Planning and creating content is only half the battle for marketers. The distribution of the newly created marketing assets is another essential factor that needs careful planning and actioning. This can get especially tricky when thinking about how to balance multiple content distribution goals for your brand.
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Distributing marketing content effectively across digital platforms is essential, yet it can be challenging with countless potential content marketing distribution channels available. Businesses must find the right balance in their marketing planning to reach their audience and achieve their goals. How can you balance multiple content distribution objectives? Read on to learn everything you need to know about how to develop and implement an effective multichannel strategy.
What is content distribution?
Content distribution refers to publishing, sharing and promoting your marketing content across online channels to extend its reach. The aim is to make your valuable content visible to your desired target audience.
Some key benefits of an effective distribution strategy include:
- Driving more website traffic and engagement with your content
- Building brand awareness, trust, and thought leadership
- Generating more leads and conversions from your content efforts
- Improving search visibility and authority rankings
Without a content distribution plan, your hard work creating blogs, videos, reports and other assets will struggle to realise its full potential. Distributing content to your audience is as crucial as creating it.
What is a content distribution strategy?
A content distribution strategy outlines where, when, and how you will publish and promote content to achieve your marketing goals. It helps coordinate content distribution across the many potential digital channels available.
An effective distribution strategy should cover the following:
- Your target audience and buyer personas
- The content formats and types you will create
- The platforms and channels to leverage
- Your publishing schedule and frequency
- Promotion tactics for each platform
- How you will track and measure performance
With a documented distribution plan, you take a strategic approach instead of distributing in an ad-hoc, haphazard way.
How do you develop an effective content distribution strategy?
Crafting an effective content distribution strategy is crucial for getting your marketing content in front of the right audiences. Follow these six key steps to develop a robust distribution plan:
1. Understand your audience
Your content distribution strategy begins with your audience. Research their demographics, interests, challenges, preferred content formats and the platforms they actively use.
Surveys, interviews, social media analytics and web traffic data can provide insights into your buyers. Build detailed buyer personas that capture your key audience segments.
Did you know?
When GetApp surveyed SME owners and managers on their social media strategies 50% used social listening as a way to get a better understanding of their customers. Around half of these respondents used social listening software to carry out this task.
2. Set goals
Be clear on what you want to achieve with your content distribution. Do you want to drive traffic, generate leads, increase brand awareness, boost engagement or something else?
Set specific, measurable goals so that you can track progress. Goals also help you prioritise channels and tactics.
3. Choose the right content distribution channels
Select channels that align with your audience's preferences and content consumption habits. Doing this will help to ensure your content gets discovered.
Start with owned channels like your website, blog, email lists and social media. Look at high-value third-party websites, influencers, forums and aggregators to extend reach.
4. Audit your existing content
Audit existing content using a robust content management system (CMS) and analyse performance data to identify high-impact content formats and topics tailored to your audience.
Look at how content performs across different channels and mediums, such as blogs, videos, podcasts and webinars. Then map formats to channels where they resonate most. Also, account for content your audience wants to see more of.
5. Promote your content
Actively promoting your content across multiple channels is essential for extending its reach and visibility. Developing a solid promotion plan provides a framework to help amplify each piece of content and drive engagement. Effective tactics include:
- Publishing content across owned social media profiles and company accounts.
- Running sponsored social media posts and pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
- Email marketing to subscribers with content alerts and newsletters.
- Guest posting and influencer partnerships to expand your reach.
Tips for SMEs?
In our SMEs and Social Media Survey, 47% of SME leaders highlighted the time commitment of posting to social media platforms as the biggest disadvantage of using social channels in a small company. Using social media management tools can help marketers cut down the time it takes to work on these tasks via a centralised interface to plan posts, review feeds and schedule posts to multiple networks at once.
6. Track and analyse performance
Put tracking mechanisms like analytics software in place to monitor content reach, engagement, conversions, and return on investment (ROI) across channels.
Use insights to identify high-performing content or channels and underperforming areas in need of refinement. Continuously optimise efforts based on data.
How do you set an effective content distribution goal?
