Content Distribution is the mechanism of promoting content to online viewers through multiple media formats.
About 70% of marketers invest in content marketing and 40% of marketers say content marketing is an important part of their strategy. Given all the distracting and diverting noise in the content marketing arena, not to mention the fastly growing competitors, one must deliberately carry out strategies for utmost engagement and performance for optimal content discovery.
Here are the steps worthy to follow.
Knowing Your Audience
Your audience must be your primary priority in creating your content strategy. Before diving into the specifics you must meticulously know every angle of your audience’s interests, goals, and needs. Specific details of your main audience matter. Details like age, gender, location, and goals. Even the ways and means of reaching them also help.
During this time wherein online platforms are at their prime when it comes to collaborating and connecting despite the physical (social) distancing, it is crucial to reach them through their most frequently used online platform. Your content must align with the audience’s characteristics and be intended to ensure long-term engagement. It must communicate well to certain target groups or individuals.
Moreover, your content design must cater to the location, behaviors, and interests of those target audiences. In this way, your content will be more relevant and engaging. Customizing your content design to make it more resonant with your audience’s experiences is the key to deepening relationships and creating a lasting impact on your viewers. There are abundant choices you can try to help you prepare your content based on your primary audience’s preference. There is software that offers pre-made web designs, newsletter templates, and related stuff that will come in handy as you deliver your content on certain
Identifying Your Goals
Before anything else, it is always logical and strategic to determine your goals. Not just to cognitively identify your goals but to jot them down so that you can reflect well on the things that truly matter to you in the light of choosing the right channels for you.
Aside from providing a condition wherein you can properly think through the specific details of your goals, documenting these goals will also enable you to vividly explain and share these goals with significant others just like your team and other stakeholders. This will allow everyone involved to be engaged and on board with everything that is going on. Having everyone on the same page will surely foster productivity, talent optimization and generate success according to the goals you have set.
Once you have ascertained and documented your goals you are now prepared to select appropriate channels. Here are the vital considerations in choosing your channels.
Channel Category
Next, let’s go over the different categories of the available channels for content distribution.
Among the most popular are the following: Owned Content Distribution, Earned Content Distribution, Paid Content Distribution, and Free Content Distribution.
Owned Content Distribution
This refers to web properties that belong to you which include your blog, social media, microsite, a newsletter distributed through emails, websites, social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Whatsapp, Tumblr, etc.)
To give you an overview of the progressing avenue for this type of content distribution, the following are the substantial statistics of the selected social media platforms: 952 posts are consistently published on Instagram each second. 8,726 tweets are posted per second.
About 8 billion views occur each day worldwide. One of the benefits of your own content distribution is that it is totally within your control, thus making it cost-efficient, conveniently flexible based on your goals and needs.
Earned Content Distribution
These types of channels are the third parties that disseminate your content without any type of compensation in return. May it be through guest postings, retweets and shares, press coverage, and product reviews and comments. It could be through directories, influencers, users, and fans promoting your content.
According to Nielsen (a prime global provider of information and insights of consumer demands), 92% of worldwide consumers rely on earned content distributors among all other means of promotion. Earned content distribution channels expand your reach and strengthen your reliability.
Since third parties are perceived to be authentic and unbiased. These characteristics of third-party content distributors allow you to exceedingly amplify and validate your content.
Paid Content Distribution
This channel for content distribution entails a sort of compensation. Several platforms and networks offer tremendous opportunities to promote content. Paid channels for content distribution seemed impractical compared to free avenues yet mostly it gives you leverage to outsmart competitors in online traffic.
These are sponsored social media advertisements or campaigns. Some are in the form of paid editorials posted in a publication, partnerships, and collaborations with social media influencers. These avenues enable you to thoroughly target your audience. Visibility is heightened based on your goals and budget.
Free Content Distribution Channels
Purposeful channel utilization is possible to achieve through free content distribution channels.
