Are You Spending Enough Time On Content Distribution?

Time to get back to the basics. You and your content team are likely spending a lot of time planning your B2B editorial content calendar, keeping up with the latest new in your industry, and of course creating new content for your website like blogs, whitepapers and infographics.

And when your latest masterpiece is finished, you hurriedly send out two or three tweets and move on to the next project.

But think about it: You sank a lot of time and effort into brainstorming an idea that will get traction, researching and writing a quality piece, and didn’t plan out the actual distribution of your content. Sure, if you’ve considered SEO along the way, people may find your article. But the overall balance of your content marketing process is off.

Unfortunately, this is pretty common.

For many marketers, development and distribution look more like an 80-20 ratio when it should be closer to 50-50. If you build it, they will not necessarily come unless you tell them about it.

If the idea of spending more time on distribution sounds like a huge chore, take a deep breath and keep reading.

The key to easily promoting your blog, whitepaper, infographic or article to your owned audience is planning ahead. Just like you’ve planned out your content strategy (you documented that, right?) and your editorial calendar, you should also plan distribution.

Your email subscribers—the engaged audience you’ve built—are still the most valuable readers. Make sure you’ve got an email ready to go. If one doesn’t automatically get sent to your subscribers when you publish a post, create an easy to use template to promote your latest post.

After you’ve got email squared away, turn to social.

I think this is where people figure, “If I tweet about it, all of my followers will see…I’ve done my job.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Moz reported way back in 2012 that a tweet’s lifespan is 18 minutes. In 2015, that lifespan is probably even shorter.  It’s crucial to set up tweets that will post at various times of the day for several days or weeks after your latest piece is done. To make your post more visually interesting, include an image, too. Hootsuite and Buffer are great for managing social, and you’ll also get some basic metrics. Don’t forget to take a look at Twitter’s metrics, too, to get a good idea of how many of your followers are actually seeing your tweet.

Turn to LinkedIn next. The good news is that LinkedIn posts last much longer than tweets. So write a thoughtful update and share your latest piece with your followers. You might also want to consider asking a question to prompt discussion and expand your reach.

To get an even longer shelf life out of your posts, you can now also publish on LinkedIn. The platform is gaining steam, and it can be a great way to reach a new, wider audience. Your post is shared with your connection and followers. It’s searchable on the site, and people who aren’t connected to you can follow you for more updates. In addition to that, your post will live on your LinkedIn profile so that anyone can easily find it. A note or two: For now, your actual company can’t publish a post; it has to be done by an individual (thought you can tag your company in it). When you publish on LinkedIn, remember to let your readers know that it first appeared on your site.

After you’ve set up automatic posts, create a recurring calendar event in the morning and evening to monitor and respond to social posts and check out your metrics. If it’s not performing how you’d hoped, use different keywords to see if that boosts engagement.

After you’ve moved on to writing new posts or developing a new whitepaper, don’t forget about your older posts. Look at your high performers and add them to you social queue so they get even more traction.

Is this everything you should do to distribute your content? Absolutely not. But it’s a starting point—the bare minimum you should be doing. And it’s probably more than you’re doing today.