How to Improve Your Content Distribution Strategy
By: Edouard Lavidalle
Tags: Digital Marketing, Fintech, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting

Reposted from Beaver Writer’s Blog

Writing good content is great, but this is just the beginning of your content marketing journey. What matters most is what happens after pressing publish.

At Beaver Writer, we’ve been creating content for many years, and frequently provide advice to our customers on distributing their content effectively, with a focus on organic distribution.

It is clear that good content is just not enough, especially if you don’t have an audience yet. Without a loyal audience, the chances that good content will be met with crickets are actually quite high.

You will need to distribute content on channels that already have an active community. But there is more competition than ever to just get the attention of the audience. That’s why everything starts with consumer research.

Research the Audience

Consumer Research is the starting point for an effective content distribution strategy. Before spreading the content all around, you need to find out where is the audience spending time. Yet, the best thing to do is actually to reverse engineer the content in order to match the distribution channel and the audience.

To do so, put yourself in the shoes of the audience. If you don’t know which audience you’re targeting yet, it’s most probably your prospective customers. Have a look at our User Persona template and read How to Identify your Audience in this article.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you’re better able to determine what kind of content they are looking for. Research the channels they spend time on and have a look at the topics being discussed on these channels. Try to understand what type of content is generating the most engagement. You should use these channels to inspire the type of content you create.

Let’s say that by researching the audience, you find out that they spend time on Quora. There, take a look at the content which seems to be successful with the audience. Have a look at the question types asked and determine which questions you should be answering as well. Is there anything not being talked about that could be helpful? Ask the question, and provide the answer. The best shortcut to having successful content is to reverse engineer what is already working with the target audience.

When writing content with distribution in mind, you’re more likely to publish content that will add value to the reader, and increase your chances that this content will be shared.

There are a bunch of distribution channels that can fit your audience. Adapting the content and finding the best channels takes some trial and error. Document your lessons and iterate. Below are some channels you may consider to publish your content organically. Depending on the size of your ecosystem, you should ask for support in distributing content to your partners and network.

Customise content promotion

People are more likely to share content if it creates value. Even if you’ve identified the good channels and adapted the content in order to match the audience, you will still need to adapt the post to maximise its reach.

Content has to be delivered in a way that your audience will enjoy and appreciate, and that search engines algorithm will understand.

This starts with setting up proper metadata and tags on the blog posts. Likewise, one cannot address Twitter, Linkedin or a Forum audience in the exact same way. With the ridiculous amount of content that is created nowadays, competing for attention has never been so hard.

Email is a very effective channel to promote your content. It’s the opportunity to reach out to some selected customers to whom you believe the content can add value. Reaching out to your own audience with guides or product updates can add lots of value to them.

Depending on the piece of content and the angle, you can contact some of your partners or media companies.

If you’re not sure how to reach out with your content, have a look at these 8 content promotion outreach templates.

Go Beyond

It doesn’t stop at publication and promotion. To go further and improve your strategy, you should monitor the content metrics. You can set-up tracking across channels with tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, Bit.ly, etc.

Your content can live on for years on the internet. Search engines will always prefer fresh and recent content over an outdated one. Use this opportunity to provide value over the long-term, by frequently updating the content, and also linking new content to it.

Each update is an opportunity to redistribute the content. If it was a successful article, you can repurpose it across different platforms. Let’s say you initially published on Medium, well maybe you can adapt that content to Slideshare, Youtube or Quora.

Whatever you’ll do, no strategy is ever perfect, and you will find lots of adjustments to do in the future. Based on feedback, metrics and research, you will be able to iterate and advance towards your goals.‌