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The average marketing team spends a good amount of time creating content and comparatively very little on promoting that content.
Think about the last blog post you published: You probably spent a handful of hours writing, hit publish, maybe shared it on Twitter and LinkedIn, and called it a day.
That strategy may have worked back when content marketing was new, and search engines were primitive. But today, the competition for eyeballs and attention is fierce—meaning it takes a lot more promotion to get the same mileage out of your content.
The change is shifting the way many of today’s content marketers approach content production and promotion. They’re creating fewer but higher-quality pieces of content and investing a lot more in driving people to that content.
As Nicole Jackson of Foundation Marketing put it, “There’s so much content vying for the attention of your target audience that it takes a lot more time, effort, and strategy to get your content seen than it once did.”
With the new emphasis on promotion, we were curious about how marketers distribute their content for a maximum splash. To quell that curiosity, we talked to 73 content marketers to get their tips for distributing content.
Content distribution refers to the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your content to online audiences.
Your content only lives up to its value and intended purpose when shared in the proper format and through the right channel. As such, how you choose to disseminate your created content is very important.
Simply put, content distribution channels refer to the platforms where you share and promote your content.
Content distribution channels are divided into three groups: owned, earned, and paid.
These are the content channels that your company owns and controls, such as your blog, email newsletter, social media, videos, case studies, and so on.
These channels are great because you get to determine how you want your brand to be portrayed, and they are not subject to third-party rules.
Earned content distribution involves having third parties share and promote your content. This encompasses influencers, journalists, product reviews, non-sponsored blog posts on third-party sites, etc.
Earned distribution channels are considered highly credible because they are unpaid sources and unaffiliated with the brand (posted out of their own accord for free).
Paid content distribution refers to when you have to pay to get your content shown to your target audience. You can do this through paid social ads, native advertising (sponsored/ branded posts), pay-per-click advertising, and so on.
When we asked our respondents to rank their top-performing content distribution channel, the majority ranked email and social media as their number one channel for content distribution.
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You can create different types of content to attract your ideal audience and generate leads and sales.
And because not all content formats will appeal to every user, choosing your distribution approach for each content format wisely will be important.
So without further ado, here are some content types and the unique ways you can distribute them.
There are many budget-friendly ways to get your blog in front of new audiences, some of which include promoting your blog content on social media, leveraging your email newsletters and email signatures by adding links to your recent blog posts, and so on.
Dan Christensen of Pest Rank says creating visual content, and video, in particular, causes high engagement. So do well to “promote on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and embed your videos within your blog posts. One excellent piece of content can be amplified and effectively convert your audience across channels.”
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To promote your brand’s data, information or knowledge visually, you should consider promoting your infographics on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook.
Additionally, another way to promote your infographic(s) is by connecting with related blogs and articles that’ll find your visuals highly valuable to their audience and existing content.
Case studies are highly underrated but very effective for connecting with your audience due to how closely related they are to your product offering. So to get more eyes on them, distribute and promote your case studies on your blog (have a designated icon for them), through your email newsletters, and promote on social media.
Also, encourage your employees to share (especially your marketing and sales team), and lastly, include at least one case study in your sales proposal.
A lot of time and resources go into creating an ebook, but no one will download, click, or read your ebook if you don’t promote it.
You can distribute your ebook through your newsletters, by linking to your landing page, including CTAs in your best performing posts for your readers to download your ebook, writing supporting blog posts that you can link to (you can also repurpose your ebook this way), and of course, don’t forget to promote your ebook on social media.
Feature your upcoming webinar(s) on your website through banner ads, thank you/confirmation pages, also include a link to your webinar landing page on related blog articles.
Do well to send out the promotional emails for your webinar and promote it on social media (organic and paid promotions).
Leverage iTunes for attracting new audiences and growing your base of subscribers. After all, iTunes generates 75% of a podcast’s listens and downloads.
Also, promote your podcasts on your blog posts, as well as your social media channels. Share your podcast with podcatchers (apps that play podcasts). And try having guests that are knowledgeable and well respected in their industry. Not only is this an excellent credibility booster, but you’ll also naturally get exposure amongst their followers as they’ll most likely share your podcast.
Undoubtedly, having a solid content distribution strategy is important, So we asked our pool of experts to share their best tips for getting one’s content seen. Here’s what they had to say.
