Content has long been the cornerstone of digital marketing. The outcomes of effective content marketing can be huge. But what’s the point if your copy does not reach as many prospects as it can?
By blending different content distribution channels, you can amplify your outreach and make sure that your copy is visible and converts well. Let’s see how you can use this to your benefit.
Content Distribution Strategy: What Is It and Why Should You Care?
Content distribution is the process of delivering your copy to your target audience across a variety of touchpoints, including the channels your brand owns and external ones. The primary purpose of this tactic is to amplify your digital presence. Other benefits include:
- Growing brand awareness
- A larger number of leads
- Enhanced sales
So, what’s the case for adopting this strategy? In fact, using a mix of channels to spread your copy is a must-have in today’s market. With so many brands and content out there, reaching your TA takes extra effort. Unless, of course, your brand is already widely known.
The Three Fundamentals of Content Distribution
A solid outreach strategy consists of three main content distribution channels—owned, earned, and paid. Each of them has certain specs, pros, and cons. However, only a combination of the three makes a good network for spreading your content and ensuring that your TA sees it.
Owned Channels
As the name suggests, owned channels are those that you own. They involve all digital assets a business controls, such as a website, blog, app, podcast channel, accounts on social media, and customer portals.
- Pros: Owned channels give you full control over the creation and distribution of your content.
- Cons: These channels limit your outreach to people who already know your brand.
Earned Channels
Unlike owned, earned channels are those that don’t belong to your brand. They are third-party sources that mention your brand, spread your content, or link your assets for promotional or sharing purposes. A few examples of such resources include backlinks earned through ethical link-building practices, social media shares, coverage in media (PR), guest posts, and user-generated content (UGC).
- Advantages: Earned sources give you access to new audiences and help you enhance your credibility and demonstrate the high value and quality of your copy. Hence, they grow trust and can positively affect your organic rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs).
- Disadvantages: These channels don’t give you sufficient control. And they can actually hurt your progress if you get featured on sources that are not trusted and quality. This especially applies to backlinks, which can be toxic and cause your rankings to drop. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on your backlink profile with the help of the best backlinks checker tool and regularly monitor other mentions.
Paid Channels
As the name suggests, this category includes channels that you pay for. They can be divided into two main categories—sponsored copy, such as that obtained through partnerships with influencers, and paid advertising, such as ads placed on social media and search engines. It also spans content syndication if you pay to republish your articles on external sources.
- Advantages: These channels allow you to target your outreach with precision and make your copy pop up in front of your prospects right where they are, at the right time. They start working instantly after you create a campaign. And thanks to ad analytics, they also give you immediate insights into your reach, engagement, and other metrics.
- Disadvantages: Ads work best for short-term wins, though they might not be very effective in terms of creating long-term exposure. They also require significant investment.
Content Distribution Strategy Building: 6 Steps to Get on Track
- Clarify your business goals—Understanding what you are aiming for is a good starting point for defining the right channels and approaches to use. For example, boosting general brand awareness requires a balance of all three distribution channels, increasing seasonal sales may require a focus on paid ads for a rapid surge, and generating quality leads might require a focus on owned and earned channels.
- Refine your TA—While you already have a well-defined audience on the platforms you own, leveraging earned and paid mediums will require accurate targeting. Take time to analyze your customer data to create a fine-tuned ideal buyer profile and understand who you will be trying to reach.
- Pick distribution mediums—You already know that a mix of owned, earned, and paid content distribution can give you the best outcomes. Still, before you implement your strategy, you need to define which specific channels from each category you should use. You can use all available owned media. However, when it comes to earned and paid ones, you need to analyze your TA’s behavior to know where your prospects spend their time most often.
- Audit your existing content—Leverage tools like Google Analytics to see how your copy performs at this moment. Find pieces that bring the most traffic and engagement to leverage them in your strategy.
- Tailor your top-performing copy for other platforms—Analyze the most effective formats suitable for different media and adjust your existing content to suit them well.
- Create a distribution calendar—Plan what, where, and when you want to publish to promote your copy. Be sure to consider the best publishing times for different platforms for maximum outreach.
