How to Distribute Content for a Larger Audience

Digital Marketing today is incomplete without effective content marketing. As a business you need content to promote your services like never before. The best part is that many big and midsize businesses are investing a decent amount of money into content marketing.

Businesses, however, are having problems with making their content work for them and are having issues with the way they are promoting it. I personally looked into many different content marketing campaigns and found that quality of content in most cases is not the problem. The main thing that their content marketing strategy is missing is the distribution.

Webmaster’s Note: This is a guest entry by Moosa Hemani from SEtalks.

Creating great content is not enough unless you distribute it to the right audience and most businesses failed to realize who their target audience is, where they are and how to efficiently target them so that they convert instead of becoming irritated.

We know that creating content that appeals to users is important; in order to learn more about it, check out this content marketing guide by Smart Insight. Now the question is how to distribute or share that content to the target audience.

There are tons of content promotion ideas that we can use to get the attention of the target audience, but before that here are a few things we should know.

What persona are you targeting?

In most cases you will have multiple personas for your businesses, but when you are creating content you may or may not be targeting all of them. The best idea is to dive back in to the content and see what persona the content is targeting: how old they are, what they like and more. Use this information to plan your promotion strategies accordingly. What’s the use of sharing your content on LinkedIn or other social media platforms when you don’t have a specific persona in mind?

Always make sure that you target the right persona, because if the right audience lands on the website, they will be more likely to convert as compared to others.

What is your end goal?

I agree that making more sales is what a business wants at the end of the day, but there are pieces of content that marketing teams created especially for sales, and others are for the brand awareness only. When promoting your content, make sure you know what your content is targeting and plan your promotion strategy accordingly.

What is the lifespan of your content?

This is also important. There are some content pieces that are great, but their lifespan is very short, a.k.a seasonal content. Let’s say you create a piece of content for Black Friday, regardless of the quality of content, the lifespan of the content is very much limited to the event. Once the event is over, there will be little or totally no use for the content. It is preferable to think of a general but substantial topic that can cover you for a longer period of time, whatever the event.

Dive in and be sure about what your content looks like. If it’s evergreen content, try to think big and plan your promotion strategy over the course of weeks and months, but if the content is seasonal, in that case, plan your promotional strategy accordingly.

How to Distribute Content for a Larger Audience

Now that you know what your content is and who the target audience is, it’s time to use different content promotion tactics that attract a larger audience in quick time. Listed below are the 6 promotion tactics I recommend for content promotion.

Note: SEO is a powerful channel, but as we are talking about getting the wider audience quicker, we are not including SEO in the list.

1. Influencer Outreach

This is one of those phenomenal ideas that, if done right, can get you a great amount of audience members that will not only read your stuff, but will be more interested in what product or service you offer.

The idea is to outreach the influencers within your industry, show them the content and politely ask them if they can share it on their social media accounts or give any feedback in the comment section or more.

The reason why this works extremely well is because here you are using the principle of authority. When they share your content piece from their Twitter accounts, their followers take a look at them and finally move to your content.

The reason why your content is more important than others is because it was shared and recommended by the authority figure in their eyes.

Just find the right people within your niche, who are active and big into following. Once you have the list, reach out to them and convince them to share your content with others.

2. Paid Social

 

Nowadays, mobile phones are the ones that people check first thing in the morning and, if you look at the data of the top downloaded apps, social networking apps like Facebook and Twitter are among the first ones they use. This simply proves that social media is where your audiences are most of the time, and it would be good to direct your content to these platforms.

The social network platform can be different based on persona, but people are all connected online via social networks. In order to get targeted traffic quickly, paid social works really well. The problem with social traffic is that a good amount of that traffic is not made up of mature buyers, so the idea is to test a few campaigns and see what channel works best for you the most and use that accordingly instead of investing good amount of money on all social networks.

3. Organic Social

Organic social is as important as paid. The idea is to share your content within the circles and communities you follow. The reason why it’s important is because if people in your circle like your content and share it within their own circles (and if this goes on), the ripple effect can create the content to go viral and one can expect a lot of leads, sales and traffic as a result.

Here are few of the ways to increase the impact of your organic social:

• Hashtags – no matter what social platform you use, hashtags work everywhere. It’s important to use relevant ones so more and more people would be interested in what you are trying to put up, and so they can decide if they would continue to be involved with it.
• Mention the experts who shared something in your content. If you have quotes from experts within your content, the idea is to use them in snippets in order to gain wider audience attention. When people see an authority figure has included feedback in the content, they are more likely to click on it and read it.

4. Do outreach for links with similar content

This is similar to influencer outreach, but it’s not limited to influencers and industry leaders only. The idea is to see who has written similar content as yours and check their link profiles. You can easily do that by using tools like OSE or Ahrefs.com.

Once you have the list of all the people who have linked to similar content as yours, the next step is to find their emails (Buzzstream is a good choice here) and reach out to them. Chances are this will not only give you extra traffic, but it will also give you some extra links that point back to your content.

We use this idea a lot on our company blog and it usually takes up our rankings in web searches and we get both search engine and referral traffic.

5. Turn your content in to different media

If your original content is in text format, the ideal thing to do is to convert it into PDFs and videos and share it on websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare, Scribd and more.

This way you will be able to attract a very different audience to your content. YouTube alone has the most traffic after Google and sharing there will give you extra exposure and traffic that points back to the website.

6. Submit to Content Communities

There are some great content communities where there are tons of traffic, and sharing your content piece there will give you more traffic and conversions. There are some great communities like Blog Engage, Bizsugar, Inbound.org (digital marketing), Triberr and more.

Competition on these websites is tough, but if your content is exceptional and can attract an audience, you can easily win the race and attract more traffic than you can imagine.

Final thought

These are a few ideas that I use when I promote my content on paid and social platforms. If you have more ideas for content promotion, please share them with us in the comment section!