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Content Distribution Strategy: Sure Ways to Deliver Information to the Target Audience

45 mins read

The thing is, when you publish an article, the content promotion process begins. From that moment on, you need to double your efforts to help as many people as possible put a face to your story. What’s more important, don’t focus on the resource itself. It could be published on your blog or on an external resource with thousands of readers.

The problem is, the organic traffic that comes from Google is delayed. It can take up to three months on average for a Google bot to find your content, rate it… That’s where the meat of the story is. Content promotion strategy is as important as a result. When you start promoting content, you send the first positive signal to Google – the behavioral factor. It sounds like, “Wow, the article gains attention after publication, then I’ll keep it shooting up to the top search results.”

But how to promote your story after publishing?

In this article, we will talk about what content distribution entails, the types of channels it has, and show you the bullet-proof strategy that can help you amplify the traffic and maximize your reach. 

What Is Content Distribution? 

Simply put, content distribution refers to the set of activities you intend to do after producing a piece of content. 

Let’s say you created a podcast episode that you know will wow your audience – on which channels would you share this piece of content? Will you repurpose it for social media? Will you optimize the page for SEO? Or perhaps you will boost it through online ads? 

Answering these and other similar questions is exactly what the process of content distribution looks like, and its goal is to help you understand the exact action points you should take to attract traffic to your content piece. 

This type of thinking after publishing an article, video content, or even a webinar session is important because otherwise, it would be really hard to reach new audiences and amplify traffic, which is the main reason to create content in the first place. 

In other words, if you don’t have a proper content distribution strategy in place, there is not much point in spending time creating a quality piece of work. 

The main idea is to distribute your content in front of the right audience at the right time and through the right channel in order to make sure you get the most out of your marketing efforts. 

What Types of Content Distribution Channels Are There? 

There are three main types of content distribution channels – think of them as places where you share your content for your audience to check it out. 

Logically speaking, choosing your channels entirely depends on the nature of an audience and the set of resources you have, right? 

Let’s take a closer look at each one of them and see what types of content distribution channels exist for you to choose from: 

  • Owned Content Distribution Channels are the platforms that your company fully controls. This could be your blog, website pages, mailing lists, newsletter, social media pages, and even physical locations if that’s applicable to your case. 

Developing owned channels gives you full creative freedom to share the information you want and is cost-effective for increasing awareness over time. 

  • Earned Content Distribution Channels involve activities where others help you to share your piece of work. This includes user-generated content (UGC), backlinks, social media post shares, and media coverage on relevant outlets. 

These types of arrangements help you effectively attract new audiences and build trust to boost the credibility of your brand. 

  • Paid Content Distribution Channels involve the promotion of your content through online ads, sponsorships, influencer marketing, and every other marketing activity where you have to pay for your placement. 

Gaining visibility through paid channels gives you guaranteed visibility and results in the short term that you can easily track. 

Read more: What Is Paid, Owned, & Earned Media? PESO Model

5 Tips for Constructing an Effective Content Distribution Strategy 

Getting your content pieces in front of your ideal target audience can be challenging at times. But if you put together a proper content distribution strategy, the process might feel more streamlined and aligned to your goals. 

Let’s have a look at the 5-step strategy that can help you amplify the traffic through the content you create: 

Start With Learning All About Your Target Audience 

If you want to find the best ways to get your content in front of your ideal customers, it is important to conduct thorough research about your target audience in the first place. 

Firstly, try to understand which platforms they like to use to receive information that is relevant to your field. Do they like to find products on TikTok and Instagram? Or do they go to Google when they are searching for a specific solution? 

Not only that, but learn about their online behaviour and map out their habits, so you can gather data and conduct analysis to gain specific insights. 

You can do this by interviewing your target and simply asking them which platforms they like to use the most and why. You can also use tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to learn about their online habits.  

Conduct Analysis and Set KPIs That Make Sense for You 

After understanding specific details about your audience’s online habits, it is time to analyze your existing content and see how you can apply your learning to amplify traffic. 

