To figure out which tools fit your needs best, we put together the following list of content promotion tools.

This list includes social media networks, social media management tools, paid content promotion tools, distribution tools and advocacy tools. Please note this list is not comprehensive and there are other ways to promote content such as emails and newsletters. For a look at the entire ecosystem, see our complete content marketing tools map.

Content Promotion Tools

Social Networks

Use these networks to build followings, reach out to influencers, and even pay for sponsored posts and customized reach. For expert tips on using social media, see Neal Schaffer’s guest post: 11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.

Twitter – Boasts 328 million monthly active users as of Q1 2017. Users can post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more. Promote content on Twitter organically, with Twitter cards, or paid promotions.

Facebook – The social media giant has two billion monthly active users as of June 2017. It lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more. There are options for promoting content organically and through paid promotions.

Pinterest – Share your images and videos on customizable boards and “repin” others’ images. Pinterest has 175 million monthly users as of Q1 2017.

LinkedIn – A business-focused online network. Users can share links, add connections, join groups, write recommendations, and search for connections by company, industry, skills, and more. Marketers can share content through company updates, sponsored updates and LinkedIn Pulse posts.

Google+ – Google’s social network. Set up “Hangouts” using video chat, and create “Circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging.

Offerpop – A social media platform for businesses to recruit, engage, and convert customers.

SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.

StumbleUpon – A discovery engine for finding and recommending web content. Allows users to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos personalized to their tastes using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.

Flipboard – Curate articles, videos, pictures and more. Save them into a glossy, shareable digital magazine format.

Social Media Management Tools

These tools help you organize your online presence. Many allow you to post to several social networks. They also typically analyze your posts’ performance through a dashboard, showing which content performs best on which platform.

Sprinklr – Large global companies use this social media management system. Engage with customers, connect with CRM systems, build custom widgets, publish and manage content, and more.

Tweetdeck – Track brand mentions and hashtags, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and schedule Tweets, all in a single Twitter platform.

Hootsuite – Administer multiple social media accounts. Analyze social media traffic, track brand mentions, collaborate with other team members, and schedule messages and tweets.

Buffer – Add articles, photos, or video. Buffer automatically posts content to your social media accounts throughout the day.

Traackr – Discover influencers, nurture relationships with them, and demonstrate the impact of these relationships.

Sprout Social – Allows multiple users to schedule, publish, and analyze social media posts across several platforms.

Social Bro – Follow trends on Twitter and capitalize on them with this fully functioning Twitter listening and publishing tool.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Find and analyze what’s being said about your brand and your competitors’ brands. Find out what customers want, which content is working, and how to keep up with the conversation.

Social Mention – A social search engine that searches for and analyzes real-time aggregated content across 100+ social media platforms.

Bottlenose – Track what’s trending in your industry. Get warnings about breaking news stories using advanced topic discovery and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Spredfast – Company-wide social media collaboration and monitoring, and social analysis reports.

Meltwater Buzz – A social media marketing SaaS platform. Combines monitoring and analytics with engagement to give you a complete lifecycle approach to social media community management.

Marketwired Resonate – Connect to your industry marketplace in real time through social media and traditional distribution.

CisionPoint – PR software that helps you reach your audiences and manage campaigns across traditional, digital and social media.

GetStacker – Receive all social media mentions in a single inbox. Schedule messages across platforms, and run reports on social media content.

ViralHeat – Publish, analyze and run reports about social media posts via multiple networks.

Followerwonk – Discover metrics such as who your Twitter followers are, where they are, when they tweet, and easily share your reports with the world.

Content Marketer – Three products to help you find and contact influencers via email and Twitter. Email templates feature tracking, scheduling, and follow up sequences.

Narrow – Build a targeted Twitter following by interacting with the users most likely to be interested in your company’s offerings.

Image Sharer – Create viral traffic by allowing your readers to automatically share images on your site and link back to you.

Jing – Capture basic video, animation, and still images from your computer screen, and share them on the Web.

