A good content distribution strategy is vital for every brand that wants to succeed in digital marketing. Creating content is only half the job. Even if you create an exceptional piece of content, what use is it if nobody gets to read it? All your content is wasted if you don’t effectively deliver it to your audience and they don’t read it.
In this guide, we’ll dive into the intricacies of a content distribution strategy and all the tools you need to create one. Once you go through it, you’ll be able to create an effective distribution strategy, get your content in front of your audience, and encourage them to read through it.
Table of contents
What is Content Distribution?
Content distribution is a critical element of content marketing strategies. It is the process of publishing, promoting, and sharing content across different media outlets and platforms. Content marketing has grown into an essential component of marketing. Due to this excessive popularity, the competition is very high. Even high-quality content can face challenges and may seem ineffective.
How you distribute your content will ultimately affect how effective it is at converting your audience. Content needs to be delivered to the correct audience at the appropriate moment through the right channel. It’s critical to study your audience and decide which content type they are most comfortable with.
Types of Content For Distribution
Before moving on to where and how you distribute content, it is important to discuss all the content assets you can distribute to your audience. Listed below are a few of the most prevalent kinds of content marketers use:
Blogs
A blog is a web page maintained by an individual, company, or brand where long form content is posted regularly. It’s one of the most common types of content because it lets content creators talk about a certain topic or niche in depth. It’s an effective way to maintain your online presence and attract your audience toward your products and services.
A successful blog is updated regularly and has high-quality content. This content needs to be in-depth, engaging, and trustworthy. Headlines are an important part of blogs. They should be interesting and catchy, so they nudge your audience to click on them. SEO has an important role to play in the success of your blog.
Video
This is a very versatile type of content. Content creators can use videos in a lot of different ways. These include vlogs, explainers, tutorials, live streams, webinars, customer testimonials, and more. There are many channels where video content can be very effective. These are social media, company websites, and video sharing platforms.
Although video content has been around for a long time, it has really picked up in the last few years. A significant portion of this is due to TikTok, which popularized short-form videos. Soon after, other platforms like Instagram and YouTube also introduced short video features. The younger population prefers consuming short videos because they’re easy to watch and share.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a very recent content type that gained popularity over the last decade. They’re now a global phenomenon that is consumed by millions of people. Podcasts are audio or video episodes centered around a certain topic or theme. The host is often accompanied by a guest who has considerable expertise on the subject of the podcast.
These podcasts have become so popular because they are so simple to listen to. They’re easy to listen to and enjoy because there’s a conversation going on. They make multitasking very easy. You can listen to an episode whilst driving or doing housework. This easy accessibility makes them a good choice for content distribution.
Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of information that are easy to read and understand. When you have to present large amounts of information, readers can get bored or confused very quickly. An infographic helps represent difficult-to-understand information in the easiest way possible.
Such easy data visualization is the reason why they’re such a popular content type. Infographics are mostly used in owned channels, namely as part of your blogs, an article, or your website. According to HubSpot, infographics have become the fourth-most popular content type in digital marketing.
Newsletters
Email serves as a vital component of digital marketing, and a popular content type here is newsletters. Almost every business creates email newsletters, regardless of what they’re selling or whether they’re B2B or B2C. It’s a periodic It is sent periodically and is a compilation of all the latest updates, tips, and news about your brand, products, and services.
An email newsletter lets you interact with consumers directly with no other distractions. It’s a simple yet effective way to communicate with your audience. They are thought of as a very potent digital marketing tool for this reason. You can share valuable content that is personalized to meet the needs and demands of your audience. The goal of a newsletter is to motivate your subscribers to sign up for events, buy something, or read your blog.
Let’s move onto the channels where content distribution actually takes place.
Owned Channels
Owned channels are any kind of channel that your company owns and has total control over. These are often called owned media channels or owned marketing channels. Such channels include your company website, its blog, landing pages, social media accounts, newsletters, mobile apps, emails, and printed receipts.
Owned channels are by far the most effective channels to distribute content and achieve the highest ROI. It is because there is no competition. Since no competitor is present on these channels, your audience views only your content. Any marketing message or piece of content draws the full interest of your audience.
In other channels, you often have little or no control over where your or your competitor’s content will appear. It’s also much easier to target a niche audience, i.e., your buyer persona. The audience present on your owned channels will be those that are interested in your products and services. This gives marketers a lot of room to personalize their content.
Earned Channels
Earned media channels are channels that are owned by third parties and take part in promoting your brand and products. This is one of the most organic content channels which make it very difficult to succeed in. Some examples of earned channels include review sites, media coverage, social media mentions, search engine result pages, and product roundups.
This channel stands out from the rest because it’s the one place where you’re not in control of anything. Your audience and customers are doing all the talking, and they have free reign over what they say about you. Think social media, where customers can talk about what they liked about your product or post a video on Instagram unboxing your product.
Earned content is very effective in raising brand awareness and swaying customer opinions. People tend to trust those like them much more than organizations. According to a HubSpot report, 56% of consumers are more likely to be influenced by friends and family on social media than they are by marketing content. This shows how important earned channels are for marketing purposes.
Paid Channels
The last type of marketing channel is paid media. As the name suggests, it is a channel or platform where you have to pay to get your content published. This channel falls under both marketing and advertising. The most common examples of paid channels are paid search, social media ads, display ads, sponsored content, banner ads, and paid influencer content.
You can’t capture your entire audience just through owned and earned channels. This is why you need to promote your content on paid channels. It’s very effective because it pushes your content toward your audience. In the other channels, you have to attract your audience toward your content, which is much more difficult.
