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Content marketing tips: Maximize content promotion & distribution

If you’re looking for content marketing tips around distribution and promotion, you’re at the right place. Let’s start by answering an important question: are content distribution and content promotion one in the same?

No.

In short, content distribution is disseminating your content to your own curated audiences (often via email), resulting in more targeted and personalized outreach. Content promotion is a broader outreach strategy that aims to get in front of as many eyes (that fall within your audience persona) as possible.

Is one better than the other? Not necessarily. The key is executing a balanced strategy involving both promotion and distribution to maximize effectiveness. Let’s look at each opportunity in a little more detail.

Content Promotion

Content promotions may include activities like posting updates on social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) via your company’s public profile. From there, your fans and followers can access and may opt to share your content.

Since the goal with promotion is a little bit more generalized and public-facing, you may also try paid advertising and content syndication. An example is creating a Facebook update where you share your latest blog posts with a brief synopsis as the text accompanying the link. You can then set up a sponsored post, tailor the targeting (perhaps targeting towards “people interested in content marketing tips” if your article is about content marketing), and run the sponsored post for your desired time frame.

Tools like Taboola and Outbrain are also great for paid content promotion. These tools enable native advertising, wherein your content is advertised in a way that matches the platforms on which it appears. Because native ads don’t really look like ads and are more aligned with the natural editorial flow of the page, it’s a more non-disruptive option to traditional paid advertising.

It’s important to remember that content promotion does not mean that targeting is not important. You should always aim to promote content to a relevant audience—one that is aligned with your target audience persona(s).

Content Distribution

Content distribution is even more targeted than content promotion. Content distribution is geared towards audiences that you have more control over, like an email list or private social media group or even individual fans or followers on social media. Email is a popular medium for content distribution; options within marketing automation systems enable more personalized distribution options. For example, you may want to distribute some of your recent blog articles in a monthly newsletter. If you’ve done a great job segmenting your email list based on interests or other relevant factors, you can actually create personalized enewsletters for each segment.

Let’s say your three most recent blog posts include the following:

  • How to Leverage Freelancers to Improve Content Marketing
  • Top 10 Chicago Content Marketing Agencies
  • Fintech Content Marketing Tips for CMOs

Let’s also say some of your email segmentation is based on the following:

  • Location
  • Business Size
  • Industry

When sending out your monthly newsletter, you may have a different angle or focus for each of your segments. For example, if you have a large Fintech segment, you may include an intro with a synopsis of the “Why Fintech Content Marketing is on Fire” blog that links back to your website. You might include the other blog links, but lower down in the email.

If you have a large Chicago segment, you may choose to do something similar with the ”Top 10 Chicago Content Marketing Agencies” post.

Distribution—particularly via email—can get even more personalized than that, depending on the type of marketing automation tools you have in play.

Content Promotion & Distribution for Lead Generation

When it comes to generating leads using content marketing, both content promotion and distribution play an important role. Content promotion enables you to put your content in front of eyes that might not otherwise see it. Content distribution allows you to customize and curate content for one audience or several distinct audiences.

Both are important to maximize effectiveness of lead generation. Content promotion can broaden your audience and potential leads while content distribution can ensure that you’re framing your content in the most personalized, effective way possible.

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by Ashley Poynter
source: B2C