Meet Edgar – A social media scheduling tool. Catalog your updates in a library that builds over time and automatically refreshes.

Oktopost – A B2B social media management platform. For managing, measuring, and amplifying your social media marketing.

Viraltag – Easily pull visual content from websites, Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Dropbox, RSS Feeds. One click scheduling for all social networks, and measure results from each channel.

DrumUp – Content discovery and social sharing. DrumUp uses data mining and NLP algorithms to discover, analyze and rank content based on relevance to the user’s interests.

Paid Promotion Tools (aka Native Advertising)

Use these content promotion tools to advertise content on websites across the Internet.

ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.

OneSpot – This tool automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads. It distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.

Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.

Outbrain – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers. It offers a personalized reader experience while exposing your content to engaged readers.

Vocus – Scans for prospects looking for companies like yours, suggests relevant social conversations, and distributes your press for traffic and search.

Taboola – Takes your content and places it on publishing websites, targeting it towards your selected audience.

nRelate – This platform helps content developers and publishers find an easier path to your target audience. Grows your reader-base from your site or elsewhere on the web.

Content Blvd – Connect with brands and publishers to create relevant and rewarding product placements.

Vibrant Media – This native advertising tool places content ads within other forms of editorial content. All triggers are user-initiated.

Disqus – Allows bloggers and website publishers to engage readers with an industry-leading comments section.

ContentClick – A native ad delivery system. Integrates content into thousands of blogs and websites.

Zemanta – Partners with many native ad networks such as Outbrain and nRelate.

Adblade – Target content with advertisement opportunities on over 100 branded content sites.

Mylikes – Places content on various websites and allows you to control your daily budget and bidding strategy.

PubExchange – Helps create partnerships between content creators. Partners then share ads for each other’s content on their blogs and other websites.

Resonance – A content retargeting tool for keeping your message in front of people who visit your website. Tracks the content they view and makes them aware of the next most relevant piece.

Zemanta – Programmatically buy native content ads on almost all native ad platforms. Target your audience with the reach and frequency to meet your marketing goals.

Distribution Tools

Content promotion to these networks will expand your reach.

Brightcove – This cloud content services provider offers an online video platform. Add custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.

PR Newswire – Distribute news releases to a global media database of more than 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts. Monitor traditional and social media, and engage in real time conversations with journalists, bloggers, and other influencers.

Cadence9 – A unified solution for managing content marketing. Plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, administer content creation and publishing workflow, and more.

Dynamic Signal – Cloud-based promotional tool for content marketers. Distributes to multiple channels and alerts marketing and sales teams when content is published. Leads are integrated into Salesforce and marketing automation platforms.

JustReachOut – Find the right journalists and bloggers to pitch by searching keywords, competitors, niches, publications, and more.

Advocacy Tools

One of the most powerful forms of content promotion could be inside your own company. Use these tools to enable your employees—and in some cases your customers—to share content across their own social media profiles.

GaggleAMP – Amplify social media efforts. This tool allows you to create “gaggles” of people who can share company social media updates to their followers.

SocialChorus – Amplify social media posts and create brand ambassadors out of employees, customers, and partners.

Amplifinity – Creates advocacy programs across various mediums, including email, direct mail, and social media.

EveryoneSocial – Employees and customers can build their own social profiles to share your company’s created and curated content.

SoAmpli – Encourage employees to become brand advocates. Helps you feed them content and reward them accordingly.

Influitive – Create an army of advocates with Influitive. Fosters a community of customers to share your content across various platforms.

SocialLook – Increase content traffic and conversion rates by sending messages through employees’ social media presence.

Smarp – Empower employees to discover and share content such as blogs, events, and open positions to social media networks. Employees can measure the impact their content has on their network.

Content Promotion Tools are Crucial for Content Marketing

Do you use a tool for content promotion we haven’t mentioned here? Let us know in the comments below. If you’re interested in furthering your content marketing career as much as your content, download Curata and LinkedIn’s joint eBook: The Ultimate Guide to a Content Marketing Career.