More specifically, take a look at your content pieces that are not performing well, and try to think about the changes you should make to make them more attractive to your target audience. 

That said, make sure you set proper goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track your content performance and evaluate if your content marketing efforts are successful or if they need some extra boost. 

KPIs could vary depending on the type of content. For example, if you are planning to publish YouTube videos, then you could focus on the number of views, video engagement, Click-through rate, subscriber growth, and similar. 

Select Media Channels That Are Relevant for Your Audience 

This is where the process gets really interesting. In this step, you must choose the channels for publishing content and also think about where you will distribute that content in different shapes and forms. 

Firstly, think about the types of content distribution channels you will use – owned, earned, or paid? Of course, this decision should be coming from the research you made in the previous steps. 

After that, think about the supporting channels to share your content pieces as well. 

Let’s say you are writing articles on your blog – that’s the primary channel for your content. But wouldn’t it help to repurpose this content for other supporting channels as well? 

For example, you could share a shorter version of that article in your newsletter, create a LinkedIn carousel out of that information, or make a short video for Instagram Reels to expand reach. 

The opportunities are limitless – the important detail is to understand where your audience’s attention is and make decisions based on that. 

Get Started With Creating and Distributing Content Pieces  

Time to get your creative juices flowing and get started with putting together content pieces that your audience will truly love and appreciate. 

Remember to make sure that the content you create is helpful and valuable for your audience. If you keep the quality, consistency, accuracy, reliability, and originality above everything else, you will automatically set yourself up for success. 

Another important detail to keep in mind is that you must make it easy for your audience to share your content on their pages, which will bring you additional traffic and potential increase in sales. 

When distributing your content pieces, make sure that your materials are visually appealing and, of course, according to your brand guidelines. 

Track the Results, Measure Performance, and Draw Conclusions 

Finally, it is extremely important that you monitor your content performance and track down the learnings from the actions you take. 

For that, you must collect relevant and useful data from every single content distribution channel you build. Keep an eye on your website traffic growth, social media follower numbers, mailing list sign-ups, and other metrics to measure success. 

It would also help if you could compare these results with the numbers you had previously and see if your content distribution strategy was effective and useful for your business growth. 

Content Distribution Channels vs. Effectiveness

Distribution ChannelBrand AwarenessEngagementLead GenerationConversions
Social Media (Instagram)HighHighMediumLow
Email NewslettersMediumMediumHighHigh
Travel BlogsHighMediumHighMedium
YouTubeHighHighMediumLow
SEO/Organic SearchMediumMediumHighHigh
Paid AdvertisingHighMediumHighHigh

Useful Tools for Content Distribution 

Other than well-known social media platforms, there are lots of tools that can help you effectively execute your content distribution strategy. 

Let’s take a look at our top picks: 

  • PRNews.io If you want to distribute your articles in well-known online magazines, this tool can help you get guaranteed placements for sponsored content in the publications you’d like to collaborate with. 

All you need to do is go to their online store, choose the publication you’d like your article to be published with, and send out your piece of content for review. The tool takes care of distributing your PR content. 

  • Medium a platform where anyone can register and start sharing their ideas, knowledge, and expertise in the form of articles. 

You can use this platform if you are looking to create an additional blog platform, as it gives you a broader reach and can be used as a source of building brand awareness. There are thousands of readers consuming content here every single day. 

  • HubSpot an all-in-one tool that can be perfectly used for content distribution. It allows you to connect all of your social media accounts and mailing lists and automatically schedule content weeks ahead, making the distribution process more efficient. 

How to use PRNEWS.IO for content distribution

Using PRNEWS.IO for content distribution involves a straightforward process designed to help businesses and individuals get their stories published in reputable online media outlets. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Explore the Media Catalog

PRNEWS.IO offers an extensive catalog of media outlets across various industries and regions. Use filters to narrow down outlets by category, geographic location, audience type, and pricing. View details for each publication, including audience size, SEO metrics, and editorial guidelines.

Prepare Your Content

Write a press release or article that aligns with your distribution goals. If you need assistance, PRNEWS.IO offers content creation services, where professional writers can craft your story.

