How Do You Develop an Effective Content Distribution Strategy

Over 74% of businesses leverage short-form videos, engaging images, and any type of interactive branding to enhance reader and client engagement. Why? Think about the last time you purchased a product because of a commercial or ad. The fact is today’s consumers want to know more about what your branding says. They want a deep connection that includes all the services you offer. Balancing how to present your brand image, features of your company, and highly engaging content is what brings in new and returning consumers. 

While crafting writing that your target readers cannot put down is important to a brand, you also want to ensure they keep coming back for more and know where to find you online. You want an emotional connection that resonates just enough and is efficient to use so you can focus on running your business. That begins and ends with a solid content distribution plan. 

What Exactly is Content Distribution?

Content distribution is a generalized term that refers to any methods you use to get your info out to your target customers. This isn’t simple marketing. Your team is using unique systems, companies, and platforms to deliver highly engaging content efficiently. 

For example, if you are hosting a special event like a book signing for an author, your distribution strategy is going to have a ton of email blasts, posts to Facebook or TikTok, a news article, and a press release through a media distribution company. Other popular forms of getting the word out on your content might include: 

• Q&As
• Blog Posts/Informational Articles
• Tutorials & How-tos
• User Generated Content
• Videos, Pictures, and other Visual Media
• Newsletters
• Email Marketing Campaigns
• Social Media Posts
• Digital Advertising
• And the list goes on and on

If you want more awareness, market penetration, and engagement, then you need to get quality and diversified traffic to your online touchpoints. Do this by using trustworthy pathways that increase your unique brand authority in your niche. We could spend all day covering the several types of content you can deliver, but to make things easier, let’s focus on website blogs, various articles, and case studies that are the most common written mediums. 

The Importance of Quality Content Distribution

If customers don’t know the places your brand posts updates, you cannot expect to increase sales or build a long-term customer relationship. Think of a Hollywood movie trailer. You watch a snippet of a story about a film long before buying a ticket and planning a visit to the theater. It’s the same for any modern brand. Content informs your target customers of the “who,” “what,” “when,” “why,” and “how” of your unique brand. 

After you’ve crafted this content, it’s time to deliver it to consumers. These target readers will depend on your brand mission. Maybe you offer auto parts for B2B sales or custom cat costumes for B2C markets. Whatever it is, you are delivering unique content in the most efficient way to the best-match clients. 

Owned Vs. Earned – Which is Best?

The lines that separate channels like earned, shared, and paid distributionare 100% blurred. You can thank the mass proliferation of social media accounts going viral and digital advertising offering a strong advantage to mom-and-pop shops. Most media companies require a small to medium-sized fee to share your content on their platform. Everyone leverages paid media sources like Google ads and link shares, so let’s focus on the two primary categories – owned & earned. 

Owned Distribution Channels

As the name suggests, this is any content your brand owns outright. Think of the unique blogs, landing pages, social media profiles, newsletters, and case studies your brand puts out into the world. 

• Strengths: Complete control of your content direction, how your users view the content, what landing pages they hit, and anything else your brand puts out into the world. 
• Weaknesses: This takes consistent effort, or you risk getting stagnant. 
• Threats: Could narrow down who reads your info or risk visibility issues whenever Google, Bing, Facebook, or Instagram decide to suddenly update their page rank/search algorithms. 
• Opportunities: You get a streamlined method to build a loyal fanbase while remaining flexible to market demands. All you need is to adjust your SEO to retarget organic traffic. 

Earned Distribution Channels

Earned content is published a little bit differently. These unique channels are where you leverage some third-party teams to amplify your branding and content tone. For example, think of using press releases through an outreach group, guesting on another blog, engaging a review site, or distributing media through a dedicated service. Unfortunately, you won’t get much control, but it is a good way to cultivate strong customer engagement.

• Strengths: Increases your brand authority, helps with client credibility, and is a fantastic way to boost trust. 
• Weaknesses: Not much control. Editors and creators may shift the final edit or narrative.
• Threats: There are unpredictable instances of pricing and communication. 
• Opportunities: Consumers will seek solid relationships because you are using influencers, recognizable platforms, and other significant players – tapping into new audiences along the way.

Which is Best for Me?

It’s tough competition in today’s post-pandemic world. Content digestion by consumers has grown by over 207%. Securing the best-fit content publisher with unique ways to distribute your work requires balancing strategies. The best way we’ve found is to take a little from both. Kind of like being a prizefighter. You want to use techniques and skills from a bunch of assorted styles. The same is true for distributing all your fantastic content. Try a little bit of everything to see what works best for your unique brand. 

The tough part is learning how to leverage earned distribution to organically grow your brand reach.

5 Tips for a Winning Earned Distribution Plan

#1 – Automation is Your Best Friend

Finding suitable consumers for your unique content publishing goals will take research. Your goals may not be the same as popular providers. To get the best results, they need to understand your target audience as much as you already do. Automating this task through data analytics, and powerful software-backed services is a good place to start. 

Help a Reporter (HARO)

Connect directly with journalists interested in sourcing experts or those with experience in a wide range of topics and stories.

PR Newswire

With PR Newswire, you get a recognized leader in distributing press releases, announcements, upcoming events, or anything else you wish to share about your business with reputable news sources.

List.ly

Create a list of anything related to your niche business that you can share across all types of platforms. Want a book list of business marketing? How about a list of tools for blogging? This is your way to grab attention and backlinks.

