So you know your personas and you’ve created great content, but how should you deliver that content to maximise its value? There are endless channels to send out your message. Choosing the right ones and creating a great content distribution plan is hard. But it’s the most important factor when trying to accomplish your business’s goals.
Why you should distribute content
Content distribution is complicated. The abundance of options is neverending. But distributing content is not as simple as publishing it and waiting for your audience to see it. You can’t expect Google to track your published content and mark it as a useful, worthwhile piece of content. If you want the right audience to engage with your content, you need to invest in that piece of content.
There are a myriad of different ways that you can amplify your content to entice your ideal audience. Whether that’s emailing out links to it to customers you already have or promoting blog posts and articles on Facebook with paid, boosted posts, you have to take the first step for your business; blindly putting it out there isn’t going to achieve much at all.
How to know if your content distribution plan is right
Luckily, there are indicators to tell if your distribution is functioning successfully. Measuring impressions, shares and likes helps you monitor what content is working.
However, you don’t want to get too hung up on these numbers. They could distract you from making quality content which promotes your business. They can tempt you to create clickbait material. If your content is on a blog, you should check to see if others have linked back to your posts or mentioned you on their channel. These analytics are good endorsements and can be used to determine if your content is being productive.
Is email still effective?
Many businesses either rely on or avoid promoting their business through email blasts. But, there are ways to stay out of the spam folder and get your content out to customers. Email services, like any other artificial intelligence, have gotten smarter. They are now able to recognise if a particular email has been sent to numerous other addresses. They can also see if their users are not opening the email or marking it as spam.
If a service notices this pattern, it may block the email from users who also haven’t engaged with the content. Therefore, there’s some invisible filtering that’s going on. To avoid this, businesses should constantly refine their mailing lists so they’re not sending content to people who are simply not interested. Although this means decreasing the number of customers who will see the email, it ultimately will save resources and only target those that are eager to receive your content.
To utilise email in the most effective way, it is important to return to your editorial statement. Your customers expect that you’ll follow through with your promise on what sort of content you deliver to them as well as how and when they’ll receive it, so sending emails which are unrelated to them will only distance your relationship. Instead, it’s helpful to declare a distribution schedule that will plan out when you’ll send an email.
Whatever you commit to, do the same thing consistently. That way your customers will know when they will be receiving the email and not be overwhelmed with a full inbox. Then, make sure that your content is useful, valuable and something your audience will engage with it. You can still get profitable results by sending out an email, and it’s essentially free. The number of customers who have opted in to receive your content is a good indication that they’re engaged advocates for your brand.
How content distribution can lead to a sale
Content distribution is extremely beneficial─ but first, you have to figure out what works. The first step of that process is to understand the buyer’s journey. Knowing where your customers are in the journey can help you view your strategy from their perspective, and most importantly realize what’s in it for the reader. Often this revolves around what problem you can solve for the customer or what education you can provide.
Once you understand their position, you can ask yourself how can you can educate your audience? How will you proceed once they know about a topic? The answer isn’t always a sale but rather how you can help further.
It’s essential to recognise that strategy is a two-way relationship. If you continue to deliver irrelevant content or things your customers cannot learn from, you may lose your audience.
What to do if your content distribution isn’t working
Sometimes, people just don’t want your content, and that’s okay. Focus on building an audience of engaged customers. Losing someone who isn’t interested really isn’t a loss at all.
As discussed previously, cleaning up your email list is a great way to begin clarifying your content distribution. Firstly, you should remove people who don’t open your emails anymore; your content is already not reaching them so adding someone who might read your content is much more rewarding. Many businesses are afraid of making their list smaller and believe that it is some sort of measure for success within the business. However, narrowing your list is usually the easiest way to target your best customers and nourish those relationships as well as strengthen your content distribution.
How to enhance your content distribution
If your content distribution is not functioning properly the first thing you should do is take a hard look at the content. You should ask yourself questions like, “Am I really addressing the pain points of my persona? Am I publishing this at a bad time of the day? Is there something off-putting in my subject line? Is my content formatted for all devices?”
These are just a few of the many factors that can affect how your audience is receiving and perceiving your content. Really examining any issues that could occur is a vital step in improving your distribution.