Submit and Approve Your Content

Upload your content to the platform. The editorial team at PRNEWS.IO reviews the material to ensure it meets the selected outlet’s guidelines. You’ll have the opportunity to approve any edits or changes before publication.

Review Published Content

Once your article or press release is published, review it on the target media site. Use the link to promote the content across your own channels (e.g., social media, email campaigns).

Content Distribution Guide by PRNEWS.IO

Use press releases for content promotion

Press releases are a great way to get more exposure on your content. Writing and publishing a press release with a backlink to the original article featuring your company will help the article to rank higher in google for relevant keywords. This can aid in driving leads to your business.

Use our press release template to save time and effort.

Press Release Distribution As a Tried And True Way to Get Your Story Noticed

Social media marketing (SMM)

The most popular social networking website is Facebook. The audience of this social network exceeds one and a half billion people, about one billion of which enter it every day. Day by day users add 350 million new photos to Facebook and share posts about five billion times. This is one of the most global marketing tools.

The SMM philosophy is to establish a company that will be distributed by users themselves independently from the seller. This method has more credibility because it serves as guidelines.

LinkedIn, such media blogs as YouTube, Instagram, Twitter blogosphere enjoy great popularity as well. As a prime example of the advertising campaign in Instagram may be pyshechnaya1958 public in Saint Petersburg. A good marketing and just 28 provocative posts in the social network have attracted almost 70 thousand subscribers to the profile of this location.

Think only, with over 756 million users, LinkedIn is not a platform with hype. The reason? Well, the platform is still untapped. To get some traction there, it’s enough to share the best stuff. The best thing is that it could be even old stuff but the one that stands out. 

Telegram is one of the dynamically developing sources of sales. To attract the audience, partners’ posts, quizzes and surveys are published here. Links with auto subscription, native advertising and much more are hidden under the buttons of them.

Facebook Groups

The Content Distribution strategy allows companies to create a space about a specific product or branch of the brand their customers are particularly interested in. Unlike a brand’s Facebook account, the content should be created, “owned” and managed by the Group members, not the brand itself. It’s a chance for the followers to share their experiences around the brand or product, and it is not a place for the brand to push more content. According to Facebook, the platform prioritizes content in their algorithm from Groups that users frequently engage with. So if you’re consistently posting to your Group and your audience is reacting to it or they’re posting content themselves, you’re sending to the algorithm exactly what it wants.

Aside from tracking your website performance through Google Analytics, Facebook Insights is a free and extremely helpful tool to analyze your social audience. You can see:

  • Gender and age group of your audience;
  • Time, when they are most active on your Facebook page;
  • What device they use to visit your Facebook page (mobile, desktop, tablet);
  • Which posts are more interesting for them.

The key to success is to really understand your audience’s interests and emotions and to create your content accordingly to this. You should create the posts your audience really wants to see and should address the issues which really are important to them, both before and after they click the post.

Unfortunately, due to the changes in the algorithm, organic reach on Facebook is decreasing, with most companies citing that their posts are reaching between 2-5% of the total audience. This is a huge drop since 2015, and it has had a huge impact. That’s why it is crucial to invest in Facebook posts that you want to appear in the news feeds of your followers.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to spend a huge amount of money on Facebook ads. It’s enough to pay for a small push of the post. However, if you want to see the very best results from your Facebook group, this is a step that should pay attention to on your priority list moving forward.

Quora Content Distribution Strategy

Quora is a platform to ask and answer any question, either based on facts or opinions– and that’s where you can participate as well.

Quora is an excellent source in generating organic awareness, content marketing, thought leadership, paid advertising, and even help you to learn your audience. On this platform, you get:

  • Excellent reach: Share questions and answer the answers with over 300 million monthly users. 
  • Search visibility: Quora posts are searchable through Google. Your content here keeps evergreen, driving users back to your website whenever a problem is appearing.
  • Thought leadership potential: There are already countless high-profile experts on the platform. Join their ranks and promote your brand.
  • More high-quality traffic: Boost customers back to your website by answering their questions and performing how your product or service solves their problems.
  • Insights into your audience: Quora is a platform for real people, seeking to solve problems and finding real answers. If you help Quora users with this, they’ll support you in return by investing in your products and services. You may even attract new brand advocates. Questions and answers are an amazing insight into your audience, how they think and what they need.

