Meanwhile, greater engagement and viewer interaction can increase exposure and spread brand awareness in a number of ways.
Cost-effective marketing strategy
Not every form of marketing is created equally. Some are only effective for certain products or niches. Others only get traction at a large scale with a big budget supporting the content marketing plan.
Content distribution works a little differently. You start with an existing foundation of the content you’ve created and your first audience members and build from there.
With the right mix of owned, paid, and earned media, you’ll develop a content distribution plan that works for where your brand is now and where you want it to go.
Increased exposure and awareness
You’re creating content for a purpose, whether it’s to move products, build a brand, or educate people on something you’re passionate about.
Building awareness of what your business stands for and what you have to offer isn’t easy. However, it is necessary for your future success.
Exposure is key here. You need to lift your content out of the field of your competitors so it can be clearly seen by your target audience. Content distribution takes the guesswork out of how to accomplish this.
Targeted content marketing
What are the chances that your content will pop up as a suggestion when someone in your target audience types into a search bar?
It’s not zero, but you have a lot of competition just to get to the first page of the results.
Smart content distribution plans help you target your marketing efforts. If you can build brand and company recognition among your viewers, they’re much more likely to click on that link they wandered across.
Better engagement and interaction
You learn a lot when you go through the process of planning a content distribution strategy. Some of the key lessons go beyond grabbing your target audience's interest. You’ll also learn how to hold onto their interest in the long term.
What content structures do they find engaging? How can you make it easier for them to interact with the content and your brand?
The more engaging and interactive your content is, the more you’ll be able to enjoy earned media content distribution channels like positive word of mouth.
Steps to effective content distribution
If you want to be effective in this space, you need to work smarter, not harder. That means coming up with a good plan to create distribution-friendly content.
Identify your target audience
No content distribution strategy can help you if you don’t understand who the right audience is. That makes this a great place to start improving your targeting.
After all, you don’t need your content seen by every pair of eyes. It just needs to get in front of the right eye.
What demographics respond well to your brand and presentation style? If you’re chasing a particular demographic, what can you do to encourage reactions and shares?
Finally, take a look at the competition and who is where you want your brand to be. What are they doing right, and what lessons can you learn from this?
Define your distribution channel’s best practices for content distribution
If you simply take these audience insights and start creating content, you may be jumping the gun. It’s easy to get distracted and forget the plan you’ve developed.
Best practices can slip from your attention when you dive into creating. Write out and define the practices you’ll be using so you have something to refer to as you work on content distribution.
Create relevant and high-quality content
You may be able to briefly fool search engines and algorithms with hastily cobbled-together content. What happens when this content reaches real human beings? They won’t respond well.
It’s okay to occasionally miss the mark, especially if you analyze your missteps and learn from the experience.
However, you want to make sure that your content is overall of high quality, deeply relevant, and offers real value to your target audiences. The audience needs to feel that your content was worth their time.
Optimize your content for distribution
You’ve created content tailored to your audience's interests. That means it’s ready to hit the content distribution pipeline, right? Only if you’ve taken the time to write SEO content.
Even content that’s engaging and relevant isn’t necessarily optimized for content distribution. This is because the platform and search engine algorithms don’t see content the way your audience will. These programs look for certain features such as keywords and content length.
Pieces that comply will be boosted. Those that don’t will likely sink no matter how much ad spend you throw at it.
Once the pieces reach audiences, optimized content will naturally drive engagement with techniques like included social sharing buttons and tweetable quotes.
Measure and analyze your results
As you work out the right content distribution strategy for your brand, stay on top of your analytics. Define your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Figure out how to analyze the data that you’re getting from your content distribution channels.
Some forms of distribution take a while to deliver results. You’ll need to look at data trends over time to check that these content distribution channels are slowly but surely gaining traction.
Other forms give you more immediate feedback. This lets you course correct on the fly. However, they’re also more prone to big daily and weekly fluctuations. If you don’t check frequently, you could lose money fast and miss opportunities.