With a strategic distribution plan, you need clear goals to execute it effectively. Follow these tips for setting robust objectives:
1. Make goals specific and measurable
Set precise, quantifiable goals so that you can accurately track progress. Vague goals like 'increase website traffic' or 'drive more engagement' are difficult to measure.
Instead, use specific metrics like 'increase organic traffic by 30% in 6 months' or 'achieve a 10% increase in email click-through rate (CTR) over 3 months'.
2. Align goals with business objectives
Your content distribution goals should ultimately align with and contribute to your overall business goals.
If your company objective is sales growth, then set distribution goals that target audience segments in your sales funnel. Content that helps convert leads to customers will be a priority.
3. Audit your current performance
Review historical data and current benchmarks to set realistic, achievable goals. If your email open rate is 20%, increasing it to 40% in three months may be unrealistic. Instead, set incremental goals for continuous improvement.
4. Set goals across key metrics
Look beyond vanity metrics like social shares and likes. Instead, focus on actions that impact ROI, such as generating more traffic, leads and sales. However, include brand and engagement goals, too, for awareness.
Strategies for how to balance multiple content distribution goals
Juggling multiple content distribution goals across different platforms and channels can be challenging. Here are some strategies to balance your efforts:
Set clear content distribution KPIs and goals
Setting specific, tailored key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals for each platform is vital when balancing multiple channels. Establish precise success metrics rather than broad objectives.
For instance, define KPIs for owned channels like your website and blog, individual social platforms, content partnerships, promotions and offline distribution.
This focused approach enables concentrating efforts on the most impactful activities per channel. With precise benchmarks aligned to overall goals, you can ensure distribution activities across owned, earned, and paid channels drive measurable business impact.
Create a content distribution calendar
A content calendar is invaluable for executing your distribution strategy and balancing efforts across channels.
Mapping out content plans and promotions in advance enables you to maintain a consistent publishing schedule per channel. This organised planning distributes content evenly, avoiding inconsistent timelines.
A calendar also allows you to coordinate content production and promotion seamlessly across your team. It ensures strategically allocating resources to achieve specific goals set for each channel. Maintaining this centralised overview keeps multi-channel objectives focused.
Prioritise high-impact activities
Prioritising distributing content on the most effective platforms for your industry and audience is crucial. The highest impact channels depend on your goals, products and buyers.
Dedicate more time to promoting content on high-ROI platforms that align closely with your objectives. While social media has benefits, email marketing may generate more revenue for B2B brands by providing qualified traffic.
Carefully evaluating each channel's effectiveness through analytics enables you to balance your efforts appropriately. Focus on platforms demonstrating the greatest measurable return. This strategic, data-driven approach maximises results.
Allocate resources strategically
Your time, talent and budget are limited. Allocating resources proportionately based on value and expected impact is critical to achieving balance across channels.
Channels strongly aligning with your goals and resonating with your audience warrant greater resource investment.
For high-priority content supporting key objectives, plan robust promotion in channels with the most significant effect. For other assets, a lighter media mix may suffice to conserve resources.
Continuously evaluating performance analytics enables refining this strategic allocation over time. Focus resources where the most significant measurable impact is achievable.
Continuously analyse and improve
Regularly analysing performance across channels is vital when balancing distribution. Use analytics to identify practical, high-impact tactics to double down on.
Look for poorer-performing areas needing optimisation or replacement. Continuously testing new distribution ideas based on accurate data enables you to refine your approach.
Be ready to adjust your strategy as channel effectiveness shifts over time. An agile, data-driven optimisation approach is vital to maximising distribution return.
Activating your content distribution game plan
Distributing content across numerous digital platforms is challenging yet essential for modern marketers. So, how can you balance multiple content distribution goals? The answer is to develop a strategic, tailored approach aligned with your audience and objectives.
Clearly define your distribution goals, create an editorial calendar, leverage analytics, and continuously optimise activities based on data. With a well-balanced plan, you can maximise your content's impact and achieve your marketing goals.
As new platforms and trends emerge, remaining agile and refining your content distribution strategy over time is vital to stay ahead. A focused, data-driven approach enables optimal content distribution.