To optimize your website’s content for conversion, you probably use Google Analytics 4 to learn how many people are interacting with your site, which pages brought them to the site in the first place, which pages they engage with the most, and more.
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When it comes to distributing and promoting your content, some of the tips on our list take time and effort to accomplish. This isn’t one of them. Gareth O’Sullivan of Revealing Britain shared this straightforward tip with us: link to new content in your email signature.
“After publishing content, I include new trend-worthy content in my email signature and update it regularly with a tracking link,” O’Sullivan said. “Since I use my email every day and reply to emails constantly, this helps bring in additional traffic for free—especially since the content included is suitable to the topic of the emails.”
There are some communities in the marketing world where the general rule of thumb is that paid ads are for revenue-driving products and services. We heard from several marketers who’ve thrown that guidance out the window.
“If you’ve got the budget, the fastest way to drive traffic is through paid social media,” said Morgan Lathaen of Thumbprint.
As HealthJoy’s Rick Ramos pointed out, you spend a lot of time and money creating great content—so it makes sense to invest in that content’s success. “Running a content marketing strategy takes a lot of time and money,” Ramos explained. “Don’t be afraid to spend a bit to support your content. Using targeted ads to boost your distribution on social or a content distribution network can be well spent.”
Andrew Schutt of Schutt Media says they’ve seen success promoting content through Facebook Ads. “Take the best, most juicy snippet from your content, create an engaging image, and use a Facebook Ad to get it in front of your target audience,” Schutt advised. “If you’ve clearly and concisely conveyed the value of your content in the Facebook ad, then you’ll get plenty of clicks to your content.”
In addition to promoting content via social media ads, a few marketers recommended taking it a step further and nurturing retargeted audiences with content.
“Just like email marketing allows you to distribute new content to existing audience bases, promoting new content to remarketing audiences on Facebook or any other social media platform is a great way to nurture warm leads, keep your brand top of mind, and help get engagement rolling on newly published content,” said James Bowen of Ripen Digital.
On most of the social media and communication channels we use to promote content, algorithms judge organic content based on signals like likes, comments, and social shares. An easy way to get your content off to a good start on that front (even in a small way), is to call on your own personal network.
“Create easy ways for colleagues and friends to engage with your content to give it an initial boost,” recommended Perry Nalevka of Penguin Strategies. “You can even email or send them ready-made social media posts they can copy and paste to promote on their networks.”
On top of leveraging your personal network, the marketers we heard from suggested proactively building a network designed to promote each other’s content.
“You likely have ancillary partners, co-members of business councils, vendors, and business customers who are facing the same pain point as you: not enough eyeballs on their advertising,” said Nextiva’s Yaniv Masjedi.
“Approach these companies honestly, asking if they could use help with their marketing—just like you. Then propose that you each promote each other’s content.”
Alex Birkett of HubSpot relies on this promotion tactic, too. “When it comes to content distribution, the only thing I really worry about is building relationships with other prolific and excellent content creators and working with them.”
“I’m talking about guest posts, quotes, citing their research and articles, etc.—giving value,” Birkett added. “Do this a lot, with good people, and when it comes to sharing your own content, you’ll have built a little crew that you can bank on.”
See also: Best Ways to Promote New Content
“Influencers have a large following. If they think your content’s great and share it, you’ll get a lot of eyes on your work,” said Alice Stevens of Best Company.
Influencer marketing has a bit of a mixed reputation in the marketing community, but we aren’t talking about capital-I influencers. For our purposes, influencers are just prominent figures in your industry or niche. They’re people who you and your colleagues admire, people who’ve built up authority, and people a considerable number of others look to for thought leadership.
While it can be an uphill battle to get in touch with influencers, Stevens recommends starting small. “Reaching out to ask a question or requesting a quote for an article you’re working on are great ways to get started.”
Adam Connell of Blogging Wizard even recommends bringing influencers in from the start, by collaborating on the ideation and creation phases, in addition to promotion.
“Influencers have direct access to your target audience,” Connell pointed out, “and when you involve them in the creation of your content, they’re more likely to share it with their audience.”
You can even take it a step further by teaming up with influencers on content production, too. “One way to maximize that exposure is to make content with an influencer in your industry,” said Casey Hill of Bonjoro. “That content will not only be promoted by you, but also by the other person.”
In a similar vein, we heard from a lot of the marketers we spoke with about partnering up with other brands to both collaborate on content creation and cross-promote to each other’s audiences.