Here we examine the top content distribution techniques B2B firms use to entice their ideal audience to their website.

Start With Great Content (Good Isn’t Good Enough)

Before we dive into content distribution techniques, it’s important to discuss something fundamental to B2B marketing and content strategies. All content creation for brands should focus on quality, not quantity. There is so much noise out there, even in certain niche industries, that it’s important to produce quality pieces of content that resonate with your audience. Do you write sub-par blogs, create low quality videos, or throw together boring guides? Expect the reaction to those types of content pieces to be lackluster.

Alright, now that we have addressed the issue of quality content, let’s jump into effective content distribution methods.

Share it on Social Media

At minimum, the first thing your content team should do is share your content on social media channels. You don’t need to take to every social media channel and blast it out repeatedly however. In fact, it’s better to carefully select the social media channels where your target market is active.

For B2B firms, we find that our clients’ ideal prospects are typically active on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ (yes, people are still on Google+) are also good places to connect with a B2B audience. We haven’t seen much of a case for B2B firms on platforms like Snapchat. But if you have a strong following on the platform, definitely share your content there.

Check out 11 effective ways to promote your content using social media. Neal Schaffer explains how to share your content to maximize user engagement and entice them to actually click on your content.

Email Newsletters Get the Word Out

Building up your owned audience is essential for distributing content. No matter what, you own your list of email subscribers. Build this over time. Get opt-ins on your website, through your sales emails, on your blog posts, and via social media. The ideal aspect of an owned audience—in this case an email subscriber list, is that you can completely control the messaging, how it appears, when they see it and the frequency of when they see it.

Whether they are monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly, branded email newsletters are an excellent way to get more eyes on your content and more visitors to engage with your content. Typically an email subscriber list includes a mix of current customers and prospects. Sharing your content with existing customers is a great way to have a customer touchpoint. It also reinforces your standing as a resource for your clients. Sharing content with prospects who are interested but not ready to commit keeps you top-of-mind and builds your topic authority. So when they are ready to close the deal, they come to you and not your competitor.

Paid Content Distribution Techniques

There are many content promotion tools out there. However, a quick way to distribute your content is through paid promotional campaigns. We’ll look at several paid options for promoting and extending your content’s reach through the rest of this article.

Organic Is Mostly Dead, so Pay Your Way

Yes, organic reach on social platforms is mostly dead. While your brand may still be able to organically reach your audience if they engage with your content regularly and have selected to receive your content updates, it’s important to note that organic reach on platforms like Facebook is mostly a thing of the past. The answer however, is not to stop posting on social media. The social media usage statistics don’t lie; people are more active than ever on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

In addition to sharing content on your social media channels, using paid social promotions is effective for B2B companies. The major benefit of paying to promote content on platforms—particularly Facebook and LinkedIn—is the targeting capabilities.

You know your ideal audience—where they live and work, which industry they work in, their job title, etc. Use that knowledge. Get your content in front of your ideal audience who may not follow your brand on social media or be aware of your company.

LinkedIn Targeting

LinkedIn has a ton of options for sponsored content (paid promotions). The newest option is Matched Audiences. You can target people who have visited your website, also called retargeting. Or you can target a list of ideal accounts or contacts, often called account based marketing, or ABM. (Read Doug Kessler’s account of how to integrate content marketing with account based marketing.)

To reach new audiences who may not be on your radar, LinkedIn has a variety of targeting parameters to make your paid content distribution successful. You can geo-target, zero in on a particular industry (such as insurance, apparel & fashion, or manufacturing to name a few), exclude or include companies by their size, and even target individuals with certain titles (such as CEOs, Project Managers, Marketing VPs, etc.). There is even an option to target individuals at certain companies.

The options aren’t endless with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates. But they do offer enough specificity to ensure your paid content distribution isn’t wasted on a less-than-ideal audience.

If your audience isn’t on LinkedIn, Facebook offers similar targeting options for paid social promotions. Just like LinkedIn custom audiences, Facebook has the option to create custom audiences for your paid content distribution strategy.

