3 important considerations for your content distribution game plan

Successful content marketing is not just about creating great content.

In recent years, many businesses in Southeast Asia doing content strategy have woken up to the fact that their customers want compelling and valuable content.…successful content marketing is not just about creating great content.

The good news for marketers is that content marketing is the most sought-after digital technique in 2017. The bad news is that because so many businesses are either doing or intending to do content marketing, getting your painstakingly created writing noticed by the right people has become very competitive. Even sites with well-established content foundations, such as Moz, Copyblogger, and Buffer, experienced declines in their social shares of content.

Don’t be daunted! Based on this year’s digital marketing trends, we’ve picked out three key considerations to inform your B2B content distribution strategies.

Remember, successful content marketing is not just about creating great writing. You need to cut through the online clutter and deliver them to your audiences too.

first know your core marketing channels and optimise them for distribution

Every year, there are one or more shiny new objects that marketers get excited about.…think about your target audience. Are they active on this channel? Is this channel relevant…?This year, live video is trendy, according to many social media practitioners and thought leaders. The successes of Snapchat and Instagram Stories prove that there is demand for raw, in-the-moment footage. Even Mark Zuckerberg talked about Facebook “becoming video first”.

Don’t start allocating your budget to video production yet! Before you hop on the live video (or whatever’s “in”) bandwagon, think about your target audience.

Are they active on this channel? Is this channel relevant to them? Remember, adding another channel to your mix moves your audience and scatters them across multiple platforms.

First, you need to know what channels work best for reaching your audience. Know which channels they commonly use to get information. Check your existing social media platforms to see which ones are giving you the highest levels of engagement. These are the channels where you want to concentrate more of your marketing efforts.

Once you know what works well and have them covered, you can think about experimenting with new channels.

use paid social, but don’t neglect organic search

You might have heard that it is now more difficult than ever for your content to be found organically. Especially on social media. You might have also heard that you may soon have no choice but to “pay to play”.

It’s true that distributing content on social media is much more competitive these days and paid social media ads can help boost your reach. This is illustrated starkly by Castrol Moto’s experiment with growing their social media reach organically versus with paid social thrown into the mix:

Image credit: Contently

Having said that, don’t neglect growing your organic reach. Heed this good advice from LinkedIn: “Be wary of over-investing in short-term paid, instead of long term organic. You need to do both.”

The reality is that 90% of all social clicks go to organic content and on Google, organic content commands 80% of clicks. So, make sure you create compelling and valuable information that your users want and distribute it via a mix of paid, owned, and earned media channels. That’s how you grow your authority over time.

maximise your marketing automation

…segment your audiences and delivering content that is tailored to each segment’s challenges and goals.Content distribution is more than getting found by your target audience and getting them interested in what you have to say. Once you’ve successfully converted visitors into leads (e.g. after they pass you their contact details in exchange for downloadable lead magnets), you have to nurture relationships with them in order to turn them into customers.

This is where you need marketing automation. For those who are not familiar with it, marketing automation refers to software that monitors leads and engages with them automatically. The use of marketing automation was in fact ranked third in Smart Insights’ survey of top-rated digital marketing techniques for 2017.

“Marketers and consumers alike do sometimes suffocate under an avalanche of content. This is a good problem to have. Marketing automation, when done right, allows marketers to curate and dish out only the most impactful content to the right audience at the right time.”

– Cheam, Marketo Certified Expert

Basic marketing automation lets you automate your content distribution, such as by scheduling your social media updates and sending your email newsletters at regular intervals. You’ll want to get more (read: reap ROI benefits) out of your marketing automation though. Add real value to your prospects and customers by using marketing automation to segment your audiences and delivering content that is tailored to each segment’s challenges and goals.

quality content is not enough. it needs to be found too.

(Image credit: geralt)

The marketers who succeed are those who know what their target audiences want, create content that answers these wants, and deliver that content through the relevant channels.

Sure, the competition for eyeballs is tough. But with the right tools (marketing automation and paid social), a good grasp of your core marketing channels, and a commitment to growing long term organic reach, you can’t go wrong.

Need help with your marketing automation or content marketing this year? Give us a shoutout here!

(Contributed by Wan Ying Yi)