Here are six proven methods to get the most out of your Quora marketing efforts:

1. Boost Existing Content

There are two ways to advertise your content organically on Quora:

  • Write an original response.
  • Use parts of your existing content.

You can even add links and refer to your website in your answers. Make sure these links are appropriate. Otherwise, users might conclude you are merely spamming.

If you are extracting the content from your website, make it anywhere between 100 and 200 words, and then make a referral link to the original content on your site. Make sure to re-word the extracted text or put it in quotation marks to avoid being penalized for the duplicate content. 

When using anchor texts, don’t be too insistent. It’s better to avoid such phrases as “Read more”, “Check out my website.” and use “Check out the complete step-by-step guide here”, or “Read this article to discover more.”

2. Build Up Thought Leadership

As a social Q&A platform, Quora makes a perfect place to earn credibility and establish yourself or your project as an authority in your industry.

It only needs 20 to 30 answers to the same topic for Quora’s algorithm to consider you as an expert in the field. Quora encourages the top experts in each topic by putting them in the “most viewed writers” roster.

So, how often should you respond to the questions? You should answer at least once or twice per week just to get the ball rolling. And once you reach it, you can most certainly do more than that.

3. Generate Quality Leads

Quora platform entirely stands on demand-driven questions and answers. And as a result, the traffic it generates is likely going to convert better because users are determined in their search and Quora visits.

As long as you are providing valuable and helpful answers, people naturally get attracted to your account. Thousands of people may potentially visit your profile and see your full bio with a link to your website. That’s a constant stream of traffic and leads right there.

4. Build Conversations Around Your Content

The real impact of Quora is in creating your community of followers and engage with them. That‘s why Quora is becoming a powerful platform to build a presence, whether it’s for your business or yourself.

With its new opportunity Quora for Business, you can now launch an official page for your company for free. A business account creates a business’s own persona, making it easier for past, present, and future visitors to understand and communicate with your business. Make sure you described in detail:

  • Business FAQs
  • Technical questions
  • Industry questions

5. Find Targeted Blog Ideas

Quora is a robust tool to do market and customer research. Real people come here to find the answers, so it can’t get any perfect to learn more about your audience.

This makes it very useful for marketers to create more specific content based on:

  • Problems they are coping with;
  • What they want to find;
  • What interests they have.

When looking for these questions, make sure it hasn’t been answered anywhere before or at least questions that already have some following. In another way, you might give responses to the most common questions that can easily find and you will go unnoticed. If you have unique expertise on the topic, then write content around it by all means.

There are two ways to find question ideas on Quora.

  1. Use industry keywords to look for appropriate questions.
  2. Follow industry topics and spaces to continue with the trending posts that may be interested in your audience.

6. Attract Potential Customers

As an advertising option, Quora gives you a cheaper and more effective way of reaching your potential customers by advertising answers. These answers could be yours or someone else who has a complete and sufficient response about your product or service. Quora does not have such a huge audience as Facebook and Google, but it is more demand-driven on Quora.

Quora Marketing: What You Need to Know to Get Your Ideas Heard

Contextually targeted advertising

The main driver of contextually targeted advertising is remarketing. It offers the possibility of informing the users, who have visited the page earlier, on new arrivals, promotional actions and various events.

The popularity of contextually targeted advertising that has risen in the last few years comes from the fact that this is one of the income sources of many companies, including Yandex and Google. Their advertising platforms, namely Yandex Direct and Google AdWords, earn money by translating contextual ads.

Examples of this abound. The contextually targeted ads are those small advertising banners inviting you to visit pages of the online stores with the goods, which you might have searched for recently. It can appear on social networking websites or on the pages of news sites, in browsers and mobile applications.

Mass media

Media of mass communication or mass media are the ways of information delivery and interaction between the publishers and the audience at all levels.