Retargeting Ad Campaigns

However, paid promotion on social media isn’t the only way to extend your content distribution reach. Say you have website visitors who haven’t converted and aren’t signed up for your email newsletter. They’ve shown some level of interest and have been to your website. It’s time to retarget these visitors and get your new content in front of them with retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting website visitors with content has a twofold effect:

1. It keeps your brand top of mind with prospects
2. More visitors will view your content

Research shows it can take up to 6 touch points or more to get a viable sales lead. Why not use your awesome new content as a touchpoint? It’s simple to create a nicely designed, simple ad that promotes your content. And there are a variety of platforms that offer retargeting advertising, also called remarketing. The company I work for, Bop Design, uses AdRoll for retargeting, but there are a range of comparable options like Retargeter and Magnetic.

It takes more effort to roll out a retargeting campaign for content distribution and promotion. So try to only retarget website visitors with stellar content pieces. Well-designed downloadable guides are great candidates for remarketing. Although a progressive thought leadership article can also be successful for retargeting visitors and driving website traffic.

Run Search Ad Campaigns

The limitation of retargeting is that it doesn’t get your content in front of people who may be searching for your firm’s products or services. Paid search ads are an alternative method that does. For some reason marketers often consider PPC campaigns to be separate from content marketing efforts. Rather than creating more content, PPC campaigns are a great way to get more mileage out of existing content. They should be part of any content distribution strategy. If you’ve created a buying guide for the services you offer, run a PPC campaign targeting terms related to those services.

The pro tip here is to not just rely on Google AdWords for a paid content distribution campaign. Take a look at Bing ads. Remember, many B2B users are forced to use Windows with Microsoft Edge as the default browser.

Account Based Marketing Promotions

We’ve already touched on ways to reach a target market using data they have supplied to social networks, via browser cookies, and through searching online. Now we encounter the cool (and yes, kinda creepy) ways you can get your content in front of prospective clients. It’s called account based marketing (ABM) and it’s not necessarily new, but many of the technologies are. Essentially, ABM platforms like AdDaptive Intelligence and El Toro use proprietary IP targeting technology to serve up display ads on a network of websites to a predetermined group of individuals in a target market.

A little creepy. Also, very cool when it comes to controlling the audience reached, timing of ads, and the content being displayed. ABM may not be the first thing you think of when deciding on content distribution channels. But it is a great way to get your content in front of a target list of individuals or key accounts.

In fact, ABM is the ideal channel for B2B firms that have clients in various industries. For example, say you create an article on how apparel manufacturers can streamline their A/R. Now imagine there is a convention coming up for apparel manufacturers. A targeted ABM campaign promoting that article to convention goers ensures the money you spend only reaches that audience. You avoid distributing industry-specific content to the wrong audience.

Publish a Press Release

One last pay-to-promote strategy is not a new idea. But it’s still an effective means of getting your content in front of a broader audience. Publishing press releases discussing your content pieces is a good way to drive traffic to your content. Press releases still drive traffic and interest.

An effective use case for press releases to expand content distribution is promoting a branded industry report or industry trends content piece. Both content pieces are newsworthy and are likely to elicit attention from professionals in that industry. At Bop Design, we use this method to promote our content and our clients’ content with great results. In one case, a press release announcing the release of industry trends garnered excellent social media exposure and increased website traffic. It also resulted in a well-known industry association contacting us for a follow-up interview on the trends.

Conclusion: Get Out of the Box

It’s easy to get into a routine of distributing your content through the “regular” channels and doing things the way you always have. However, the best way to get results and amplify your content is to get outside of traditional content distribution strategies. Marketers spend a lot of time and effort to create awesome content pieces that will resonate with your target market. The right content distribution strategy will wring the most value out of those content pieces and garner the most interest from your target audience. To learn how to integrate distribution into a holistic content strategy, download The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook.