Buzzstream

When you’re looking at link building, Buzzstream offers a way to connect with influencers in your niche who want to amplify your content to their engaged online audiences.

Contently

Building your articles and news updates can be tough on your blog. With Contently, you get to create a portfolio of your controlled content that is easily sharable with other content producers looking for additional resources that amplify their work.

Outbrain

Need to boost your content distribution through external links? Outbrain feeds relationships and complementary content related to your articles at the end. This is a great way to add discovery content to your own pages as well as get listed on other people’s blogs and websites.

Appinions

Using social media influencers is a fantastic way to boost your content distribution. This tool makes it way easier to find the best-matched influences for your brand and unique business voice.

Content BLVD

Here, you can directly appeal to creators and publishers by submitting your original content to a massive marketplace that others will use to promote your business, organization, and brand.

NinjaOutreach

Another engaging platform that helps you share content by using influencer relationships. This is also a chance to link share by publishing work through guest blogging opportunities.

Prowly

A professionally managed and recognized media database that connects you to over one million industry-leading journalists and editors. The entire platform is very user-friendly and a great place to begin expanding your distribution strategy.

JustReachOut

Here, you get a great database of journalists, but also a thriving community of fellow bloggers that have already built a solid reputation. You can filter who you want to connect with using niche markets, sectors, or industries.

Magic PR

Elevate your content distribution strategy by creating and publishing your news to over 250 premium media outlets. This is a fantastic way to gain solid and high-quality backlinks for your website.

FollowUpThen

A scheduling tool that helps you manage the journalist’s requests to “follow up” with media inquiries and distribution sourcing. It reminds you of the relevant so you never miss these opportunities again. 

Even with all these fantastic providers automating your distribution plans, the processes may still need a human touch. Manual intervention is going to be required to get the job done right. 

#2 – Cultivate Unique/DIY Media Contact Lists

Any outreach team with the experience of or benefits from link building (or lazy content publishers) understands how vital a curated list is for getting content to best fit readers. Why do you think you receive endless emails about expensive “ready-made” media lists from agencies where you can get published?

The problem is most of these media lists are not targeted well. They are generalized to help get more backlinks, but not on the needs of your target industry or niche market. That can cause you to get lost in the competitive mix. Ready-made lists can cause serious issues with page rank on search engines like Google and Bing if you’re not too careful. 

#3 – Avoid SEO-Toxic Media Outlets

You should always be wary of anyone (freelancer, agency, or unsolicited email) offering backlinks or publishing to highly ranked websites for a small fee. These offers could fail to get you listed and can pose a serious threat to your SEO.

Roughly 71% of all link clicks come from the first page results of search engines. If you are harming your rank due to bad distribution channels, you drastically lower your chances of increased visibility and engagement. To combat this, make sure you follow our media quality criteria:

• Do the digital publishing companies have positive traffic dynamics for the last year?
• Is the channel you’re considering aligned with your website, brand, or business voice topic?
• Does the platform you’re using have high-quality content (at least 2-3 articles that are of good quality and free from over-promotion, grammar errors, or autogenerated content)?
• Do they have 10 or more keywords in the top 10 of your relative searches?
• Does the top 3 pages of the channel gather less than 50% of organic traffic?
• Can you be sure these resources do not rank with suspicious keywords like “casino,” “adult,” or “XXX?”

Getting one premium backlink from a respectable media outlet is far better than hundreds of backlinks from suspicious resources. Even if you are offered a free service for your earned distribution channel, be suspicious as they are likely to sell links to others – diluting your visibility and authority online.

#4 – Expand Your Network of Media Contacts

Overseeing your media outreach is a never-ending battle. You’ll have to show content to dozens of editors and blog owners, one at a time. All that work involves uncovering contact details, setting up relationships, and making editors/publishers interested in your content. You’re looking at an uphill battle unless you build your network. 

• Talk to journalists willing to write on your topic. They will know what editors decide on the content going into their distribution channels.
• Set up relationships with bloggers, influencers, and experts in your niche by mentioning them in your material. Include a statement of gratitude for their ideas and request a sharing of content in the future.
• You can offer your services as an expert in your field, so you eventually get published as the source (free of charge). 

You’ll need to choose if you assign a single employee to this task where you risk errors or boredom. Or you can work with an experienced and professional team like ours at SmartContent. We offer incredibly well-written content with clear distribution channels from high-quality sources that save you time, effort, and stress over growing your brand awareness.

#5 – Offer Valuable Content

The final tip is a little subjective but critical to your page rank and engagement rates. Learning how do you develop an effective content distribution strategy begins and ends with the quality of your content.

You need to deliver content that feels authentic to your brand without trying to “pull one over” on the editors or slipping in a link without their permission. As long as your content is excellent, reinforces your identity, and delivers good information to the readers, most editors will be happy to link to your services, resources, and website. 

Taking pre-existing successful content and supplementing it with your own added value is more than acceptable. Editors appreciate the work of making their job more manageable, and readers will love the added benefits.

Wrapping Up

Quality content distribution strategies will be unique to your brand and resources. Start small and slowly build your reputation online. As you progress, you’ll quickly realize where there are great partnerships and opportunities and, hopefully, where to avoid certain services.

If you want more insight into how to build your distribution strategy, reach out to our team at SmartContent. We love growing your brand through content creation, distribution, and quality backlinks.