21 Ways to Distribute Content

This week I had the pleasure of presenting at the very first Content Marketing World! It was very exciting, a lot of great content marketing, social media experts and authors attended and spoke about the industry and how it’s evolving. There was a good combination of motivational (get out there and do it!) speaking as well as plenty of how-to, practical advice to get your content marketing efforts in order, and aligned with revenue goals.

One of the presentations I gave was on more of the tactical side. I spoke about 21 ways to distribute content. Originally it was from the perspective of “I have all this content, now what?” but I really felt strongly about emphasizing the fact that content distribution is really a discipline that needs to be considered much earlier on, when you’re in the content strategy phase. If it’s something you think of after the fact, the success of your content marketing programs may be at risk.

The number one thing to consider about content distribution, is whether or not your getting the right content, to the right person, at the right time. And this take more thought then, “okay now what?” When you think about success in your content marketing programs, you really need to look at how engaged people are with the content, the more engaged, the more likely they are to share, or come back to that content, or reference you again for more content, and all of those factors depend on whether or not you did a good job realizing how different buyers behave online, and how the prefer to consume their content (where they get it, and in what format).

We look at this as the “buyers journey.” As they engage with your brand, and as they move through their unique purchase processes, they prefer to engage with and consume content in different formats, and from different resource. To map your distribution effectively, you need to look at the difference between how a CEO consumes content and how an end-user, or an IT purchaser might consume content. All of these different personas have different habits, and there can be even more differences when you look at different industries.

Content marketing will only be successful if you are delivering the content in the right way, and at the right time. Here is an example of a “buyers journey” notice that they use different pieces content from different sources all along their process. These are the things you need to be aware of, and that’s how you need to be thinking about your content distribution.

To get you started, here are some content distribution ideas. Just remember, some of these ways are generic, others may work better for specific groups of people, ultimately, you need to find the distribution channels and formats more appropriate for your varied audiences.

21 Content Distribution Ideas: (I’ll comment on some of the less obvious ways)..

1. Your website
2. Your blog
3. Social media
4. Email (database)
5. Email signature – Your email signature can be a really easy way to share new content. Every time you have a new piece, add the link to your signature and that will be an easy way to share will colleagues, customers and partners.
6. Comment threads
7. Discussion forums
8. Events
9. Document sharing sites – Slideshare.net and Scribd are both great ways to share company collateral or presentations. They also offer vary active sub-communities of their own.
10. Multimedia sites – YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr
11. Mobile applications – Tablets are becoming increasingly popular, how are you addressing that as a content delivery mechanism?
12. Company newsflash – I have had great results sending out an email, company-wide with a list of new content, brief descriptions of it, and varied tweet-like, status update long, comments that can be shared by your entire staff. Your sales guys will be all over this, and you can help to quality-control the message a little.
13. Influencers/bloggers - This works really well if you stay engaged with the bloggers overtime. Share there content, comment on their blogs, and when you have stuff that’s relevant to their audience, they’ll likely be inclined to share it.
14. Social PR
15. Social bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a really easy way to let other people share your content with their network and that bookmarking community. Many of these communities will also send out an email with links that have been bookmarked that may interest users, so there are various ways that these sites can be leveraged.
16. Social news sites
17. Partners – Not every partnership has to be so formal or restricted to “strategic alliances” Try working with more people on content development, and then share the promotion across both databases.
18. eNewsletters
19. Lead nurturing – This is our favorite way to distribute content of course, because it really allows you to map certain kinds of content to different buyers, as well as buyer behavior, so we always know we are sending the right content, to the right person, at the appropriate stage in their purchase process.
20. Syndication/RSS
21. Content discovery platforms – this is an interesting was to share content. These platforms are usually a PPC model for content distribution. You pay X, and they syndicate your content with relevant sites, and as people click through to your content and site, you pay for that visit. Check out OutBrain (I caught up with them at Content Marketing World and checked out the platform…pretty cool).