“Find like-minded brands targeting the same audience,” advised Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls. “You can share existing content through newsletters, websites, social media, joint promotions, and more to expand your reach.”
“To attract visitors that are most likely to become customers,” The Good’s David Hoos explained, “you have to go where your audience already hangs out. One of the best ways to do that is by partnering with non-competing brands that serve the same audience as you.”
Best Company’s Claire Shaner recommends collaborating on content creation, too. “When you collaborate with others, they’re likely to help you distribute that content on their social media, on their own site, and by sharing with their network.” Shaner said you can pitch low-stake collaborations by:
“Identify relevant groups to share your content with,” advised Jered Martin of OnePitch.
When we think about promotion, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to get as many eyes on your content as possible—so caught up that we forget about getting the right eyes.
“The best thing you can do is to research and target those niche content communities where your content is most likely to thrive,” said Nicole Jackson of Foundation Marketing. “Rather than sharing your content on every single platform, choose a few that you know, whether from observance or experience or trial and error, will work.”
“Provide a few takeaways of what the reader can expect,” Martin suggested, “and link to the long-form content.”
“The best trick I’ve found to get more eyeballs on your content is to convert it to different formats,” said Blogcast’s Miguel Piedrafita. “For example, a great blog post might make a great webinar or podcast episode. You’re producing three pieces of content with the work of one, and you’ll get 3x more engagement.”
“Repurpose content into different formats (videos, images, graphs, infographics, tutorials, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.) and for multiple distribution channels (social media, email newsletter, Medium, LinkedIn, Quora, etc),” advised Samuel David of Smart Home Vault. “That way, your content enjoys increased reach and visibility.”
As for which channels to focus on, Persist Communications’ Grace Montealegre says it’s all about how your content performs across channels. “Create evergreen content for channels that have the highest engagement rates,” Montealegre said.
Eric Melillo of COFORGE shared a similar process, saying, “We’ll take an existing blog post and break out every important topic into separate social media postings. So, a single 1200-word article can yield 30-40 social posts per social media channel.”
For Nex Gen Dynamics, Laura Wigodner takes a novel approach by turning blog posts into a Twitter thread. “Instead of simply resharing the link to social media, we repurpose a blog by incorporating all the main points into a Twitter thread, and include the link for people to read the full article,” Wigodner explained.
“This keeps people engaged and connected, and they’re more likely to click the link to read more.”
“When producing content, be conscious of how easily it can be modified to fit and distributed across platforms. You don’t want to waste time and resources on content that can only be shared once,” said Kelsey Davis of Medicare Plan Finder.
In addition to repurposing content for different distribution channels, a few of the marketers we talked to emphasized creating inherently versatile content, so it’s easy to repurpose across different formats.
“It’s all about making your customer feel like they’re the only one for you,” said Cristina Maria of Commusoft.
The key is to take advantage of everything modern email marketing solutions have to offer—including segmentation, triggered campaigns, and automated email personalization.
“Although we’re an ecommerce store, we avoid using our email lists to promote sales and products,” said Jeff Neal of The Critter Depot. “Instead, we use our email lists to let previous customers know about useful pet care guides we recently published.”
Neal and team have seen some counterintuitive results from this strategy. “Our content gets more interaction from our email lists than any social media network. Plus, this strategy helps sustain the quality of our email list, because we’re using it to offer valuable information.”
Are you a MailChimp user? Use Databox integration with MailChimp to track your email marketing performance in real-time.
One of the more common refrains we heard centered around doing some of the more un-scalable promotion tactics—because the added effort can have an outsized effect on the success of your content.
“Search for keywords on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, and chime in on conversations that you’ve published relevant content on,” suggested Andrea Moxham of Horseshoe + Co.
“Visit question and answer sites,” B-SeenOnTop’s Donna Duncan recommended. “Look for people who are asking questions about the content you’ve just written. If your content will help shed some light on the issue they’re grappling with or, better yet, provide answers, then respond with a helpful suggestion and point them to your blog post for more details.”
Robert Baillieul explained why engaging in digital conversations can be such an effective promotional strategy: “Providing in-depth answers while citing your blog posts increases the visibility of your blog and positions you as an authority in your industry. Q&A sites like Quora also help you understand the problems that trouble your audience, providing great fodder for future blog posts.”
