Content marketing isn’t a new strategy. Companies have been using it for decades. But it didn’t hit the mainstream until about 10 years ago. Now, it’s taken over the internet.
The key to content marketing in 2020 and beyond is content distribution. In this article, we’ll share five distribution channels that you should invest in immediately to 10x your results.
Everywhere you look some person or company has published a new blog post, shot a new video, designed a new infographic. The sheer amount of content being created on a daily basis is staggering. How can your business cut through so much noise and get noticed?
What is Content Marketing?
According to the experts at the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Rather than constantly pitching products to your audience, you can educate them with valuable content related to your product(s), build a relationship with them, and win their trust. Then, when they’re ready to buy your products, they will — on their own, without you having to do much selling at all.
Why is Content Marketing so Important?
An effective content marketing strategy will benefit your company in multiple ways. It will give you a boost in SEO and brand awareness, a full funnel of qualified leads, and help you build a better relationship with your target market.
Let’s quickly explore these three benefits in greater detail:
A Boost in SEO
By creating content that targets the specific search queries that your audience types into Google and other search engines, your brand will appear higher in search results, thus improving your brand’s SEO performance and brand awareness.
This kind of traffic is invaluable because it’s free. You don’t have to pay Google to link to your blog post or video. You simply create valuable content and let your audience find it.
More Qualified Leads
Because content marketing relies on creating value for a target audience, the leads it attracts are often of a higher quality than leads gained via other marketing initiatives.
Think about it. Would you be more interested in purchasing from a company that constantly bombards you with sales messages or one that consistently delivers useful information to you on topics of interest? It’s an easy answer. Valuable content creates more qualified leads.
Better Relationships
Content marketing produces better leads because it builds relationships. If your company can consistently produce quality blog posts, videos, and other kinds of content that your target market wants to consume, it will start to become a trusted leader in its space.
Consumers buy from those they know, like, and trust. In other words, from companies they have a relationship with. Content marketing will allow you to build this relationship.
Of course, all this only works if you follow the “golden rule” of content marketing: always create value. If your content is useful and relevant to its target audience, you’ll be able to boost SEO, generate more qualified leads, and build better relationships as we just discussed.
The Key to 10x Success With Content Marketing
Can we agree that content marketing is a vital business-building and promotion strategy in 2020 and beyond? Great! Now the question becomes, “how do we get the most out of the content we create?” In other words, “how do we 10x our content marketing efforts?
The answer is content distribution.
Yes, you have to follow the “golden rule” and create content that’s valuable to your target audience. Everybody knows this. What many people don’t realize is that amazing content isn’t enough. You need to also make sure your well-crafted blogs, videos, and images are seen.
The best way to do this is to distribute your content to multiple places on the internet. Here are our favorite content distribution avenues:
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a fantastic content distribution strategy. If you’re not familiar with it, influencer marketing is the practice of partnering with well-known personalities in a specific industry and paying them to promote your brand’s products.
Influencer marketing has become quite popular in the last few years — with good reason. According to Single Grain, $1 invested in influencer marketing yields an average of $6.50 in return. Not bad.
By partnering with influential bloggers, popular Instagram personalities, and well-known email marketers, you’ll be able to get your content in front of a whole new audience of people who are ready and willing to consume it.
Email Marketing
If your company already has an email list (Hint: it should!) then email marketing is one of the easiest and most effective forms of content distribution. You simply send out a quick message notifying your subscribers that you have a new blog, video, or other pieces of content for them to consume whenever they’re ready for it.
If you consistently publish useful and/or entertaining content, this one little email should drive a lot of traffic to your marketing pieces. After all, you’ve already proven that your content is worth consuming. Why wouldn’t your subscribers want to check out your latest work?
Bonus tip: if you’ve created evergreen content, you can distribute it in your welcome emails and new subscriber sequences as well!