This is harder than it might seem. Marketing influencer Mark Schaefer coined the idea of “content shock” in 2014. He argued that content production will:

… increase exponentially as more and more brands pile in on the action, the rate of increase in content consumption will only increase slightly and then inevitably plateau. This is because we only have so much time with which to consume content. Therefor content marketing will become a victim of its own success, and brands will find that the same techniques become less and less effective each year.— SmartInsights

The point of “content shock” is upon us. Over four million blog posts are published on the Internet every day, while 50 percent of content created gets eight shares or less according to BuzzSumo. This says two things. First, that most content is created without being read or interacted with. Second, that many content creators fail to properly distribute their content. For content to succeed requires strategic content distribution.

Source: BuzzSumo

The real value of content marketing is in the distribution channels.
— Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom

If you build it, they will come no longer holds true, if it ever did. Marketers now need to build it, share it, talk about it, optimize keywords, email it, and share it again. Then maybe you’ll start getting people to come to your website.

Some people may argue that if you create really amazing content, your job is done. People will find it and love it and share it and come back for more. This is sort of true. If you own a bakery, you need to put your freshly baked triple fudge cake out front in the glass window in order for people to know they want to buy it. If not, they’d probably pick something else in the glass window, even if it’s not as good. That cake won’t create value for your bakery no matter how delicious it is. The same goes for content: it needs to be out front in the glass window.

REBECCA LIEB
Analyst, Author, Speaker. @lieblink
If you build it they will come.
Maybe. Maybe not. That’s why a plan to promote and distribute content is as critical as having great ideas for content creation. The most brilliant content in the world is the proverbial tree falling in the woods if it’s not seen or found.There’s not a single best way to approach promotion and distribution. Instead, there’s a series of questions to answer: who is the intended audience? Where do they go online? Who are their influencers? Is paid promotion a good option? If so, on what channels or media? There are many, many dependencies to promotion and distribution that can only be addressed with a solid content strategy.

This article explains different content distribution methods, how to develop a content distribution strategy, tips for optimizing, and offers tools to make planning and scheduling easier.

Things to Consider

Before developing a content distribution strategy, consider the following:

• Content distribution should just be one section in your overarching content strategy. And there is no one size fits all option to content distribution. Your strategy should be unique to your company.
• Consider the goal of your content. Are you hoping your audience will buy your product, interact with more content, or sign up for your newsletter? This will dictate the way you’re sharing, where you’re sharing, and the frequency.
• Who’s your audience? Determine your target audience and figure out where they are and at what time to optimize your online promotion strategy.
• The digital and content marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Best practices for sharing on Facebook are nothing like what they were five years ago. Be aware of promotional tactics that are no longer effective.

Distribution Options

After defining your content audience and goals, examine content distribution methods to determine which ones are ideal for your organization. Here are the most common content distribution methods in marketing today, and how they can be used in a distribution strategy.

Paid Promotion

Paid is a four letter word to a lot of content marketers. If my content is good enough, why do I have to pay people to read it? The simple answer is, you’re not paying people to read it. You’re paying people to see your content, the same way magazines pay for prime placement on newsstands.

Paid content can help:

• Pre-existing content work harder
• Get a solid base of eyes on your content
• Jump-start sharing of your content

DOUG KESSLER
Creative Director & Co-founder of Velocity, @dougkessler
Everybody talks about earned, owned, and paid media. But it’s important to add employed media. All the people who work for you add up to a really powerful distribution channel—but only if they know the content exists.

When paying for eyeballs, metrics other than pageviews become more salient. While you can count on those numbers, you’re paying for them. “Paid” is an umbrella term that can include anything from paid social to banner ads to pay per click (PPC).

Email Marketing

Email should be the foundation of any content strategy. While not as glamorous as social, email remains the most effective marketing channel there is. Email allows you to send content to people who already have a relationship with your brand. You have more information about them, and more control over how your content is packaged when they first see it.

For this reason, email should be a primary method of content distribution. Segment lists to prevent your audience from fatiguing with emails, and to ensure you only deliver content each audience member finds interesting. 

