Content Distribution Strategies That Works in 2019/2020 Creating compelling and useful content for potential customers represents only half the entire job of marketing
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
The phrase "content is king' is one that every digital business owner has heard, and perhaps it would strongly compete if there's an award for one of the oldest phrases on the Internet.
However, irrespective of how true that statement is, many digital marketers will agree that churning out great content isn't necessarily all there is to hitting their sales targets or acquiring new leads.
Creating compelling and useful content for potential customers represents only half the entire job of marketing. What's the other?
Yes, you guessed right.
It is trying multiple marketing channels and finding a content distribution strategy that works for your business.
Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach for distributing content to reach a broad audience, let us look at some of the best content marketing strategies that work irrespective of your niche or scope of your business.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with an individual or organization that has a strong following from people who are your prospective customers and getting them to promote or endorse your product or service to this audience.
Distributing content via influencers has numerous benefits, which include reaching an audience that already has an interest in your content, and also trusting in the influencer's goodwill to turn them into regular visitors or buyers.
However, getting these influencers to publish your well-written content or endorse your product can be one heck of a job if you don't get it right. Here are some tips on how to get influencers to distribute your content:
- Create valuable content for your audience and mention the influencer's website or social media pages. The goal is to give value to them first before making a request, and you can go even a step further by asking for their thoughts on what you published about them and whether they have any contributions or an idea of something that could have been done better.
- Once you've published the content, personally reach out to the influencer either via email or tweet to let them know you mentioned them. The keyword here is "personal' as sending non-personal messages to multiple influencers is a sure way to put them off.
- The result is often a "mention' or shout-out by influencers and gaining their goodwill for any further requests you make.
By applying the above tips, you will come under an influencer's radar and can significantly boost your content distribution by trying the same strategy with other influencers in your niche.
Email Marketing
Have you read or heard someone say that "email marketing is dying or even dead?"
Well, the best content distributors understand that the above statement is only a fad and still spend most of their time and effort on attracting new subscribers and implementing the latest trends in email marketing.
According to OptinMonster, checking emails score 58% against social media when it comes to the first check of the day for Internet users, with popular email service provider Gmail still boasting over 1.5 billion users.
Putting those numbers into perspective certainly shows why you must prioritize your email marketing efforts. But you can achieve even more results by:
- Collaborating with other marketers in your niche to cross-promote content.
- Creating an affiliate system or rewards programme for customers who share your email with their friends.
Organic and Paid Distribution via Social Media
With the number of social media users globally topping 2.6 billion, it is not hard to figure out why distributing content on social media platforms remains one of the most viable strategies for online businesses.
It is in fact, difficult to find an online business that is not represented on social media.
However, beyond sharing links to your blog post on your social media accounts or creating engaging content in the form of images and video, it is also vital to pay attention to the key performance indicators from your content marketing and what can possibly be improved.
On Facebook, for instance, many agree that Facebook's change of algorithm in early 2018 effectively ended the prospect of getting amazing results through organic content on the platform.
Over time, though, pages with large followings and marketing budgets have gotten results by combining organic content and promoting their best performing posts occasionally.
Such an approach could also work on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Pinterest, even though these sites rely more significantly on building followership and promoting on group boards, respectively.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is the ideal to reach out to a new audience by publishing helpful content on other websites. Beyond acquiring new followers, guest posting also helps your SEO efforts as you can get a backlink and some referral traffic from the guest site.
To achieve more results with guest publishing, you may want to set a target regarding the number of sites you will contribute to over a certain period, albeit with more focus on getting featured on authority sites in your niche or a related field.
Like we pointed out under influencer marketing, it is vital to keep your outreach email as personal as possible. Bloggers can tell when an outreach email is widely broadcast to multiple site owners and are less likely to accept such proposals.
We once got an email from a blogger who reached out to us with the same email that he sent to a health-related site when our niche was based on technology. To help you get a clearer picture of what we mean, a rephrase line of the outreach email from the blogger, read:
"We appreciate the helpful insights you share about health matters on your blog and wish to contribute content that will be helpful to your audience."
You already know the response he got, and that's what happens when you don't sent personal guest posting reach out emails.
When you've landed a guest posting opportunity, remember to provide valuable content, deliver it to the guest site within the agreed time, and follow any guide they provide regarding guest posts that they approve.
Conclusively, promote the content to your audience and encourage them to do the same.
Final Words
As we noted at the onset, content is not king if there is not an effective distribution strategy to send that valuable information across to a broad audience of potential customers.
Applying the methods that we've mentioned in this article is sure to bring you results, and potentially set you on the path to reaching your sales numbers as well as the high level of authority that you want to attain in your niche.