Paid channels operate on a basic pay to play model. The more you pay, the farther you can distribute your content. The most common pricing model is CPC – Cost per Click. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you’ll have to pay a certain amount. In CPM, Cost per Mille, brands pay for every thousand views. If you have the budget to support it, paid channels can be very effective in spreading your content far and wide.
Best Tools For Content Distribution
When it comes to content distribution, you’ll need a host of tools that can help you reach your intended audience with your content. Here are some of the best:
HubSpot
HubSpot is considered an all-in-one software solution for anything related to marketing. It’s one of the leading marketing solutions and an excellent distribution tool. Its Marketing Hub feature is a godsend for marketers and includes content creation, email marketing, marketing analytics, and scheduling features.
The feature that is most useful for content distribution is the Social Inbox. This feature lets you connect all your social media accounts and other platforms to HubSpot, making it a central part of your content distribution strategy. You can create, manage, schedule, and track every piece of content from a single interface. It also integrates analytics data from your other marketing strategies, like landing pages and email campaigns, to give you a more holistic view of all your content marketing.
HubSpot is a very flexible tool and offers several flexible plans for every size business. There are also a range of free tools that you can use to try out the software before you buy it. The Starter plan costs $18 a month, and the Professional plan goes all the way up to $800 per month. There are a range of plans in between, making sure that there’s something for everyone.
HootSuite
This is another marketing tool that is leading the industry and gives tough competition to HubSpot. HootSuite is a tool that is specifically geared toward social media, as it started off as a tweet scheduling tool. But since then, it has expanded to other platforms and added a range of new features that meet all your content distribution needs.
HootSuite works with most social media platforms, which include Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, FourSquare, and Google+. You can manage your accounts, schedule posts, upload content, and track engagement. The easy interface makes it easy to create new content and upload it. It also integrates with your WordPress website, so you can distribute content on your website as well.
HootSuite Amplify is one of this tool’s best features. It’s a separate feature that lets you amplify your distribution efforts. Whenever you have new content to distribute, it will send push notifications to your employees and associates. It nudges them to share your content in their circles so it can spread far and wide.
It has a thirdy free trial, which is ample time to check out all the features HootSuite has to offer and make an informed decision. The individual plan starts at $99 a month, whereas the Business plan costs $739. These are perfect for solopreneurs and SMBs. The Enterprise plan is available to bigger companies, which can be custom-built for their specific needs.
Medium
Medium is an open content distribution platform that anyone can use to publish their content. The digital publishing platform has a reader base of over eighty-five million people. This is a massive market for any company to target. There is a very wide range of topics targeted on Medium, which makes it easy for content distributors to find their niche.
Every day, thousands of readers flock to Medium to consume content. It’s an all-in-one platform for content consumption. Think Amazon, but for content. A lot of multinational companies are using Medium in addition to their own blogs. These include the likes of Starbucks, Intel, and BMW.
When you post on Medium, there’s no limit to the length of your content. This is an undeniable benefit that it has over other similar platforms. It is depth that you need to be mindful of. The reader base is looking for deeper articles that explore all facets of a topic. So your content ought to be interesting and insightful.
Medium is a free platform that lets anyone publish their content. Any features can be unlocked without purchasing a membership. But if you want to create a Medium publication, that will cost you a $5 monthly subscription. If you’re going to distribute marketing content, you don’t really need this at all.
MailChimp
This is another exemplary tool for owned media, or, to be specific, email content. MailChimp is regarded as the most effective tool for all your email marketing campaigns. It’s an entry-level email marketing tool that is known for its templates. It has many pre-designed templates that make sending out emails easy for even amateurs. The best thing is that these templates are very visually appealing, which adds an aesthetic flair to all your email content.
MailChimp has a lot of smart features that use artificial intelligence to enhance your email content distribution. Its AI features identify your best selling products and high performing email newsletters. It also automatically tracks your engagement levels and customer preferences. The AI then gives personalized recommendations based on these analytics to boost your content.
With its analytics features, you can look at the performance of all of your campaigns and gauge the reaction of your audience. This helps you adjust all your future content and campaigns to meet your audience’s needs. The analytics dashboard is easily comprehensible and covers a wide range of metrics like bounce rate, open rate, CTR, and many more.
MailChimp has four tiered plans, including a free plan. The basic plan costs $13 a month. The Premium plan costs $350 a month with all the advanced tools and features.
Mention
The last tool on our list is for earned media. Mention is a social media listening tool. It scours through social media platforms to find where your brand is mentioned and what people are saying about you. Brands and content distributors can’t keep an eye on every social media channel to find mentions and tags. It’s almost impossible to do so manually. This is where Mention helps them out.
People from every continent use social media to discuss the products and brands they’ve used. They share their knowledge and experiences in order to assist others. Review sites and social media are the channels that are most commonly used for this type of earned media. Mention lets you monitor these channels so you don’t miss out on someone talking about you. It also has crisis management and content publishing features. These let you respond to these mentions, so you can engage with your audience and leverage the conversation.
Mention also has an influencer identification tool that works very well for your paid media. With this feature, you’re able to navigate a vast list of influencers for your marketing campaigns. The Solo plan will only cost you $41 and supports one user and one account on every social media platform. The ProPlus plan costs $149 for fifteen accounts and unlimited users. Enterprises can also get custom plans made as per their needs.
Content is King, But Distribution Is the Queen
There’s no content marketing without distribution. It’s an integral part of the strategy that can make or break a campaign. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to content distribution. Every brand has its own distribution strategy that works best for it.
Make engaging content that will appeal to your audience. Select a channel to distribute it through. Leverage tools to optimize your content and your channels.
