A content marketing distribution plan is the cornerstone of any successful organization. You can have amazing content that details revolutionary, groundbreaking ideas but it is no good if no one reads it. You can spend tons of money on marketing in the hopes of building your pageviews, lists, or reader engagement, but, if you target the wrong audience, you throw your hard-earned dollars down the drain.
The hallmark indicator of an effective plan is increasing ROI over time. If your stats are stagnant – or worse – trending negatively, you need to go back to the drawing board. Don’t give up or settle; you just need to find the strategy that works for you and your audience. Producing great content your audience wants to read is half the battle and, chances are, you already have that. Now you need to get your content out there to find those readers and bring them back to you again and again. Here’s how to improve your distribution.
Rethink Your Content Marketing Distribution Strategy
Make your content work for you by exploiting it wisely. The fundamental purpose of your content is to build your brand so keep that idea front and center in your marketing plan. Use your content to create trust with your community, so they are more inclined to use your products or services and recommend them to others. At the same time, use keywords from your content to rank your site through SEO strategies to drive conversions.
Find a Way to Provide Genuine Value
Don’t just churn out content – this will only harm your efforts in the long run by sacrificing quality for quantity. Instead, leverage the latest content marketing best practices. Your readers want value, and if they can’t find it on your site, they will go elsewhere. Your readers don’t owe you anything, and they are not going to waste their time reading subpar material that means nothing to them just because you were more interested in amassing content rather than making the content meaningful and relevant to your readers.
If you concentrate on providing value by marketing meaningful content, you will find readers that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and they will be willing to buy from you. What good is it to have loads of pageviews but minimal conversions? If your pageview to conversion rate is 1000:1, you will rank lower in Google’s algorithms than if you only had ten page views and two conversions because of the difference in perceived value. Spend your time and energy on creating value rather than quantity.
Take Advantage of Free Promotions
Cut out unnecessary expenditures by making free distribution sources like social media work for you. Spend money on promoting those pieces that do well in your “free” arenas because you already know that people are interested in them. It is also important to evaluate where you are promoting your content. Pinterest and Instagram engage audiences in a different way than Facebook or Twitter, for example. There’s even more differences and idiosyncrasies when you take into account the various verticals of businesses/websites – ecommerce, lead generation, etc. Ask yourself questions like whether Instagram or Snapchat is better for your business.
Posting images that link back to long articles on Instagram may hurt your efforts because the user on Instagram is probably not interested in reading your article. However, they may be interested in your products so a link to the product description page for the image you posted will serve you better on that platform.
Harness Your Capital Effectively
Direct traffic to your site with useful paid distributions on social media and through ad networks. You can’t go wrong if you promote the content that already proved successful through your free distribution efforts. An essential factor to keep in mind with paid distribution is that your campaign is only effective as long as you are willing to fund it. To avoid falling headlong into a money pit, you need to ensure that the audience that comes to you through the campaigns become loyal readers and result in conversions. One way to do this is by creating a mailing list so that you can market your content to the readers after the campaign is over.
Just as you would with unpaid distributions, make sure that the platform you are using allows you to engage with users appropriately. The same content or services, marketed on different platforms in various ways, will drive viewability and traffic. Videos are great options to promote on YouTube, related products can be shared on Instagram, and articles can be promoted on Facebook. Promotional tweets about services do well on Instagram and Facebook provides a beautiful way for your readers to interact with you.
Remember: Automation is Your Friend
Automate yourself as much as possible to save time and conserve energy for those tasks that are better done manually. For example, NextScripts allows WordPress users to post on multiple platforms in seconds, and Mass Planner allows all types of users to automate the uploading processes telling the software what to post and when. These tools and others like it will enable you to upload content to various sites throughout the week without requiring you to do it yourself physically.
Another benefit of automation is that it can be used to promote some of your best content again a few months after it’s initial run; this gives it visibility to new audiences and provides you with higher chances for money-making conversion. Re-use the content you have but don’t just post it as-is again and again, it becomes tedious and users will just skip over it. Edit the article so that it is fresh and relevant. Always have a purpose for promoting old content that makes it applicable in new ways to you readers.
Don’t be Afraid of SEO
SEO can be a powerful tool in your distribution arsenal when appropriately leveraged. Comb through your site so you can create a list of running themes and ideas that are specific to the value you provide. The last thing you want to do it promote your material with keywords that don’t apply to you because that will give you negative “points” in Google’s algorithms and hurt your visibility.
Add content and keywords to images of products and services so that Google will know how to rank and tag them appropriately so that relevant users can find them. Create your content around keywords but don’t overcrowd it unnaturally because it will look spammy to your readers. Work it into your titles, headlines and body paragraphs naturally. You can also find and tag synonyms for your keywords and use them to avoid repetition.
Make Your Content Personal
First and foremost, nurture your leads so that you can build real relationships with the individual members of your audience. You need to build brand familiarity before you try to sell anything. Interact with them and don’t just ask them to buy something every time you send them an email or make a post on Facebook. Show your readers that you care about them and they will be more willing to become paying customers.
Secondly, make sure that the tools you are using – like forms that encourage sign-ups – actually work on your site. Play around with different forms and various positions so that you can find your golden egg.
Make sure you are taking full advantage of your leads. Monitor the activity of those who have signed up to follow your sites versus those who have not. Use the data you collect and turn it around to your advantage by providing greater incentives to your readers to sign up and your followers to stay with you.
Final Thoughts
Strategizing your content for distribution is not an easy task but it not a pie-in-the-sky unattainable ideal either. Be smart about your resources and how you use it, and you will see the results you want. Don’t look for some quick answers – valuable content marketing distribution takes work, and it’s worth it. Keep on trucking… and writing… you will arrive at your destination.
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