Content marketing relies on distribution. If it didn’t, no one would see, interact, or share the content you’ve been slaving over. However, it can be surprisingly difficult for it to reach your target audience. This is why you need a watertight, foolproof strategy to focus your efforts.
But how do you do that? Well, you need an article that sets out exactly what’s required to get started. Isn’t that handy?
We’re going to look at everything. From the types of content you can produce and the channels to distribute on, to the tools that make life easier and how an editorial calendar can help you out. Don’t worry, we’ll also cover the basics and everything in between.
Key takeaways
- Knowing your audience inside and out is one of the most important elements that will inform your distribution strategy. Creating buyer personas can help visualize your ideal customer.
- Conduct a content audit to find out what’s currently working and what’s not. This can include audience surveys to get straightforward, no-nonsense answers.
- There are three types of distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid. To be successful, you should have a mix of all three.
- There are plenty of tools out there that can help with every step of your distribution strategy. From automating social media posts, to providing helpful metrics for tracking.
- Organizing your strategy with editorial and social media channels will help focus your marketing team. Alongside setting realistic KPIs (key performance indicators).
Decide on the content you’ll distribute
Every piece of content matters. To make sure you strike the right tone, you need to know your target audience inside and out. Depending on your industry, your audience will likely favor certain types of content over others, so let’s take a look at your options:
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Email newsletters
- White papers
- Case studies
- Product reviews
- Video content
- Digital articles
Visual content is super important to incorporate. 95% of B2B customers evaluate a company based on visual content, and 62% of marketers use visuals primarily as part of blog content or landing pages. So, if you’re still opting for chunks of unbroken text, you will certainly lose engagement and miss out on potential customers.
Getting to know your target audience
The more specific you can get when considering your customers, the better. Ideally, you’ll be able to visualize the intended buyer during the content creation process. Creating a buyer persona can help you do just that.
Maureen Condon at Precision Marketing Group says, “The good news is that creating and using buyer personas does not have to suck the fun out of creating a great marketing campaign. It simply makes the process more strategic and, ultimately, more successful for your company.”
You should create a profile of an ideal customer that includes everything from hobbies to income. Here are a few things to consider to help you build yours:
- Gender
- Age
- Hobbies
- Income
- Job
- Family
To find out this information, look at your existing customer base and following. You can monitor metrics on social media accounts to gain insights as to who is interacting and engaging with your content. You can also view your conversions to find the demographics that are most likely to buy or subscribe to your product.
Once you have built up a detailed profile, it’ll start to become clear what kind of content they prefer based on their lifestyle and spare time activities. For example, if your desired audience is over 65s, then email newsletters might be your best bet as they are less likely to spend time on social media.
Evaluate existing content
You have a huge backlog of data telling you exactly what your audience likes and doesn’t like. Your existing content is a gold mine of information to inform your strategy. So don’t ignore it! Start an in-depth analysis of the performance of each type of content you have published, and it’ll start to become clear what your audience favors. This is known as a content audit.
Check out this free content audit template you can download to get started.
Most social media channels offer access to some great metrics to keep an eye on. For example, on Instagram, you can view the reach of a post, comments received, impressions (how much your content is being seen), engagement by reach and by followers, and much more. You can compare the results to find out what kind of content is most effective for your audience.
This doesn’t just relate to social media. In almost all forms of digital marketing, there will be metrics to track to inform your strategy decisions. For example, Google Analytics is a great tool for web content. Be sure to check out the following:
- Bounce rate: Percentage of people who visit your website but exit quickly. This could indicate how your current content is performing and whether it’s engaging your audience.
- Click-through rate: Amount of people clicking through to your website from a link in a piece of content. This could be on a social media post or in an email newsletter.
- Pageviews: Number of times a page on your website has been viewed. This is good for making comparisons. For example, if an infographic-focused article has lots of pageviews but a long-read piece hasn’t, you know what your audience favors.
Ask your audience
What better way to know the answer to something than ask the question? It’s super common now to have a pop-up on social media or on a web page asking what you thought of the content.
- Was it engaging?
- Did you learn something from it?
- Did you find what you were looking for?
- What could be improved?
You’ll get straightforward, no-nonsense answers. And that’s what you want, right? If you’re hesitant about putting people off with pop-ups, a survey after the customer has bought the product or interacted with the content is also a great option. Here, you can get a full rundown of the customer journey. You should be able to notice trends in the answers so you can easily identify the areas of your content that need some TLC.
Decide where you’ll distribute it
Now you know your audience like the back of your hand, you can start making bigger decisions for your strategy. Like where you’ll distribute your content. This refers to different social media platforms, personal websites, email, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. These are mainly ‘owned media channels’. However, there are three types of different channels that overlap and are all equally as important. These are paid distribution channels, owned channels, and earned.
Each content distribution channel has its own benefits and will suit specific formats. Ideally, you’ll want to have a healthy mix of all three types to ensure your strategy is most effective. An initial focus on owned media channels will spark more content being shared on earned media channels. However, to kick-start that process, it’s good to invest in some pay-per-click ads (PPC) and reach out to some relevant influencers in your industry to promote your new content.