Social Media Marketing
Social media is another easy avenue for content distribution — especially if your business already has accounts on popular networks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But don’t forget about lesser-known sites as well.
Platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat might not have as many users as the “big three” mentioned above, but they still have large followings. There’s also less competition on these networks which means it may be easier to get your content seen.
Whichever social media channel(s) you decide to use, always remember to be social and interact with your followers. Ask them questions, get their opinions, and be a part of the community.
Guest Blogging and Syndication
Some people claim that guest blogging and content syndication aren’t viable strategies. In our humble opinion, those people are wrong.
If you’re able to write a post for a popular blog and include your name and company in the author byline, you’ll undoubtedly see a bump in online traffic. You’ll also gain a valuable link back to your company’s website. Not to mention the boost in street cred you’ll gain by having written for a top content creator in your industry.
Content syndication is another great distribution channel. Why? Because many websites out there need more content. If you can get your post re-published on multiple websites, you’ll be able to reach a much larger audience without having to write another word. Win!
Paid Advertising
Lastly, you can distribute your content via paid ads. Platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Adwords represent an amazing opportunity to get your blogs and videos and other content pieces in front of a highly targeted group of people.
Obviously, this opportunity must be paid for, which means you should use it with care. Always evaluate your efforts and look for ways to optimize. That way you don’t waste money.
But if you have the budget and a truly amazing piece of content to promote, why not give it a go? And remember, many social media networks and search engines have advertising options. While Facebook and Google are the most popular, you can also find success elsewhere.
3 Best Practices for Content Distribution
Content distribution is the key to success with content marketing. You might write the greatest blog posts or shoot the most informative videos, but if no one sees them, they won’t benefit your business and the time you spent creating them will be wasted.
In regards to content distribution, here are three best-practices to keep in mind:
1. Always Create Value
As we talked about earlier, the content you produce should always be valuable to its target audience. But when attempting to distribute your content across the web and 10x your content marketing efforts, you also need to create value for the other sites and people that you ask to publish and promote your work.
For example, what will another company get by syndicating your last post on their blog? What will members of your favorite Facebook group get by watching and sharing your latest video?
To ensure your content is distributed properly, you have to think about the value others will get from sharing your marketing materials, not just the value your content offers. Then you have to make that value abundantly clear.
2. Maintain a Content Distribution Checklist
There are a lot of potential content distribution channels. So many, in fact, that it may become difficult — if not impossible — for you to keep track of them all in your head. That’s why we recommend creating a content distribution checklist like this:
As you can see, this doc has channels listed as well as links and/or explanations for each. Now, when you create a new piece of content, you can simply scan through your checklist and distribute it to every eligible avenue. No guesswork or memory exercises involved.
It’s important to realize that your content distribution checklist is a living document. You should update it on a regular basis, adding new distribution channels when you discover them and removing ones that no longer exist or yield results for your company.
3. Create a Content Marketing Calendar
In the interest of making your content marketing efforts as simple and straightforward as possible, we also suggest creating a content marketing calendar to help break large projects down into manageable chunks and to keep you accountable.
Something simple like this will work:
Just don’t forget to add “distribute content” to your calendar!
While the above example has been created using Google Calendar, the same idea can be applied to Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, or even a classic wall calendar. The tool you use isn’t what’s important. Actually using some kind of calendar to schedule content is.
Get Better Content Marketing Results
For most companies, the answer to better content marketing results isn’t creating better content, it’s effectively distributing the great content they already have. This is the step that so many marketers either don’t know about or skip and it’s costing them.
But now you know. Take what we’ve shared in this article and distribute your content via influencers, email, social media, syndication, and/or paid ads. You’ll appreciate the boost in traffic these tactics afford you, guaranteed.
Jacob Thomas is a freelance copywriter and content marketer based in Nashville, TN. His professional writing approach has helped numerous businesses gain more traffic, leads, and sales. To contact Jacob, visit www.jtcopywriting.com.
