The Ultimate Guide to Content Distribution

Every year, hundreds of marketers report increased efforts and expenses for their content marketing – or the intent to do so.

But great content is a waste if your audience doesn’t know it exists.

Content distribution is an integral part, if not the most important, of your content strategy.

This guide provides the tools you need to distribute the content you create. In the end, you can develop a content distribution strategy that shows your content in front of and consumed by your audience.

Nowadays, social media play a big role in the distribution of content. Let’s take a moment to check what this actually means.

Regardless of what type of content distribution you focus on, the distribution process will take place after this You create your content.

However, you should know where and how to go publish and promote your content In front You put the proverbial pen on paper. Otherwise, your time and resources could be wasted.

Check out these content distribution statistics:

As you can see, we have seen a rapid influx of content over the past few years that has seen a waning demand. With almost 4.5 million blog posts are published dailyThere is only so much content that we can consume. Marketing influencer Mark Schaefer argues that content marketing may not be a sustainable strategy for every company due to this “content shock”.

Although I disagree with or disagree with this theory, I will outline everything you need to know to successfully distribute your marketing content.

Before we get into that Different content sales channels that you can use to share your content cover the different types of content that you can create for distribution.

Content types for distribution

There are many types of content that you can create to market your business. However, not all types of content are created equally (literally), and each type typically requires its own content distribution plan.

Ebooks

Distribute your e-book content using a closed form on a special landing page. An example of this is HubSpots landing pages through which visitors can submit their information to access and read each e-book.

Podcasts and interviews

Spread your podcast or interview content across Apple podcasts, Spotify, or Google podcasts. An example of this is HubSpots Weird Work Podcast, available on all three podcast networks as well SoundCloud.

Videos

Distribute your video content over YouTube or video. An example of this is HubSpot YouTube ChannelHere brand content, videos with instructions and written content are shared in video form.

Infographics

Distribute your infographic content on Pinterest and on your blog. An example of this is HubSpot infographic blog posts that can be shared on Pinterest. HubSpot also has its own Pinterest account, on which it shares its own infographics in addition to other brands.

Case studies and success stories

Distribute case studies and success stories on a special page on your website. An example of this is HubSpot’s case study pageHere visitors will find all types of case studies with real HubSpot customers.

Webinars

Distribute your webinar content via a special webinar page on your website and via call-to-action (CTAs) in your blog posts. An example of this is HubSpot webinar websiteHere, visitors can browse and access free webinar content.

Blogs

Spread your blog content over your blog – you guessed it. You can also send a daily or weekly newsletter with a summary of your best or recently published content. This is an example HubSpot blog which contains different properties (marketing, sales, service, and website), each of which has its own homepage and email newsletter.

Content distribution channels

Content distribution channels are the channels through which you share and promote the content you create. The channels through which you distribute your content vary depending on the target group and resources.

There are three broad types of content distribution channels that cover a number of more specific distribution channels: ownership, earned, and paid.

The following diagram shows how these three content distribution channels overlap and how you can combine them to improve their impact and reach.

Own content distribution

Your own channels are the content properties that your company has. You can control when and how content is published on your own channels. This includes your website and Blog, Your social media profiles, your email newsletter or a Mobile publishing app.

Distribution of earned content

Earned channels (also known as “approved” channels) are channels for which third parties promote or approve your content. These third parties can include customers, journalists, bloggers and anyone who shares your content for free – hence the name “deserves”.

These channels include public relations, social releases and mentions, guest articles and summaries, and product reviews. This also includes forums and communities such as Reddit or Quora – While posting on these websites is free, the content belongs to these third parties and therefore falls under the deserved channels.

Distribution of paid content

Paid channels relate to your company pays off to spread your content on certain channels. This includes above all Pay per click (PPC), paid social advertising and paid influencer content.

Pay Per Click Ads (PPC)

With PPCAn advertiser pays when users interact with their ad through impressions or clicks. PPC falls under search engine marketing (SEM) and will help you, if you do it right, to earn high quality leads.

PPC ads are most commonly used on search engine results pages (SERPs), but also on social channels. When combined with an SEO strategy, PPC can be an integral part of your inbound marketing efforts. One of The top platform for PPC is Google Ads.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content are advertising materials that are paid for by an advertiser and created and shared by another person, brand, influencer or publisher.