Measuring Content Performance
Constant monitoring of content performance allows you to gauge its efficiency when it comes to income and profit. It provides insights as to determine your next move towards attaining your goals. This process will enhance your entire content distribution procedures since it will equip you with significant information from the documents and reports you’ll acquire through the monitoring.
Study shows that 70% of marketers invest in content marketing and 40% of marketers say content marketing is an important part of their strategy. With the enormous investment spent on content marketing, it is safe to declare the importance of monitoring content performance. According to 2020 research of Content Marketing Institute, 80% of their respondents use metrics to measure accomplishments.
The first step of measuring content performance is to determine and decide on the metrics you’re going to use. Benchmark your identified goals to guide the process. Establishing the Key Performance Indicators in making measurements in comparison to the Return of Investment is highly suggested to make a scientific and bulletproof form of measurement. Here are some of the metrics you can use to create a bulletproof content distribution measurement:
- Internet Traffic- This significant factor is monitored through channel reports. Scrutinizing through source or medium is another way to consistently monitor internet traffic. The analytics through source/medium and channel reports aids you in finding the most utilized means of reaching your content, may it be through a blog, newsletter, retweets
- Audience Behavioral Response- Google analytics like time on page, pages/session, new/returning visitors are means to measure audiences’ responses. This metric will support your content performance.
- Sales Lead Generation- These metrics are crucial in knowing, understanding, and analyzing how content distribution generates leads.
- Search Engine Optimization Rankings- Rankings are great avenues to see how well you are performing in terms of internet searches. It also clearly communicates the content program performance you are employing.
- Shares and Backlinks- Social Media shares and backlinks are means to know the effectiveness of your content. These content metrics are important to your awareness-related goals. It demonstrates your content asset when users are moved into sharing these with their personal audiences. Backlinks are means to display how frequently your content is linked to or referred on other sites and sources.
- High Impressions and Click-through-rate (CTR)- The number of click-throughs of the keywords used to your content ranking provides insights into whether it could be converted into actual impressions and clicks. Via these metrics, you can intellectually create necessary adjustments to your CTR.
Moreover, content discovery platforms are widely utilized for user metadata which determines and recommends specifically suitable content. These are software executed to deliver customized content to mobile devices, websites, and other related channels. Listed below are top content discovery platforms that you can employ to further advance.
- Google Cloud CDN- Google Cloud Platform releases its users from dealing with infrastructure, servers, and configuring networks.
- Akamai- This software specializes in providing secure and highly efficient cloud services. Furthermore, it aids in the acceleration of innovative and simplified ways to connect globally for business advancement.
- Swarmify- This handy and resilient software empowers its users with ease of delivery despite the abrupt changes in network traffic. Its users experience easy access, ease of use with high-speed network access.
- Limelight Networks- This is a cloud-based content delivery channel with the most expanded private content delivery network. Limelight Networks provides its users with fast content delivery, reliable cloud security services, web acceleration services and combined with cloud storage services to enhance subscribers’ experience.
- Microsoft Azure CDN- This cloud computing platform and mechanism supplies a universal solution for swift and high-bandwidth content hosted by Azure or any other apps. It aims to create and execute managing applications and services for app optimization.
- Amazon CloudFront- This CDN (Content Delivery Network) software delivers messages smoothly through edge locations (a global network). It integrates Amazon Web Services products to enhance businesses and web developers’ performance through accelerating content delivery to end-users.
- Cloudflare- This cloud-based software is well known for its secured online services. This is objectively designed to unify developing technologies to improve clients’ experience through advanced web protocols.
- KeyCDN- This is one of the most affordable content delivery networks that offer immediate content delivery. This CDN is cost-efficient yet high-performing. Best in collaborating with other infrastructure sources to maximize functionality and efficiency.
- Fastly- This cloud-based platform produces a fast, secure and scalable online experience by way of anticipating and mitigating threats and fast-paced technical innovations.
