Content distribution is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. There is a lot of existing research that proves that marketers who invest in content creation see much better marketing KPIs.
Smart content distribution can significantly increase your website’s traffic, build trust among customers and prospects, boost audience engagement, improve conversion rates, and even reduce customer churn rates.
In this blog, you will learn about what is content distribution and how to make it work for your organization.
What Is Content Distribution and Why Is It Important
Simply put, content distribution is the process of distributing different content formats such as blogs, images, customer stories, infographics, and videos, via various channels and communications platforms.
But why does content marketing matter?
Here is the best answer to that question:
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
Even though many organizations today are aware of the importance of content marketing, just creating content is not enough. According to research, 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day, yet over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google.
Hence, it is crucial for every marketer to have a clear and structured content distribution strategy in order to make the content more visible and more engaging for the audience.
💡 Related: 9 Social Media Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023
3 Types of Content Distribution Channels
There are many different content distribution channels you can leverage. However, we can fit them all under 3 categories.
Owned
Owned media includes any channel that is directly owned, controlled, and influenced by the brand itself.
Some examples of owned media in digital marketing include:
- Company’s own websites
- Blog
- Newsletter
- Social presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media profiles
Earned
The easiest way to describe earned media is “the exposure gained from methods other than paid advertising”.
Some examples of earned media include:
- Online word of mouth
- Customer advocacy
- Employee advocacy
- Free influencer advocacy
- Free PR coverage
Paid
Simply put, paid or bought media are media where organizations pay for visitors, reach, or conversions.
Some examples of paid media include:
- Google Ads
- Display advertising
- Social Media advertising
- Sponsorships and content syndication initiatives
- Paid influencer advertising, and paid brand ambassadorship programs
💡 Related: How to Create a Brand Ambassador Program
Also, take a look at our online session: The Marketing ROI Battle.
6 Out-of-the-Box Ideas to Make Content Distribution More Impactful
SEO, paid ads, newsletter, organic traffic, and social media sharing are just some of the must-have content distribution strategies.
However, if you want to stand out and make your content go viral, you need to consider some other, out-of-the-box strategies. Bellow, we have covered 6 ways to boost your content distribution efforts, improve brand awareness, drive more website visitors, and generate more quality leads.
1. Wisely choose content formats and types
In order to get more impact from your content distribution strategy, it is important to understand what type of content formats work best for your industry and for your target audience. While some audiences may prefer longer and more detailed content formats, developers are most certainly not among them.
While buyers in some industries prefer podcasts, others may prefer webinars or detailed ebooks and guides.
There is no secret sauce when it comes to choosing the best types of content for your organization, but being data-driven can certainly help.
Regularly analyze your content strategy to better understand what content types resonate best with your audience.
For example, one research shows that infographics tend to be the most likable content type as it gets more shares than other content formats.
💡 Related: What People Like to Share on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]
2. Partner with other companies (co-marketing)
One of the most powerful ways for your content to get more visibility is by doing co-marketing campaigns. There are so many companies in the world that target the same buyer persona but are not direct competitors.
So why not partnering together? Why not distributing each other’s content? It’s a clear win-win!
However, it is important to have a clear co-marketing strategy. When choosing your marketing partners, it is crucial that you answer these questions:
- Who do you want to partner with? Are you targeting the same buyer persona?
- Does this company have a good reputation?
- Do they already have a clear content distribution strategy?
- How many followers on social media do they have, and how much website traffic do they generate?
- What type of content will you collaborate on? Blog, webinar, podcast, video, or just cross-promotion?
- What is the timeline of the entire project?
- What is expected from this campaign? What are the KPIs?
- If this is a lead generation campaign, how will the leads be shared?
3. Engage with influencers and analysts in your industry
According to research, almost 75% of consumers decide what to buy based on social media posts, but 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles.
As buyers tend to trust other people more than brands, having influencers as your brand ambassadors can be a very powerful content distribution strategy.
Some of the most common reasons why organizations engage ambassadors are to increase brand awareness, improve social selling, and build trust among customers and followers.
Because influencer marketing can be quite expensive, consider nano and micro-influencers to distribute your content and promote your brand.
Research by AdWeeks also showed that nano-influencers and micro-influencers achieve 6.7 times greater follower engagement than popular celebrities.
4. Consider various content syndication providers
Content syndication is the process of republishing web content on third-party sites for broader reach and readership. It exposes your marketing collateral to readers and viewers who may have never come across your brand organically.
When choosing content syndication providers, it is very important that your know exactly who your target audience is. Next, it is crucial that you do your research to better understand the impact various content syndication providers offer.
For example, if your buyer personas are developers or IT professionals, you should consider a content syndication provider such as TechRadar with hundreds of thousands of IT subscribers.
If your buyer persona is in HR, you should consider a content syndication provider such as HR.com.
One of the downsides of such content syndications campaigns is that they can be quite expensive. Luckily, there are some free content syndication sites that some organizations find very powerful. These are a few examples:
- Medium
- Quora
- BuzzFeed
- Business2Community
- LinkedIn articles
- Mashable
5. Leverage social groups
When defining your content syndication efforts for the next quarter, consider leveraging various social groups. There are thousands of niche groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and other platforms where people get together to connect or find answers to their specific questions.
Let me give you one example.
Let’s say your target persona is an HR Manager or a Head of the Human Resources department. Get on LinkedIn and navigate to groups to find communities relevant to your buyers.
You will find thousands of groups, and some of them have hundreds of thousands of members. For some companies, such social groups are must-have channels for content distribution.
💡 Related: 8 Steps to Implement a Killer Social Media Marketing Strategy
6. Create an employee advocacy program
Many organizations still don’t understand the impact of employee advocacy on marketing. Your own employees can be the best content distributors, the biggest source of traffic to your website, and the best source of high-quality leads.
Yet, 80% of employers have not yet implemented a comprehensive employee advocacy program.
So why should you consider implementing an employee advocacy program to boost content distribution in your organization? Here are a few powerful stats:
- Content shared by employees receives 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. (Social Media Today)
- Leads developed through employee social marketing convert seven times more frequently than other leads. (Fast Company)
- On average, an employee advocacy program involving 1,000 active participants can generate $1,900,000 in advertising value. (Kredible)
- 64% of teams that use social selling hit quota compared to 49% that don’t. (Aberdeen)
Boost Your Content Distribution Strategy Today
As seen in the previous section, engaging your employees in content distribution can be the most powerful way to drive brand awareness and to generate more sales for less money.
However, implementing a successful advocacy program is not easy without the right technology. Your employees should be able to distribute your company’s content on various social media channels in a few seconds. Organizations should be able to gamify advocacy experience and measure the impact of content distribution on a company’s success.
Haiilo’s Publishing Studio is a hub for creating and publishing content to your workforce at scale and it provides a central place from which employees can access their company’s content at any time.
Our Content Booster enables organizations to further enhance their existing technology ecosystem by publishing personalized content with one click, while Workforce Insights provide valuable employee advocacy insights and actionable recommendations for improvement.
Schedule a Haiilo demo to see how other organizations use it to boost their content distribution efforts.