• Email is best for: Acquiring customers. Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. — McKinsey
• Email is worst for: Growing your email lists. Because, well, you already have their emails.

Social Distribution

Over 80 percent of the US population has a social network profile. And 94 percent of B2B marketers distribute content on LinkedIn. Social is necessary for content marketing to succeed, and marketers know it.

Social distribution works best when shared both organically and via paid options. There are plenty of tools like BuzzSumo or Hootsuite that can determine the best time to share content, where to share, and what kind of messaging is most effective.

• Social is best for: Increasing engagement, buzz, and brand awareness.
• Social is worst for: Bottom of the funnel content meant to sell.

Tips: Social distribution can be overwhelming. Not only are there several big players to advertise on, but the pay to play options are extensive. Don’t advertise on social sites your audience isn’t on.

Make sure the content you’re sharing matches the preferences of the audience on the platform. Advertising on Instagram or Pinterest requires sharing visual content rather than text-heavy content.

PAM DIDNER
GCM Strategist, Speaker, Author. @PamDidner
Understand how your customers use each social media channel. Customized your copywriting and image as necessary. COPE: “create once, publish everywhere” doesn’t work well in the increasingly personalized communications.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

There are two types of pay per click: search engine PPC and content PPC. Search PPC involves paying to rank for keywords on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) like Google. Content PPC operates similarly. You pay for your content to show up in the recommended or related articles section of content discovery networks.

• PPC is best for: Serving content to a new audience and helping your company be found.
• PPC is worst for: Sustained, high-value traffic, unless you want to continue paying for it.

Tips: Strong copy and calls to action are vital. Your content will be served up against similar competitor content.

SEO

Is SEO a distribution method? Not really. But ensuring people can organically find your content is. This is about as close as we can get to the idea of someone asking for your cake without finding it from the front glass case. Good SEO means anyone who asks for a chocolate cake is offered a slice of yours. While SEO is a ‘free’ way to get eyes on your content, it’s difficult to do effectively. To start, focus on key phrase research, go in depth in your articles, and create high-quality content. Integrate SEO into your content strategy.

Republish Elsewhere

In addition to the company blog, publish your content on sites such as Buzzfeed, Medium, Slideshare, Reddit, and other third-party websites. (Make sure to link back to your website on these other platforms.) This helps your content gain more visibility, and to drive more traffic to your website.

Influencer Marketing

Search Trends “Influencer Marketing”

While influencer marketing needs its own strategy, your influencer connections can aid in distributing your content. Tactics such as including influencer quotes in your content incentivize influencers to distribute your content to their followers, increasing your content’s reach.

Native Advertising

Another way to distribute your content is via paid posts on other media sites. This is a good option for outlets you haven’t been able to get published in.

Customer Advocacy

Many brands ask customers for case studies and testimonials. If you’re creating a tiered customer advocacy program, try social sharing and interaction as one of the tiers with low incentives. Or ask customer success to encourage your clientele to share your content.

Edelman Trust Barometer, 2017

Tips for Optimizing Distribution

• Repurpose content so it’s in different forms for different distribution channels.
• Keep testing; there’s no “best practices” for content distribution.
• Company employees are an asset. Your email lists and social accounts aren’t the only ways to share content with your audience. Ask employees to participate in your content distribution strategy to grow your audience and social engagement for free.
• Create a community engagement strategy that aligns with your distribution strategy. By consistently interacting with your audience to form deeper connections with them, you increase the likelihood they’ll interact with and share your content.

Tools

As with anything in the marketing sphere, there are many tools and platforms to optimize a content distribution strategy. Here are some of the essentials:

• WiseStamp: Automatically share your latest piece of content in your email signature.
• ClicktoTweet: Help your audience evangelize your content. Share tweetable quotes at the click of a button.
• Medium: All brands should have a Medium account. It allows you to republish existing posts to reach a new audience.
• GaggleAmp: Create messages for your company’s employees that are sent out automatically on social channels.
• Hootsuite: One of many social scheduling tools that helps you optimize the time and frequency that you publish.
• Quora: According to Quora’s website, “Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.” Quora enables you to establish your company as an expert in your field, and lets you link back to your content from a high domain authority site.
• Slideshare: This presentation sharing platform gives you another opportunity to distribute eBooks, webinars, and event presentations. With 80 percent of traffic coming from search, over 159 million monthly page views, and less than one in five B2B marketers using it, it’s without a doubt a platform you should be on.
• PR Newswire: Having a platform that reaches journalists and other news outlets is important for sharing company updates and company news.