As Jay Baer says, “Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.”
When it comes down to deciding which platforms within these channels you should use, your decision should primarily be informed by the type of content you’re creating and your target audience. Research the demographic you are trying to appeal to and find out where they are most likely to see your content.
Sprout Social has a great article that sums up the most popular social media platforms and the demographics of their users in 2022. Check out the Facebook example below.
Distribution platforms
There are hundreds of platforms out there for you to choose from, so we’ve put together a handy little table of some of the most popular channels so you can get started.
| Social media | Forums / Websites |
| Personal blog/website | |
| Medium | |
| Quora | |
| YouTube | Digg |
| Slack | |
| Scoop.it | |
| TikTok |
Tips for distributing on paid channels
It can be daunting to invest a lot of money into your content distribution plan. It’s difficult to tell if you’ll get the desired results, if you should have invested less or more, and even if it’ll be effective. But there are ways to eliminate a lot of the doubt and ensure your ROI remains high.
A/B testing is a great option for reducing risk. This refers to two or more versions of a web page being shown to different segments of website visitors. By monitoring the bounce rate, you’ll be able to compare which web page is more successful. Therefore, before you pour all your hard-earned cash into advertising a campaign you don’t know will be successful, you can test it out beforehand on a smaller scale.
It’s also worth diversifying the channels you use for your paid campaigns. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s a common mistake to identify the social media platform that most of your customers use and only advertize on that. However, things change. Algorithm updates can mean that specific platforms are no longer as effective for marketing your campaigns. By spreading your efforts across multiple channels, you can reduce this risk.
Content distribution tools to help you out
This is sounding like a lot of work, right? Even just the research to inform your decisions will take a while, let alone the actual content creation and scheduling of the distribution. That’s why there are plenty of great tools to help you out.
Buffer
Buffer is a tool many marketers couldn’t live without. It can pretty much do everything you need from one app. This includes:
Planning and publishing: One of Buffer’s most recognized features is its super simple dashboard where you can plan social media posts for all of your platforms and set them to publish on the date you want. This helps create a visual workflow for days, weeks, and even months ahead, if you want to be ultra-organized.
Analytics: Buffer’s help doesn’t stop once you’ve hit publish. Quite the opposite. Instead, you’ll have access to a dashboard focused only on analytic reports from each of your social platforms. This means you can constantly update your content marketing strategy based on how your audience is engaging.
Engagement: If you didn’t think it could get any better, think again. Buffer offers a feature where you can view and reply to all comments and private messages across your social media platforms. This means staying on top of your customer base is easy and manageable. Which ultimately means you are improving your customer experience.
Quuu Promote
Here at Quuu, we have worked to make the distribution process of your strategy a breeze. You may be able to publish your content easily, but how many people does it reach? This is the tricky bit and, unfortunately, the most important. Your marketing efforts will be futile if your content doesn’t reach the right audience.
So we’ve developed an advanced system that guarantees your content will be shared and viewed across multiple channels. By adding your blog content to Quuu Promote, your articles will be shared by real people on their social platforms.
This generates thousands of backlinks (websites or pages linking to the content on your site) which are essential in improving your SEO (search engine optimization) and domain rating. This, in turn, improves your page ranking, meaning your content is more likely to appear on the first page of Google when the keyword is searched for.
Above, you can see an estimation of the number of shares and views Quuu Promote could achieve for your content if you were writing about travel. Check it out for yourself and type in your industry here.
HARO
HARO, or Help a Reporter, offers the opportunity for your content to be used by journalists working for major news outlets. Here’s how it works:
- Sign up as a source: This means journalists can contact you for source requests in your industry.
- Monitor requests: Throughout the day, you can check your inbox three times. If a journalist has contacted you, you can pitch your content to them.
- Publishing: If the journalist likes your pitch, they will use your content.
This is a particularly valuable opportunity because news outlets have a high domain authority. This means they are a trusted source, and so Google ranks their articles highly. Therefore, if your content is linked to on their website, your authority will also increase. Content promotion of this kind can improve your brand awareness exponentially, so it is well worth trying it out.
Outbrain
Outbrain takes care of your paid content distribution. The company focuses on helping you build and distribute advertisements. The form of advertising they specialize in is ‘recommendations’ or native ads. This means they are embedded within existing content.
This means the ads match the look and feel of the website they are on. They use ‘smartads’ which target particular users based on their searches. Meaning this personalized approach is more likely to lead to click-throughs.
These differ from social ads because they are on the ‘open network’. This means people don’t have to be using a specific social media platform to view them, making them a more accessible form of advertising.
Now, it doesn’t actually cost to use Outbrain. However, all the ads are pay-per-click. And this cost can increase or decrease depending on the parameters you set. For example, audience size and targeting preferences. They say a campaign can cost $50 a day or $500. It’s down to the advertiser.
