When you have great content, you want to share it with the world — or at least with the people you think would most appreciate it. Social media seems like the perfect tool for doing that, especially when you consider how often people check their feeds. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center report, 74 percent of adults in the U.S. visit Facebook daily.
The same report revealed that 63 percent of U.S. adults check Instagram each day, and 42 percent scroll through their Twitter feeds at least once a day. That gives you plenty of opportunities to connect your content with people, but you need a plan to make it happen. Creating a content distribution strategy forces you to think about who you want to reach and develop a plan of action to make it happen.
Key Elements of a Content Distribution Strategy
Your content distribution plan outlines the types of content you want to share with your audience along with when and where you will share it. If you’ve ever written a business plan or created a marketing campaign, you’ll notice some similarities between them. The key elements include an overview of your intended audience that helps you decide the types of content to create and sharing platforms to use.
Your Target Audience
The most important part of your content distribution strategy is the profile of your target audience. If you want people to engage with your content, you need to know what they want to consume. This goes beyond basic demographics like age, gender and location. You should consider who they are as people.
Create buyer personas of the people you want to reach. These fictional characters represent the different types of consumers most likely to respond to your content. Think about what motivates them. What challenges are they facing? Where do they go for solutions to their problems? How do they look for those solutions?
Types of Content
There are three factors to keep in mind when deciding the types of content you want to create. First, think about the content your target audience wants to read. Look at your own web presence as well as your competitors. What types of content have the greatest engagement rates? You may be surprised to find out that your audience prefers infographics to videos or feel relieved to learn that they actually read blogs.
Then you must consider what kind of content is the best fit for the platforms you plan to use and what your team can actually produce. Say, for example, your target audience spends most of its time on YouTube. You’ll want to include videos on the list of content formats. This means you also need the skills and resources necessary to produce a video to upload on your YouTube account.
If you’re not comfortable creating a specific type of content, you should include in your plan options like shared and purchased content. Although you enjoy greater freedom using your own work, partnering with or hiring others to produce content may be a better choice.
Distribution Platforms
When your goal is to reach as many people as possible, it’s tempting to concentrate on the platforms with the greatest numbers of users. However, that only makes sense if your target audience is active on those platforms. Facebook may be the reigning king of social media, but there are plenty of other sites to explore.
You may find greater success on one of the lesser known social media sites like Reddit or Quora where you don’t face as much competition. Keep this in mind as you list the different platforms where you plan to share your content. Then note the type of content you think will best work with each platform.
Distribution Schedule
Your distribution strategy should have a schedule that details how often you’ll post content. In addition to the frequency of your posts, include the time of day and the day of the week when you’ll share what you’ve created. Aim for the periods of time when your followers are most active and likely to engage.
Deciding how often to post can be tricky. You want to share enough to keep your audience engaged, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with information. Again, refer back to your audience and look for patterns in their engagement.
Distribution Process
The final part of your content distribution strategy is a description of the distribution process. How do you plan to publish your content? For example, you may first post to the blog on your website and then share the link on your social media accounts. Or you may want to set up a poll on your social media pages that directs followers to your landing page.
Other ideas to consider in this section are how you plan to repurpose your existing content. Perhaps you start with an article that you then turn into a video. You may decide to gather all your blog posts into an e-book that you share with followers who share a post. You may also include here services that automatically distribute your content to multiple sites.
Creating and curating content is an important part of building a brand, but it also takes time to do it the right way. A content distribution strategy ultimately saves you time — and helps you monitor the results of your efforts.
