“Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
The quote is courtesy of Jonathan Perelman of BuzzFeed, and it speaks volumes to the struggles that many content marketing strategies are experiencing. Many companies are told to produce content, because content marketing is king, it engages your audience, and in a commercial industry where your customers have access to literally thousands of your competitors, you cannot afford to lose them through traditional spammy marketing tactics. So you produce content! And it’s brilliant content, because you put the hours and budget into it because you care about curating your internet persona in a manner that’s true to brand. But, quelle horreur, no one reads or watches it!
And in a virtual world with over 750 million websites, how is your stellar content going to get in front of the right eyeballs? This is the need that your content distribution plan should address. For those of you who glazed over or asked ‘What distribution plan,’ never fear, there is hope. A number of vendors including Outbrain and OneSpot will take your content and and transform it into online ads, ‘Read More’ links and mobile suggestions for your readers and watchers. In a world of changing SEO algorithms (thanks, Google Hummingbird), it pays to have content that benefits those who read it. It also helps to produce that content in volume, because Google’s new Freshness indexing addresses those lingering old news articles at the top of search results. But put it in front of the eyeballs that matter, because that’s why you produce it. You can do this traditionally too, by tweeting out your own content and sharing relevant content from other producers. The good news is, better distribution improves content’s quality, because your feedback cycle will accelerate as your readers engage. Content distribution can happen a multitude of ways, both paid and unpaid.
So drive conversion, subscribers, and entice regular readers! Just get the content in front of them first. Because no matter how brilliant your content is, if no one is reading or watching it, it may as well be this.
Image courtesy of webtreats on Flickr