Sponsored content is most effective when it contains a person or brand that is already targeting your target audience and buyer personalities and therefore already fits your brand well.

As a result, sponsored content generally feels more natural than invasive or disruptive. There are several ways to use sponsored content, including images, videos, podcasts, social media, and all influencer content.

Paid influencer content

Paid Influencer marketing requires that you employ leading content creators in your company’s niche to improve your brand awareness, traffic, and conversions between your common audience and your audience.

Influencer marketing is effective because it uses powerful strategies such as word of mouth and social proof that feel more trustworthy and believable to today’s buyers than the marketing a company does for itself. In fact, brands are expected to spend up to $ 15 billion for influencer marketing by 2022.

Paid social ads

Paid social ads may contain PPC, sponsored or influencer content. Paid social media ads are a way to share your marketing messages and campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram and at the same time address a specific subgroup on these platforms.

PPC advertising, content generated by brands or influencers and display ads are examples of paid social media. A paid social media strategy is likely to include tools that are typical of certain social media channels, e.g. Facebook ads or Instagram adsto create, schedule, and share ads to reach your audience.

Next we want to check what a Content distribution strategy is and why it is so important.

A content distribution strategy is important for several reasons:

• It increases the impact of your content after curation and creation. As I said above, great content is practically useless if no one reads it. A Content distribution strategy Get your beautiful content in front of your right eyes.
• It aligns your team and the teams you work with to create and share the content. Depending on the size of your business, you may have multiple chefs in the content marketing kitchen. (I know we do it at HubSpot.) A content distribution strategy aligns all of these different parties and ensures that they all work together efficiently.
• It sets target benchmarks against which you can measure your sales performance. The distribution of content can be vague – just hit the “Publish” button and you’re done. A content distribution strategy lets you set benchmarks and difficult goals that you want to pursue publication and promoting your work.

Learn how to create a content distribution strategy for yourself.

1. Research your target audience.

Content distribution is about putting your content in the foreground Your Audience – not just any audience. You can’t do this right if you don’t know where they are and what they like to read. Before you further develop your strategy, you should examine your target group so that you know exactly who will be consuming your content.

First, gather demographic data from your website visitors, email subscribers, social media followers, and customers. See your audience’s gender, age, income, location, education, and related categories. You can get this information Google Analytics or your social media analytics tools.

Then collect feedback directly from your customers, email subscribers, and social media followers. Ask them about their weaknesses and needs as well as their opinion on your current content and sales efforts.

Use these two data points to create yours Buyer personality. Your buyer personalities act as models of your ideal customers and content consumers, representing their vulnerabilities, information preferences, and motivations as you expand the rest of your content distribution strategy.

2. Check your content.

You may have already published some published content, e.g. B. Blog posts, videos, social media content and more. While your new strategy for distributing content does not include removing that content, you should do a review to see if it supports or disrupts your distribution efforts.

If you check your current content, you will also be reminded of which topics you have already written about and which you can expand on.

A thorough content review consists of three main parts:

1. Log your content. Your content can be logged manually or using a tool. (We recommend the latter, especially if you have published content in several properties and channels.) Tools such as Screaming frog can help you crawl and collect your content by listing each URL, title, and description in a table. The free version searches up to 500 URLs. If you choose manual content review, follow the steps in our blog post Here.
2. Assess your content impact. If you Crawl your content with SEMRushThe tool also lists content length, social releases and backlinks. With this information, you can assess the impact of each piece of content and draw attention to everything that is required Updated, rewritten or deleted.
3. Identify your content gaps. You can also identify gaps in your content using Ahref’s content gap tool or by performing Keyword research to discover new keywords or keyword phrases that you can add to your content to rank it higher and for more terms.

Check out this blog post for more than 30 other content verification tools.

3. Choose your sales channels for content.

Your Sales channels for content are probably more important than your content itself, which is why this step takes place before the creation of content and after the target group research. Once you know your target audience, you have a much better idea of ​​how to present your content to your followers and customers.

Depending on your analysis, you can post on forums and communities such as Reddit or Quora – and pay to advertise your content on these websites. Alternatively, you can choose to share content only on social media channels, or you can find traditional PR to be your best route.

Regardless of which sales channels you choose, make sure they match the preferences and behaviors of your target audience.