HubSpot
For the distribution element of your strategy, we’ll focus on HubSpot’s marketing hub. However, they also offer some great software that focuses on sales and customer service, so keep them in mind. Their marketing hub offers everything you could possibly need from one platform:
- Email marketing: Create a sleek, well-designed, and personalized template ready to send out to a large email list. HubSpot also allows you to easily run A/B tests so you can improve your click-through rates.
- Ad management: As we covered before, distribution on paid media channels is important, and this includes advertisements. To ensure your ROI is as efficient as possible, you can track the performance of your social ads across all social channels from HubSpot’s dashboard.
- Social media management: Similarly to Buffer, you can organize, create, and publish content from HubSpot’s dashboard. Conversations can also be monitored to help organize your customer engagement. Your efforts can also be fully automated, meaning you don’t even have to think about publishing content.
- Lead tracking: Analyze every single lead generated from each piece of content distributed.
- Landing page builder: HubSpot can help you build a landing page proven to help conversion without help from developers or IT.
This is just a fraction of HubSpot’s features. Their software makes it super easy to set and monitor KPIs for your distribution strategy to ensure you are reaching and achieving your business goals.
Mailchimp
If your strategy focuses on email marketing, then Mailchimp will be the tool for you. They help you design personalized emails and distribute them on a large scale, fully automated. However, the real gold is in their insights. They analyze the behavior of your customers as they interact with every email sent. From click-through rates to conversions, they track every aspect of the customer journey.
Here are some of our favorite features:
- Optimize with AI: Ensure you are producing high-quality great content with AI suggestions that seek to make your work more engaging.
- Predictive and analytical insights: Receive full reports on customer demographic based on your industry, campaign performance, and conversions.
- Pre-designed templates: over 100 pre-designed email and landing page templates mean you’ll always find a suitable outline for your message.
- Automated surveys: Receive feedback automatically from your customers so you can continue improving.
Mailchimp has branched out to not only focus on email marketing. They now offer support for social media management, digital ads, landing pages, and postcards. So don’t rule them out, even if email isn’t your main form of distribution.
Organizing your efforts
So, you’ve got quality content, you know the marketing channels and social networks you want to focus on, and you’ve identified new audiences to target. Now, for your strategy to be successful, you need to organize your efforts. There are a few ways to do this, so let’s explore some of the most effective.
Set specific KPIs
It’s important to have clear KPIs set for your marketing team. This will help focus campaigns and content creation and inform decisions on distribution.
Here are a few KPIs to track:
- Follower or subscriber growth: This is an easily monitored and easily quantifiable KPI to track. Set yourself a specific goal and organize your strategy around it.
- Conversion rate: See how successful your campaigns are and use this number for comparisons to inform future distribution strategies.
- Referral traffic: This will indicate whether your distribution has been successful. The higher the referral traffic, the better!
If your marketing team are all on the same page when it comes to your business goals, then it’ll be much easier to action your strategy.
Editorial calendar
For your web content, like blog articles, it’s important to set out your plans in an editorial calendar. This means you can:
- Prepare articles that relate to a new product to be published with the press release.
- Plan a month’s worth of content, so everyone in the marketing team is on the same page about what needs to be completed.
- Prepare time-specific topics. For example, “X Content Marketing Strategies to Bring Into the New Year” to be published in December. This can help spike organic traffic.
- Create easy-to-visualize, step-by-step workflows.
- Easily monitor progress and KPIs.
Without an editorial calendar, you may struggle to keep track of your content goals and plans. It’s also a great tool to look back on, and repurposing content should be a significant element of your strategy. This means you can view past pieces of content you published, how long ago, and how successful they were. You also want to avoid repeating blog titles and subjects too often, so having a record of what has been published and when will help you avoid this.
Download HubSpot’s free calendar templates to get started.
Social media content calendar
Now, to organize your social outreach, you’ll need a social media content calendar. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of all of your different channels and what’s being posted to each one without it being clearly laid out. Here’s what a great calendar can do:
- Fully automate your social media marketing with tools like Buffer.
- Help manage influencer marketing by ensuring everyone on the social media team knows what is being posted/promoted and when.
- Help monitor insights and track engagement.
- Plan and create all of your social media posts months in advance.
- Clearly organize your campaigns and compare their success.
- Keep track of deadlines.
There are plenty of great, free templates out there for you to use. However, it may be worth using an app like Buffer, where the calendar is integrated with the rest of the tools. Having everything you need on one dashboard makes life a lot easier.
Conclusion
It’s clear just how important distribution is to your content marketing. So it’s important not to overlook it. If you consider everything we’ve discussed, you’ll have no problem building the best content distribution strategy for your business.
There’s a lot to think about, but you’ll see it’s well worth it when those conversions come rolling in. Start researching your demographic and the tools that suit the way you work, and you’ll be on to a winner in no time.
Do you think you’re doing all you can to get your content out there and reach the right audience? There are always ways to improve. Try out our tactics and see if your conversions and engagements improve.
