Having a content strategy is an important part of running a business, especially if you want to connect with your customers online. A content distribution strategy is just as important. Otherwise, you can end up with extremely useful information that no-one actually sees.
What is content distribution?
Content distribution is the process of getting your content out to your audience – new and old. This might be sharing links across your social media channels, including it in emails, adding it to printed materials, making it a lead magnet or utilising in your ads. It might also mean taking your piece of content and turning into other things like videos, a podcast, case study or webinar.
Different types of content will use different types of content distribution, have a different target audience and different style of message.
A content distribution strategy means having a plan for how you’re going to share content, ahead of writing it. This can mean you can maximise who sees your content and repurpose it across different channels. Just dropping links and hoping for the best doesn’t cut it any more.
Why you need a content distribution strategy
A content distribution strategy is important simply because it gets your content out there. Whether that’s to new audiences on your social channels or existing customers through your email list, it connects them with your content. While SEO is still an important strategy for gaining customers, it makes sense to maximise who sees your content.
Another thing that a content distribution strategy helps with is alignment. By planning in advance, you can connect the dots with other teams and work more collaboratively. This stops any awkward double communications or missteps.
It also helps you decide what works and what doesn’t, and where you might need to repurpose or create new content for different channels. It means you can measure the success of content and distribution channels more easily.
How to distribute your brand’s content
The first thing is understanding your target audience, and the content that they’re looking for. Along with where they would seek it out. Both of these will help you work out what content to create, along with how and where to distribute it. This should make up part of your content marketing plan.
Not sure where to distribute your content? Here are some places that you can distribute your content to get you started:
- Social media
- Blog on company website
- Email newsletter
- Ebook (ideally make it downloadable so you can capture email addresses)
- Company app
- Internal audiences (your teams need this content too)
- Video
- Podcast
- Sales material
- Ads
- Infographics
- PR contacts (if it’s actually something newsworthy)
You can also promote your content via paid advertising, such as sponsored content, pay-per-click ads (PPC), social media ads or influencer channels. This should be part of your content distribution strategy.
It isn’t just a case of distributing your content and ticking it off your to-do list. You also need to check which channels work best for sharing your content by looking at your analytics and reports. There’s no point in taking loads of time to share content on a certain channel if no-one ever engages there, and your effort would be better spent elsewhere.