Also optimize your own sales channels – your blog, email newsletter and social media profiles – as they are relatively inexpensive and under your control. Even if research shows that your audience prefers forums to social media or news sites to corporate blogs, never neglect your own properties as they reflect your brand and product.

During this work, take the time to optimize yours Blog-to-gain readership, update how you send email newsletters (or send them) and learn about organic social media marketing.

4. Determine your content types.

After defining your sales channels, consider what types of content you want to create (and what resources you have).

Many companies post all of their content on their blog, then reuse and republish it. Blog posts are widely consumed, are easy to use and localize (i.e. translate into other languages) and easy to share – not to mention 50% of shoppers read a company’s blog while making purchase decisions.

For these reasons we recommend Building a business blog and then expand your content types from to share on other channels.

Think about it Content types that we discussed At the beginning of this guide, consider how to reuse and distribute it.

5. Set your KPIs and content distribution goals.

Goals help us identify where we are going and what success might look like when we get there. Your strategy for content distribution should include setting goals for your content key performance indicators (KPIs) and their metrics below:

KPIs	related metrics
Traffic / range	Unique page views by channel and source
engagement	Bounce rate, average time on page
Top content (and falling content)	Top page views, top exits
A hit	Click-throughs, conversions, backlinks
feeling	Comments, social parts

These metrics can vary by sales channel (i.e. you can’t track comments on your email newsletter or your social media ads are there above). So choose the metrics that best match each channel. It can take a few months for a baseline to be created for each channel, especially if you haven’t used it yet.

to adjust SMART goals for your content using these metrics. Here’s an example:

• S.Specific: I want to increase the organic traffic of our blog by strengthening backlinks from other reputable websites and blogs. This will increase our search engine ranking and thus bring more organic traffic.
• M.Simple: I want 30 new backlinks to our blog.
• AAccessible: We are already generating 10 new backlinks per month without An intentional strategy, so I believe there are 30 new backlinks this month With Our strategy is doable.
• R.Elevant: This goal is in line with our broader organic content marketing strategy and could also improve our deserved media if we receive mentions from third-party press offices and bloggers.
• T.ime-bound: I want to receive these backlinks within the next month.

6. Create an editorial calendar (and include distribution).

Content marketing and distribution require a lot of planning to be successful. Here is a editorial content calendar can be useful. You can create one in Excel, Google Sheets or even Use Google Calendar. Tools like CoSchedule, Asana, and Trello are also helpful.

Your editorial calendar helps your team as well as your strategy for content distribution to stay focused and work towards common goals. Your authors and editors will also receive a roadmap for what they will be working on in the coming weeks and months.

Your editorial calendar could look like this (using the example of this article):

Your editorial calendar is the perfect place to record your plans and goals for content distribution. This could look like this in your editorial calendar:

Do you see how the right columns now contain categories like Publish Goals and Reuse Plans? Your editorial calendar should serve as a hub for all content creation and Distribution plans.

Manage and plan your social media content with a free calendar template for social media content.

7. Create your content.

After you’ve researched your audience, reviewed your content, determined your sales channels and content types, and created your editorial calendar, it’s time to create your content.

The creation of content depends on your resources, your team size, your industry and your brand. For the most meaningful and accurate advice, read our Guide to creating content.

Check out the following tools as you work on your new content:

• AnswerthePublicThis can help you concretize topics and understand what your audience is looking for
• Canvathat can help you create beautiful infographics and pictures
• VidyardThis is a video hosting and publishing platform for marketers
• anchor, a free podcasting tool for beginners

We’ll talk more about it Content distribution tools in the next section.

8. Distribute and market your content.

You have created your content. Now is the time to publish it in the world. Publish and market your new content according to your editorial calendar and the selected sales channels. Follow the rules on each marketing channel to optimize your posts on each channel.

For example, Our team at HubSpot paid for ads on Reddit and found that it was helpful to deal organically with editors and pay for advertising space. Alternatively, if you post (or pay for) on social media, alternatively follow the guidelines for Best times to post and share content – The same applies Send emails.

9. Measure and analyze your results.

As always, keep an eye on the results of your content distribution. Think of these KPIs, metrics, and SMART goals You noticed in step five? Time to get them out.

