6. Pay for Promotion
With paid promotion, it’s easier to cut through the clutter and connect with more people. To be effective, you need to boost your most popular and insightful content.
Facebook ads are somewhat of a shining beacon to content creators. This is because Facebook uses laser-targeted techniques to ensure that paid posts get more traction. A well-crafted paid post has the power of stopping users in their tracks to click through and view what your message really is.
7. Maximize Content Internally
If you’re really looking to get the attention of the masses, then you need to send your content directly to people.
For this to happen, you need to include the sales, HR, customer service and sales team in your strategy. By providing them with your company’s content, they’ll find it easier to onboard new people. This is because they’ll have access to a repository to guide them on how to address specific pain points. Without such a guide, they may struggle to encounter reluctant leads, potential new hires, and interested prospects.
By supplementing one-on-one conversations with personalized content suggestions, you can grow your relationships. It also serves to show that you care deeply about their pain points and you’re committed to helping them.
Conclusion
Content distribution is the missing puzzle piece that you need to boost your marketing efforts. Without a plan for distribution, you may find yourself missing out on some incredible opportunities in the market.
Having highlighted some top content distribution tools to guide you, we’d like to know what you think. Do you think you’re ready to embrace content distribution? If so, how prepared are you start right away?
Let us know in the comments below!