For advertising purposes both direct methods in the form of advertising spots on radio, television, in internet sources and native advertising of brands during shows, programs, articles, interviews and authoritative pronouncements of celebrities, workers in culture, people of science and art are used.

Lots of globally known publishing houses such as BBC, The New York Times and others have their own advertising tools. For advertising BBC uses at once several channels, mainly, for non-British audience. These are BBC-Capital, BBC-Future, BBC-Travel. Morgan Stanley – the largest American banking holding – used BBC news channels for its advertising campaigns.

Articles for Talent Visa

Influencer/Blogger/Micro-Influencer Outreach

When promoting your story, hearing an expert source is smart. Got no clue where to go first? Now stop and think like a journalist. No matter the niche of your story, there’s always a professor/blogger/journalist ready to talk about their subject areas. You don’t need to contact all of them. There might be two or three persons to whom you send a non-pushy email. There’s nothing wrong if they don’t fit your subject. Ask for contacts who are right for it. 

Read more: How Micro-Influencers Help Brands Do Better Marketing

Super Personalized Outreach Email 

Even here in 2021, email marketing still works wonders. People often forget how powerful sending a few emails can be. The only difference for this content promotion strategy to work, your email needs to be super personalized. Even at least one personalization data can improve the response rate up to 32%. You can also have some call-to-action, be it feedback, comments, or questions. Quick and personalized, that’s how your email should be. 

Tips for Writing an Effective Email Pitch

Invite Quick Engagements by Asking Questions

When you promote media, make sure you use this content promotion strategy. A post that gets early engagement wins the attention of more people. If done right, content promotion is not biased. Instead, think of it as a conversation that engages people. To do that, help people get involved. Ask questions or invite to comment on your topic. Posting surveys on social media is another way to engage people.

Guest Post + Bonuses

A guest post is always a good way to promote content and grow your blog. The trick is yet to get people from that guess post to your website. Mention that your guests can get something for free and see the results.

From HBR to Mashable: Publish Guest Posts on Major Publications with the Help of Contributors

Tell Your Story on YouTube

Video is a hot content promotion strategy that won’t go anywhere for sure. That’s why it’s smart to take your story and turn it into a video. It will take time, yet there are millions of users looking for great videos. So, it’s in your interest to do it great. For inspiration, you can look at how other businesses have leveraged the power of video to showcase their products and services. For instance, companies like Penn Tool Co have effectively used YouTube to create engaging and informative videos that showcase their products in action.

What’s more, you can create an audio podcast and add a transcription from the video there. Or you can create sliders for SlideShare, too. All in all, there are many ways to tell your story in another form for specific communities.

Repurpose/ Reformat is hot

The beauty of repurposing is letting you scale up your story without creating something new over time. Since people’s standards for content have changed a lot over the last few years, it’s not enough to shout out loud your story and call it a day. Instead, you can give them a new angle. Thus, grab ideas/concepts/examples from your original content and repost them in the new format. The best way to promote media is on platforms like Quora or LinkedIn. Why? They have their publishing tools for that.

The idea behind it is not to reuse the entire piece but adapt it to today’s audience’s expectations. Take one of your best tidbits from the already existing article, update numbers/data/sources, and grow from there into something new. Rinse and repeat for as many posts as you need to handle. It can take time, but the result is worth it.

You gotta experiment

That said, every little bit helps. One thing is sure, for you to succeed, you need to increase your promotion efforts. There are a lot of other great content promotion strategies that help people put their face to your story. And it’s up to you to try and see the results. No matter how hot the trend, your audience’s expectations are the key point in any promotion. 