G2’s Lauren Pope shared the phenomenal results they’ve seen from chiming in on Twitter chats, saying, “I was able to grow my Twitter following by 30.82% and my link click-throughs to content by 66.3%—just by building a community around my content through Twitter chats. It’s the perfect way to build your brand authority, your follower count, and your readership in one simple step.”
“If you’re not already syndicating your content,” said Madeline Osman of The Blogsmith, “consider this your call to action.”
“Websites with a built-in community can help your existing content reach a wider audience,” Osman added.
MARION Digital Marketing’s Tony Mastri says they’ve seen similar benefits from cross-posting their content on Medium. “We cross-publish using Medium’s ‘Import a story’ functionality, which creates a canonical link back to our site.”
“By distributing content on Medium,” Mastri explained, “we can tap into an entirely new audience that Medium has already worked hard to build. The more engagement our post receives within Medium, the more potential it has to reach people’s timelines or even make it into Medium’s email blasts.
At Databox, we can personally vouch for this strategy—and we have a lot of back-up from the marketers we heard from, too. “Link to experts in your article, then reach out to those experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or anywhere you share the article,” recommended Branko Kral of B King Digital.
“We have a series that spotlights MarTech tools or marketers we respect,” said Penguin Strategies’ Nili Zaharony. “Once we hit publish, simply sharing with the featured marketer or company will grant us access to their networks.”
Tagging companies or individuals that you reference in content is a key part of making this distribution strategy work. After all, people need to know you’ve mentioned them and where—otherwise they can’t help your promotion.
“Be sure to mention or tag any businesses you’ve mentioned in your content on social media,” noted Megan Mosley of Referral Rock. “This usually encourages people to share your content with their followers and audience, too. Meaning you can be seen by a larger crowd, gain brand awareness, and develop some trust among other audiences.”
While link building can be a more arduous process, marketers can’t deny that it works.
Julien Raby of Best Outdoor Items said they do manual link outreach for all of their solid, pillar content. “We will typically make a list of the top 200 pages and sites we’d like to get a link from. Then we manually contact each of them and present our new piece of content.”
Raby admits that link building doesn’t always have the highest rate of return percentage-wise, but it still makes a huge difference for search rankings. “We typically get 3% to 5% of the people we contact to link to us, which seriously helps with SEO,” Raby added.
Related: 100+ Marketers Share Their Best Link-Building Techniques for Building Links from Reputable Experts
“You want qualified traffic,” explained Talar Malakian of Salted Stone. “Where do your personas want to find the content you’ve produced? In what format? You can distribute in a million places, but if you’re not keeping your audience’s digital hang-outs in mind, your efforts won’t go very far.”
Kirky Galt of Creative Real Estate Copy recommends asking more questions about your audience, to help you determine where to find them online. Questions like:
As marketers, we sometimes forget the power of a simple ask. As Flow SEO’s Angela Ash puts it, “Sometimes, all it takes is a quick ‘Share with anyone you think might find this beneficial’ to nudge readers to click that Share button.”
“Don’t underestimate the power of just asking,” Ash added.
When you make that ask, the key is also to make it radically easy for your audience to do what you’re asking for—to share your content. As a consumer of lots of web content myself, I’m always shocked when a blog post doesn’t include social sharing buttons, for example. But it isn’t as uncommon as it should be.
“The best thing you can do is to make sure that sharing your content is a hassle-free process and that you’ve taken care to implement the systems and mechanisms that will facilitate new users entering into the discussion,” said Andrew McLoughlin of Colibri Digital Marketing.
One tip that Mark Armstrong of Mark Armstrong Illustration recently picked up is to use a tool like Click to Tweet. “Start by finding a catchy one-liner in your blog post—something ‘tweetable.’ A quote, perhaps, or a bit of advice.” Type that in on their website and Click to Tweet will generate a custom link for the tweet.
“Use the generated link to hyperlink the text in your blog post. When readers click on the link, the tweet is automatically added to their Twitter status box—all they have to do is click ‘Tweet,’” Armstrong explained.
Greg Schaff of Digetry shared, “Of all the possible digital channels and options at your disposal, it’s critical that you identify and utilize the marketing channel that best reaches and resonates with your customer.”
“I have found that everyone who struggles to get more visits and leads from the content they produce is missing the required degree of channel focus,” Schaff said.