Create a Content Distribution Action Plan

Now you know the options for content distribution and the best ways to use them, create a content distribution strategy for your company by:

1. Implementing a set of rules for content distribution. For example, if content’s goal is to generate x pageviews, share x times on social media and send x emails over x weeks.
2. Create a distribution calendar in conjunction with, or on top of your editorial calendar.
3. Establish KPIs and allocate time to analyze performance once a month or every other week. Adjust and optimize according to these metrics.

ARDATH ALBEE
CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, @ardath421
My number one tip for content promotion and distribution is that it’s most successful when it’s part of the content planning process, rather than an afterthought when you hit publish.As part of all the content briefs I help my clients create, I coach them to include the requirements for promotion and identify distribution channels up front. This way you (or your writer) can create the snippets for social media along with any additional graphics.You can also map out distribution scenarios so that momentum is built along with reach and exposure. Planning for content promotion and distribution also helps to ensure that your messaging is consistent across channels, producing better experiences for your audience.

Once you have a content distribution strategy, it’s time to put it all into action. For more on creating a comprehensive content strategy, download Curata’s eBook: The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy.

A victim of its own success, content marketing is a model that has been so highly adopted it no longer works as optimally as it used to. As much as we’d like to believe that content of value will rise above the din of marketplaces—like a solitary tower in a green field—it no longer always works that way.

In this piece, we look at where we are and what’s gotten us here. Then we’ll break down how to optimize a content marketing strategy in today’s world for it to find true success.

Traditional Content Marketing’s Effectiveness Has Been Diluted

Let’s define content marketing. From the Content Marketing Institute (CMI):

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.

Now I hate to do this, but I have to get pedantic. Further into the defining piece, CMI puts the emphasis on “valuable” and “relevant” as the differentiators between just plain marketing and content marketing. Which is cool. I like value and relevance as much as the next guy.

But that doesn’t mean I, or the audience of the brands I work with, are always looking to engage with valuable, relevant content. Sometimes, there has to be something that happens before that content to tilt an audience’s interest toward value. Sometimes there needs to be an attention-getter that might not be of any real value at all.

Why? Because as odd as it sounds: there’s arguably too much valuable, relevant content out there now! There’s too much content full stop.

That’s right. As marketers, we’ve done such a good job of buying into the “valuable, relevant” content idea that we’re drowning our audience in it. In so doing, we’ve brought the need for advertising (gasp!) back into favor. The future of content marketing success drives through advertising. Social media ads (Check out Larry Kim’s 10 Killer Social Media Advertising Hacks For Content Marketers). Display. SEM. Native advertising. TV ads. And so on and so forth.

To Win With Content Marketing, You’ll Have to Pay

Other, smarter people have taken swipes at this topic before. Tom Webster’s piece on content arbitrage from way back in 2013 still jumps to the top of my mind.

In this piece, he writes about how much easier it used to be get a blog off the ground. Why? Because the first movers in a space have the advantage of being ahead of the impending noise.

In the case of modern marketing, that’s brain space—a new idea on a topic people are just starting to get interested in. It’s also distribution space—a new channel in which there’s relatively little noise and the right audience for the topic starting to gather. Those winners bought low and sold high on a content type and channel.

(Mark Schaefer takes a bit more of a “link-bait and scare tactic” approach to the same idea in his 2014 piece about “content shock.” Still worth reading.)

Every channel has this period of time, with first mover success stories. That magical overlap where someone sees a green field in which to build a singular tower. To be the only one found. And therefore, to truly use content marketing in its purest form: creating content of value that’s easily found by the right audience and thus, works.