Don’t Just Share, Refine and Repurpose
When you have your general strategy outlined, you can start adjusting your existing copy. At this stage, the best piece of advice we can give you is to repurpose your copy for all content distribution platforms thoughtfully, keeping their unique specs in mind.
Here is a table showing how you can maximize every asset for maximum visibility and engagement:
| Original Content | Repurpose Into |
| Blog post | High-performing blogs can be turned into a series of email newsletters, social media snippets, appealing infographics, podcast topics, and videos. |
| Whitepaper | White papers are great for repurposing them into slide decks, LinkedIn publications, short videos, infographics, and webinars. |
| Webinar | A successful webinar can transform into a blog post, LinkedIn post, video tutorial, short clip or post for social media, email newsletter summary, or YouTube video. |
| Case study | Case studies can be turned into social media posts (with key takeaways), mini case studies, and infographics. |
| Podcast | Top-performing podcasts can be transformed into a series of blog posts, videos, or social media content. |
| Customer testimonial | For added trust, consider transforming testimonials into case studies, quotes for landing pages, and ad creatives. |
The variations are diverse. When you delve into copy repurposing, you’ll find that there are many opportunities to transform every format. Most importantly, you have to do it with the specs of each platform in mind. Simply changing the length and format may not suffice for ensuring engagement—you also need to adjust the tone of voice and format.
Maximizing Success: Platform-Specific Tips
Now that you have a list of strategies for different types of original copy formats, let’s briefly review the main tips for succeeding in each particular platform:
- LinkedIn: Turn your top-performing long-form copy into thought leadership posts and carousels.
- X (Twitter): Retrieve the most engaging and valuable insights from your blogs and turn them into consecutive threads.
- YouTube: Rewrite your long-form content into transcripts. Adapt transcripts both to long-form videos and sequences of topic-specific clips.
- Email: Leverage lead-generation SEO to grow your email list and create nurturing email sequences based on your long-form copy.
- Reddit/Communities or Forums: Give answers on relevant discussion boards and cross-promote your copy through authority.
- SEO: Use optimization best practices to reduce the limitations of your owned channels. In particular, use structured data, FAQ schema, and internal linking.
Top Metrics to Track to Refine Your Strategy
Apart from standard KPIs like traffic, click-through rate, and similar, your distribution strategy requires measuring the following key metrics:
- Channel-specific engagement. Keep an eye on how engaged your TA is across different mediums.
- Conversion paths. Analyze the platforms and content formats that bring desired action.
- Share velocity. Consider the pace at which your copy spreads on different touchpoints.
The insights you gain from these three metrics should help you see the formats and channels that outperform the rest. To amplify your efforts, double down on your top-performing assets–for example, if your video content distribution efforts seem to pay off best, focus on repurposing more copy into videos and consider spreading it across all mediums, including paid ads for social media.
Bonus tip: Apart from focusing on things that outperform, you can also refine and improve the formats and channels that don’t seem to be bringing the results you want. To do this, identify them, analyze for potential errors, and leverage A/B testing to see how different variations in headings, multimedia, and other aspects affect engagement.
Top Tools for Tracking Results and Streamlining Distribution
Spreading your copy across a variety of touchpoints at the same time can be rather time-consuming and complicated. Here are a few solutions that can simplify it:
- Mailchimp for automating your email campaigns and analyzing the outcomes.
- Google Ads for creating paid advertisements on Google.
- Facebook/LinkedIn Ads for creating and managing paid social media campaigns.
- Quuu Promote for making sure that your publications get shared by real users on social media.
- Sprout Social for scheduling and analyzing social media distribution.
- Google Analytics for measuring your traffic, conversions, and user behavior.
Conclusion
Crafting high-quality and valuable content is crucial for finding your TA and converting it. However, if you are ignoring copy distribution, you might be missing out on plenty of great opportunities.
After reading this article, you have a step-by-step guide for distributing your assets across different channels. Use it to amplify your outreach, grow your business, and attain your goals without a hassle.
