Do You Have a Distribution & Promotion Strategy for Your Content?

Take a few seconds to ponder a simple question: Are you getting enough eyeballs on your content to achieve its specific objective?

In today’s #captainobvious, Content Marketing 101 lesson, you know that your content programs should have a clear target audience. But how do we reach those people? And how many of those people do we need to reach in order to achieve success? Herein lies one of the largest benefits of content marketing that often gets overlooked. Companies that have been leveraging content to build an audience over time often have a significant leg up on those who are starting from scratch.

Setting Expectations

When launching a new content initiative and targeting a new audience, clear expectations should be set based on how long it may take for your content to start gaining traction. If it’s expected for your new content initiative to move the needle quickly with this new audience, you’ll need to budget much more for paid placement or promotion/advertising. If you don’t have much in the budget for paid distribution, then you should set proper expectations for the slower growth that comes with building an owned audience and or earning prime placement in third-party channels.

A good strategy for a new content initiative is often a converged media approach that provides a boost in the beginning, but gets less expensive over time as your audience grows.

Converged Media Strategy Example

Let’s say your company has developed a new product that will be targeted at a different audience than you’ve engaged with before. You’ve done your homework, surveyed the market and now you have a solid go-to-market strategy that includes a microsite/blog specifically tailored for this new audience. Your executive team understands that brand awareness takes time, but they’d like to make some noise to drum up a base of early adopters. Here’s a few converged media tactics that would get the ball rolling:

1. Influencers within your new product category are identified and paid to create engaging, high-quality content, which they share on their owned channels.

2. This paid content is then amplified via both organic sharing and paid promotion (boosting) across social networks, driving readers back to the company’s new microsite/blog through links.

3. Buyer-focused blog content is published weekly to build a subscriber list.

While costly upfront, these types of tactics deployed with high-quality content have a high likelihood to fill the top of your funnel. From there, your content analytics should provide insights into when/if your paid tactics can be turned down or shut off completely. For those companies who have great products and services, the earned media engine often takes over and can provide a steady stream of user-generated content (happy customers will spread the word!)

You Need a Content Distribution/Promotion Strategy

Content distribution and promotion can take on many forms and utilize a myriad of different techniques and tools. In our noisy world, a great distribution strategy may be all but required for success. In our free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Planning a New Content Initiative, we provide a few more examples of converged media tactics, as well as delve deeper into the concepts of paid vs. owned vs. earned audiences. Download it today.