After you’ve published your content, check out Google Analytics, your social media analytics dashboards, and your blog performance, depending on where and how you distributed the content. Make sure you set a routine time to measure and analyze (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) so that you can create a baseline and know what numbers you can hit the following week or month.

Angry! So that’s what it takes to develop a content distribution strategy. Make sure you repeat this process. These guidelines can change as you expand your content efforts and scale your team.

Now let’s talk about that Tools you need to get it done.

Distributing content can be a tedious process, but fortunately there are many Content distribution tools out there to help you discover and consume your work.

With these tools, you can publish your content on additional networks and forums to reach a wider audience.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a All-in-one CRM for small and small businesses. It contains a Marketing hubThis means that it is useful for email marketing, analysis, content creation, social reinforcement and more.

You can monitor, plan and publish content on your social networks. You can also access information from your email marketing campaigns to get the overall picture of your readers and customers.

price: Free and paid

2nd medium

Medium is a content platform on which individuals and companies publish content. You can use Medium in addition to or instead of your traditional blog. (We recommend in addition to your blog as this gives your content the greatest reach.)

Thousands of readers consume content in medium. It’s a one-stop shop platform for all types of content … similar to Amazon for products. For this reason, you should publish on medium to increase the number of people who see your content.

price: Free and paid

3rd PR Newswire

PR Newswire is a distribution network for press releases. The platform helps you to contact and contact journalists and sales outlets according to specific industries, geographical areas and topics. It offers packages for the state, local, regional and national press.

price: Paid

5. HARO

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, an online platform that connects journalists and sources. In this case, you are the source.

When you register with HARO, you will receive emails with journalist requests every day. Answer these questions to be mentioned in an article. This is a reactive content distribution tool, but it is helpful for getting press releases and backlinks.

price: Free and paid

6. ClickToTweet

ClickToTweet is a tool that allows your readers to share soundbites of your content on Twitter with a single click. You create your content soundbites and ClickToTweet provides a link. When readers click this link, the tool opens their Twitter with the content soundbite that is already ready to post.

It also contains links to your Twitter account and content so that your readers can distribute your content to you.

price: Free

7. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is a social expansion tool that allows you to summarize your employees’ social networks and send company content directly to them.

Employees have the option to review and improve content before posting or to have it run automatically. This is a great alternative to constantly annoying your employees to report on your company.

You can also use this tool to create links to social networks of partners, customers, trademark lawyers and more.

price: Free and paid

8th. Add that

AddThis is an on-page social network sharing tool. It enables your readers to share your content without jumping off your page (and possibly being distracted). You can also include AddThis approval buttons in your email newsletter and other assets.

price: Free

You can use these tools to measure and analyze the impact of your social contributions and other sales efforts.

9. Mention

Mention is a social media monitoring tool that offers social media listening, publishing, crisis management and more. With Mention you can monitor all the mentions of your brand name, content or your social networks and react accordingly.

This is a great tool to measure the impact and engagement of your content and determine who is promoting it for you.

price: Free and paid

10th SharedCount

SharedCount is a tool that you can use to measure the engagement of your social media posts. Simply enter a URL and SharedCount reports on its likes, shares, comments and other engagement measures.

While it may not help you distribute your content, it can tell you which parts are performing well and which parts may need to be updated or scrapped.

price: Free and paid

11. Outbrain

Outbrain is a paid reinforcement tool that allows you to summarize your content at the end of other articles. You can set up content campaigns using an RSS feed or specific URLs, and Outbrain places them under related content to encourage readers to click and read your content.

Outbrain works with an impressive network, including digital publications like NYT and Mashable.

price: Pay per click

12. WiseStamp

WiseStamp is an email tool that you (and your employees) can use to share your latest content in your email signature. Your email signature is often a forgotten but important piece of digital real estate that virtually anyone who opens your email will see. With WiseStamp you can make optimal use of this space.

price: Paid

Distribute your content to get better

Amazing content is a waste if no one consumes it. The distribution of content is an important part of the content marketing puzzle. It’s also the key to increasing your brand awareness, gaining loyal followers, and encouraging your readers to click, act, and become customers.

Provide these content sharing tips and tools to make your content accessible to your audience.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for completeness.

Originally published June 23, 2020, 10:43 a.m., updated June 23, 2020