As for determining which distribution channels are carrying the load for your content, Wald suggests a familiar friend: Google Analytics. “Google Analytics is the best place to determine where your content distribution efforts are succeeding. I’m often surprised by what I see there, and if I don’t check, I don’t know where to boost or reduce my efforts.”
Blog traffic distribution can also be tracked with marketing reporting software, where you can loop data from several sources in one sole dashboard to get a full picture of how your content is performing and converting.
It turns out, getting the most out of your content distribution efforts is as much about when you share as it is about where you share. “Depending on your audience and the social media platform you’re using,” explained Alex Membrillo of Cardinal Healthcare Marketing, “certain days of the week and times of the day may garner the best engagement.”
Membrillo recommended scheduling your content distribution on social media based on when your audience is most active on each platform. “For example, we always avoid Monday morning posts across the board. For LinkedIn, we’ve found that organic content performs best mid-week, either in the early morning or between 5-7pm in the evening.”
Oxygen Inbound’s Katya Lo added that it’s important to share content more than just once, too. “By distributing your content multiple times over time,” Lo said, “you boost the chances of it being seen and read.”
Lo cautioned that marketers also need to focus on changing up captions, hashtags, and images to avoid fatiguing audience members who see multiple posts. “You might even discover something new about your audience that way.”
Editor’s note: Download this free social media (awareness and engagement) dashboard template to track and measure the impact of your social media marketing efforts.
Every member of your team and the broader organization has their own personal network. If you aren’t leveraging their sway within that network, you’re leaving as many as thousands of eyeballs on the table.
Shaye Smith of LeadG2 said it comes down to a 3-step process for leveraging your team’s collective network:
“Personal recommendations carry a lot more weight, so think of it like running a micro employee advocacy program,” advised Massive Kontent’s Jason Thibault. “Write your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter updates announcing the new blog post, and distribute them via personal profiles rather than the company page.”
Editor’s Note: Monitor your most valuable social media metrics in Databox through our robust integrations with major social networks.
“To get more visits and leads with the content you produce, I recommend you spend 80% of your time promoting your content,” Jonathan Auffray of Growth Hackers told us.
Does that sound crazy? It shouldn’t. We’ve already talked about how fierce the competition for clicks and attention is these days. The best blog post in the world can be buried on Google’s page 22 if it isn’t promoted effectively.
To find success with content marketing then, more of your time needs to shift to promoting and distributing the content you create.
Auffray says they use the 80/20 rule—spending 20% of their time creating content, and 80% promoting it. “To promote your content, make sure you distribute it in all the channels where your target audience is. Start by sharing it on social media and with your email list. Then, find other channels where your audience is.”
Content distribution is as much about how targeted your audience is as it is about how big the audience is. One sure-fire way to get your content in front of a hyper-engaged audience is to weave it into the customer journey.
“Many SaaS websites have a demo page, for example, that collects potential customers’ contact information,” explained Samantha Kohn of AutoVerify. “Once the customer completes the lead form, there’s a fantastic opportunity for content marketers to assist the sales process and showcase subject-matter expertise and product value—before the customer even speaks with the sales team.”
Suppose your customers reach a confirmation or thank you page after submitting their info, for example. In that case, Kohn recommends including a link to product-based content like a how-to or best practices for using the product guide.
“The audience is captive, and they’ve already told you they’re interested,” Kohn said. “Take the opportunity to show them your company’s expertise. You’ll get more eyeballs on the content and add value to the lead.”
“You can create the most amazing content on the internet, but if you aren’t pitching it to the right people at the right time, it’s a wasted effort,” said Portent’s Hilary Thompson. “Relevance is the key.”
Thompson suggested a few ways to ensure your content is relevant when and where you aim to promote it:
“This is all key to a successful content promotion campaign,” Thompson said.
“Not to mention, any link that you earn from this coverage will be more relevant from an SEO perspective, too. Not only are you earning brand awareness and authority, but you’re driving the most engaged referral traffic, too, sending the right signals to search engines.”
The days of pushing out great content and watching the traffic fly in are behind us—but diving deeper into content distribution and promotion enables you to get more mileage out of the content you work so hard to bring to life.
It takes a little elbow grease at times, but with the tips we gathered from dozens of marketers, getting more eyes on your content is 100% within reach.
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Kiera's a content writer who works with B2B SaaS companies. Catch up with her on Twitter @Kieraabbamonte or KieraAbbamonte.com
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