Post-publication content distribution checklist:

  1. Share the article on your personal social profiles (Facebook, Twitter). If you have corporate social accounts – share them there as well.
  2. Post your article to the relevant Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack groups.
  3. Add articles to a mailing list.
  4. Add article links to the older, relevant blog posts.
  5. Promote an article on Quora and Reddit.
  6. If you use channels such as Telegram, or Instagram (e.g. in bio) – be sure to announce your article there.
  7. Design a preview image for the article, upload it on Pinterest and add your article there.
  8. Use contextual advertising. The cost of the ads for niche phrases is often low. Set a small budget and test several variations of your ad image and text.
  9. Retargeting. It’s easy to drive targeted traffic to your website. Retargeting is an inexpensive and simple tool. Promote your content only to those visitors who have visited your site before.
  10. Launch look-a-like ads to the audience which consists of your website visitors. This is a fairly effective method of finding your target audience on social networks.
  11. Submit your article to aggregators. After you have published an article or any other content on your website and you see over time the number of visits began to decline, publish this article on other resources. It may be Medium, Blogger.
  12. Do link building. Try to build a dozen links to each of your articles. This gives your content an advantageous edge over the competition in the eyes of Google. By the way, PRNEWS.IO can help you with this task.
  13. Promote content via influencers. Once an influencer shares it on his/her account, it shows up in front of an even more audience.
  14. If your company sends out push notifications, also it’s worth using it to promote new content.
  15. Create a short video – intro and upload it to Youtube with a link to the article in the description.
  16. If the topic allows, create an infographic for the article and also distribute it.
  17. Use the Qwoted services. Qwoted stands for Help a Reporter Out. It is an online platform that helps journalists and sources connect with each other. In this case, the source is you. Using HARO’s service, you will receive daily emails with journalist queries. Responding to these queries you have a chance to be featured in an article. This is a reactive content distribution service, but it’s useful for getting press mentions and backlinks.
  18. PRNEWS.IO is a press release distribution platform. This service offers the guaranteed distribution of content in publications across the globe – in state and local, regional and national publications. The PRNEWS.IO platform can help you to drive awareness among your potential clients, generate traffic, and increase your sales. 
  19. GaggleAMP is a social amplification service that offers you to aggregate your employee’s social networks and send company content directly to them. Employees have the option to review and customize the content before its publishing or allow it to go through automatically. This is a great variant instead of constantly bugging your staff to post about the brand. You can also use this software to link to social networks from partners, customers, brand ambassadors, and more.
  20. ClickToTweet is a service that allows your readers to share the soundbites of your content on Twitter with a single click. You create your content soundbites, and ClickToTweet gives you a link. When readers click that link, this service opens their Twitter with the content soundbite already ready to be published. It also links to your Twitter profile and content — allowing your readers to share your content for you.

Why is Content Distribution Important?

After you’ve clicked the Publish button it feels like you can finally exhale. But no, it’s just a beginning. For the better performance of your article and good outcome, you should do some must-have activities. No worries, they are easy to execute.

Let’s start with the content seeding. The thing is that search engines need time to index your articles and even more time to estimate them in order to raise or lower them in the search results.

To speed up this process, you have to distribute these articles. This is when the PRNEWS.IO distribution service will come in handy. We provide the guaranteed distribution of content in media across the globe. In addition, along with distribution, we create crowd links to your article, which also positively affects it in the eyes of search engines.

Another positive factor in content distribution is the improved behavioral factors. Google “sees” that a lot of people visit this or that article, which means that this article contains valuable information, which means it has to be raised in the search results.

The topic of content seeding after publication is quite extensive and deserves a special article. Leave a comment if you want we review this topic deeply. Now let’s go back to our checklist

Prior to buying a potential customer receives information on the product, forms his or her opinion, and makes a decision. The seller’s goal is to guide the customer through all the stages of the purchase funnel and close the trade. Since the late XIX century, one of the most effective advertising techniques is the AIDA model based on which an advertising campaign must attract a target audience, spark interest in the product and hold this interest, arouse an impulse, and push for purchasing.

The ultimate goal of any advertising campaign is a buying response

The TA is a group of people joined together based on the characteristics required for purchasing. Methods of information delivery will depend on these characteristics as well. Present-day the most effective source of information is the Internet.

We will discuss three ways of TA informing with the help of the Internet.

  • Create low-quality content, thinking that a reliable resource will do the job no matter What is inside
  • Do not distribute content after publishing

Read more:

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