Are you constantly creating content but unsure if it's reaching your intended audience? Achieving a return on investment (ROI) from your content hinges on effectively connecting with the right viewers. This is where content distribution becomes crucial.
The internet is saturated with similar-looking websites, and organic traffic is harder to come by since most social networks now operate on a ‘pay-to-play’ basis. The costs involved in creating social media content, including time and expenses like image licensing fees, can quickly add up.
However, simply creating content isn't enough. Your investment in content creation pays off when your target audience discovers and engages with it. Content distribution plays a vital role here, ensuring that your content is strategically placed on relevant platforms where it can capture the attention of your ideal audience.
Content distribution is about getting your content out there—publishing, sharing, and promoting it on different platforms. It’s something you need to think about while you are planning your content.
As staying visible online gets tougher, content distribution becomes even more important for creators and brands. A good distribution strategy ensures your content gets seen.
Regardless of the type of content you are dealing with, distribution comes after creation. However, it's pretty important to figure out the where and how of sharing and promoting your content in advance. If you don’t plan this ahead of time, you might end up wasting your efforts and resources.
Content distribution channels are the places where you share and promote your content. These can be anything from your website or blog to forums, social media ads, and pay-per-click ads. Essentially, they are the methods you use to get your content in front of people.
Here are some types of content you might distribute:
eBooks
Podcasts
Videos
Infographics
Case studies
Webinars
Blog posts
Courses
Templates
Checklists
To make it easier to understand, you can group these distribution channels into three categories: owned, paid, and earned media.
Owned Media: These are channels you control, like your website or email list.
Paid Media: These include advertising channels like pay-per-click ads or sponsored posts.
Earned Media: These are channels where others share your content, like social media shares or mentions in the press.
The diagram below shows how these three categories overlap and how combining them can boost your content's reach and impact:
Owned Media
Owned media refers to content and channels that you create and control, such as your website, blog, social media profiles, email lists, or even physical mailing lists. As the owner, you have full control over this content and can use it to promote your products or services however you like.
The biggest advantage when it comes to owned media is control over creativity. You can format and design your content to best captivate your audience and alter your messages specifically to your target market. This flexibility can give owned media an edge over other types.
According to HubSpot, Facebook remains the most popular social media app, utilized by 71% of consumers, followed by YouTube (61%), Instagram (42%), TikTok (37%), and X, Snapchat, and Pinterest (all at 23%).
Paid Media
Paid media is any type of advertising you pay for. This includes traditional ads on TV and radio, as well as online ads like Google Ads and Facebook ads. Why use paid media? It offers several advantages, such as wide reach, precise targeting, and a good return on investment (ROI).
One major benefit of paid media is that it can help you reach a larger audience than you could through your own website or social media pages. Plus, paid media allows for specific audience targeting based on interests, demographics, and purchase history. This means you can connect with the right people, boosting your chances of a positive ROI.
Earned Media
Earned media, also known as earned content or publicity, is any content about your business that you haven't paid for or created yourself. This could be reviews, mentions, or articles written by others. Unlike paid media, earned media is gained through your own efforts and actions.
This concept is powerful because when other people endorse your brand, it builds credibility and trust among your audience. This trust can lead to more people engaging with your content and believing in your brand.
Earned media also plays a significant role in improving your organic search engine rankings and can even propel your content to go viral. Higher search engine rankings are crucial for brand success because they put your owned media front and center, driving more engagement and establishing it as an authoritative source.
Content marketing and content distribution aren't the same. Content marketing is a broad campaign that involves creating, optimizing, and distributing content to attract and engage an audience of interest. It typically aims to generate broad awareness without specifically targeting any particular audience segment.
On the other hand, content distribution is more like hand-delivering your content to exactly the right people or groups who are likely to be interested. It emphasizes personalized targeting to ensure that the content reaches those who are most likely to engage with it and derive value from it. This targeted approach enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of content marketing efforts by maximizing relevance and impact.
While distribution is an essential element of content marketing, it also involves the process of planning, creation, and analysis of content.
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When you invest time and money into sharing your content across different channels, it's crucial to measure its success to improve your strategy. Here are some key metrics to track:
Website Traffic: Use web analytics to see how your content impacts website visits. Look at visitor behavior, engagement, and pages viewed to fine-tune your future distribution efforts.
Engagement Metrics: Monitor social media engagement, such as likes, shares, and comments, to gauge how effective your content is. This feedback helps you adjust your distribution strategy.
Conversion Rate (CVR): CVR Measures the proportion of website visitors who complete specific actions such as signing up for newsletters, buying products, or downloading content. Measuring CVR shows if your content prompts these actions.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): CPA tells you how much each conversion costs by dividing total marketing expenses by the number of conversions. This metric helps you assess the efficiency of your paid distribution channels and refine your strategies.
Attention Metrics: Beyond just counting views, attention metrics measure how much actual attention your content receives. Advances in ad tech now allow for better tracking of user attention, offering deeper insights into your content's performance.
A robust content distribution strategy not only enhances the impact of your curated and created content by ensuring it reaches the right audience but also aligns diverse teams involved in content creation and collaboration, setting clear benchmarks to measure distribution performance effectively.
Understand your target audience through research.
Evaluate your existing content.
Select where you’ll distribute your content.
Determine the types of content you’ll create.
Establish goals and metrics for distribution.
Plan your content schedule.
Produce your content.
Promote and distribute your content.
Assess and analyze your outcomes.
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Your choice of content distribution channels should align with your audience demographics and available resources. Understanding your target audience is crucial to effective content distribution. Without knowing whom you are targeting, where they spend their time, what content interests them, and how to reach them, your efforts can become unfocused and ineffective.
Brands often misuse paid media by casting wide nets with generic content, missing their intended audience and potentially causing negative reactions.
To avoid these pitfalls, it's essential to:
Refine Your Approach: Allocate your ad budget more wisely by reconsidering how you distribute content.
Utilize Customer Data: Dive deep into customer data to understand their interests and interactions with your brand. Segment customers into groups like loyal buyers or occasional shoppers.
Develop Audience Personas: Define key traits such as age, expertise, interests, and preferred platforms for content distribution. This helps tailor your content and distribution strategies effectively.
You can retrieve this data from either Google Analytics or in-built social media analytics.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 45% of B2B content marketers anticipate an increase in their content marketing budget for 2024.
Determining how much budget to allocate for content distribution depends on several factors. It's essential to align your budget with specific marketing goals and audience preferences. For instance, investing in thought leadership in B2B marketing can yield significantly higher ROI compared to traditional content approaches.
Establishing credibility and connecting with niche audiences typically demands both expertise and a significant investment of time. Partnering with content specialists can accelerate this process by leveraging their established networks and performance metrics for better ROI insights.
Ultimately, your budget should reflect the type of content and distribution platforms needed to effectively achieve your marketing objectives.
So, while these numbers can differ by industry, a common suggestion from many marketers is to allocate 25% to 30% of your marketing budget to content marketing.
Great content serves no purpose if it remains unseen. Content distribution is crucial for effective content marketing—it's the key to increasing brand awareness, building a loyal audience, and driving action from your readers.
Implement these content distribution strategies and tools to ensure your content reaches your target audience.
Partner with LexiConn to expand your brand's reach using our proprietary distribution platform and extensive network of over 10,000 publishers.
Leverage our expertise and submit content on a weekly or monthly basis for seamless distribution. We carefully select high-traffic publishers from our vast database to maximize exposure.
Make the most of your content’s potential with LexiConn today!
LexiConn also offers a free 30-minute content consultation session to help you with your content strategy.
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