Why Content Marketing Doesn’t End with Creating Content

This article comes from the blog archive – figures and examples reflect the year it was published.

You know you need content. You have an idea, you have the time, you have the means to create it. And you’ve created it. Great news, for a start. But even the best article can sink into oblivion if you don’t take care of distributing it effectively.

Experts agree that working with content and looking after it AFTER it has been created makes up as much as 70% of a content manager’s job. It is, after all, extremely depressing when great content gets no attention simply because the people it’s meant for don’t know about it.

It’s true that one of the reasons for having relevant content on your site is to support organic search. But that’s a long-term process whose success rests on dozens of parameters that search engines go by. The moment you create content, however, you want your audience to know about it as soon as possible. Especially when it comes to time-sensitive information. In that case you need to pay all the more attention to distribution.

What Are Your Options for Distributing Content?

There are dozens of ways to spread content. First of all, you should carry out an internal audit of the options you already have, which you may not be making full use of in this respect. In first place, of course, is your website, your blog. If you have a certain number of loyal readers, they’ll be your first readers. Next, your list of customers and clients – if you did your homework in the past and asked for the appropriate valid consent, you can create a special mailing with interesting articles from your blog, or place links to selected content in your existing product mailings. If you haven’t done your homework – i.e. you don’t have the recipients’ consent, or have no contacts or mailing list at all – start working on it as soon as possible. Although it may seem like a relic of the past, the truth is that email marketing is still an extremely effective way of getting information from you to your target audience. It calls for a great deal of sensitivity, but if you go about it the right way, it will bear the fruit you’re longing for. Another route for spreading content is social networks. Let’s be honest. Connecting people is by now a minor role. Social marketing serves far more to connect people with brands and companies. Another option is placing links to your content on partner or friendly sites. Here you should bear relevance in mind above all. Links to hair cosmetics on a car repair shop’s website won’t do you much of a favour; on the contrary, in an extreme case they may even harm you in terms of SEO. Much the same applies to internal linking between articles. Links of the “you might also like” or “read also” kind should be as relevant as possible to the content being displayed.

How to Plan Distribution

First of all, think about your target group and what you want to achieve. Setting goals follows the same rules as in any other activity. If you don’t know what you want, you’ll have a hard time achieving it. Of course, at the end of the day your goal is always sales, but with content marketing in particular you need to think about this a little more deeply and define the sub-goals that will lead you to that goal.

• Do you want to build a database of users for email marketing? Then your measure of success will be the number of email addresses collected.
• Do you want to spread brand awareness? Then your KPI will ideally be a growing number of direct visits
• Do you want to improve your social media marketing? Then you’ll primarily be tracking the number of fans and followers.

So planning starts with goals – as detailed as possible and expressed in numbers. Not everything can be measured exactly, and nothing should be overdone. But having a quantity you can lean on is important. You should also bear in mind, though, that tracking millions of statistics really isn’t your ultimate goal. Otherwise you could quite literally drown in numbers.

To Pay or Not to Pay for Distribution

Although the list of distribution routes at the beginning of this article talks primarily about routes that aren’t a cash expense and cost you time and effort, there’s a paid alternative to each of them. For your own blog, a PR article on someone else’s website; for a mailing, paid direct mail; for Facebook, a campaign; for organic search, a sponsored link; for links on other websites, a network of sponsored recommended links. Whether to pay or not isn’t only a question of what you can afford. It’s mainly about the ratio of how much of your own effort it costs you to achieve a result that you could buy. If, with a single month-long campaign for 500 EUR, you get your content displayed repeatedly on the biggest sites on the Slovak internet and it brings you, say, 10 thousand visitors, 10% of whom you manage to turn into newsletter subscribers or, heaven forbid, straight into buyers, then at the end of the day that’s a very good deal. For that to happen, though, there’s one thing to remember with any campaign – always start from the assumption that the person who comes to you this way knows neither you nor your website. They’re visiting you for the first time, and to keep them happy you need to make that visit as easy and pleasant as possible. And so, to finish…

A Few Extra Tips on the Content Itself

Ideally, let your target group and goals determine not only your choice of distribution channels, but also the way the content is displayed to the user. If your technical set-up and CMS allow it, the same content can be shown to different users in different ways and with different “extras”.

• For example, for a user who arrives from search on the basis of a keyword they were looking for, you can highlight the content in question and offer further relevant links alongside it… and perhaps the ever-popular pop-up inviting them to sign up for the newsletter.
• To a user who came from a Facebook campaign, and who tends to be very impatient, you can show just a shortened intro to the article and reveal the rest only after they click “show more”… and a pop-up, this time inviting them to like your page.
• To a user who came from your mailing, you can show relevant products or services related to the topic right alongside the content… and so on and so forth… There really are many, many more options.