The rest of us must pay to build our tower at least ever so slightly taller than the others that now litter what used to be a green field.

Enter “Paid-to-Earned Content Marketing Models”

How do we resolve wanting to market with content of value, and being cool with paying for the attention? How about creating “paid-to-earned content marketing models?”

That’s right. Let’s push the idea of content marketing closer to paid marketing. Let’s do so with the intent to shift budget from paid promotion to more content creation over time as we gain more earned media.

Selling Ownership of an Area of Expertise

In this model of “paid-to-earned content marketing,” we change the goals of our paid media. We don’t look to make a sale right away. We look to sell ownership of our area of expertise.

Most marketers make decisions between paid media and content marketing based on measuring short-term “low hanging fruit” gains in sales versus long-term “build customers for life” gains. What if instead, the goal of our paid media shifted from driving sales to gaining interest? That would change the types of messages we put into our paid media. It would make our ads less pushy, more worthwhile. The conversion might no longer be “buy,” but “subscribe.”

Yes, this will delay the ROI measurement we crave, which is so much more pressing when it comes to paid. (Figure out the best way to Determine Your Content Marketing ROI with Michael Brenner.) But it’s a good way to approach building audience, and there’s precedent to this as a means to positive ends. For example: Amex OPEN forum.

Marketers point to the Amex OPEN forum as a success model for modern content marketing. And in many ways, it is. It’s become the go-to resource for small business owners in need of guidance in marketing, sales, management, IT and more. It’s a lightly-sponsored hub featuring content of unprecedented value. It provides access to world-changing business leaders that small business owners could never afford to talk to on their own. Echoing the words of CMI, Amex, “is providing truly relevant and useful content to their prospects and customers to help them solve their issues, instead of pitching products or services.”

But the flow of small business owners that flock to the site day after day was sparked by a seven-figure ad budget for Small Business Saturday and other campaigns. Lucky for Amex, they were also the first tower in a green field! The two things together—paid media to spark a path toward a content arbitrage moment—is, quite literally, gold.

We should also look at the type(s) of content that used to hold the banner of relevant and valuable. That has dramatically changed as people’s expectations of value have become more sophisticated.

Less Content; Higher Quality

In the paid-to-earned model above, we’re actually talking about creating less content. What we’re looking to drop in terms of volume, we’ll more than make up for in quality. Let’s look at what that really means.

Some content marketers fell into bad habits because volume of content alone used to be able to build a tall, strong tower out in the green field. By creating lots of content at a rapid, regular clip, you could start to own certain search terms. In turn, by owning those terms you could make yourself appear to be the foremost authority by simply overwhelming the first Google search engine results page (SERP). The content to achieve this was often short and superficial. It was keyword-laden rather than value-laden. It was listicles and linkbait.

Thank Google for spotting the flaw in a world built on volume alone. Marketers have begun to identify that it is specific people we really want to target, rather than “anyone and everyone.” Quality is now the more important trait.

However, quality is also an elusive trait. I’ve gone on way too long about what “quality content” really means already. So I’ll summarize. Quality isn’t simply about the production value of a video or the cleverness of an infographic title. It’s about content that actually addresses a verified audience need, that speaks to them in the way they would like to be spoken to, in their channel of preference. It’s content that meets the context of their situation. And it’s content that truly provides value.

That results in fewer, more in-depth, more targeted pieces of content. That’s what builds a tower that stands the test of time, rather than something tall but rickety. And the paid promotion of quality content helps establish your thought leadership as the most influential tower.

How to Go With the Right Flow

So far we’ve established that content marketing—in its traditional form—now needs optimizing to maintain its effectiveness. We marketers took too much advantage of the initial opportunity. Go us.

Therefore, we have to adjust our thinking in two ways. We need a greater focus on quality content that actively eschews quantity. And we need to attract a flow to our content with paid means, rather than relying solely on organic paths. What’s the third leg to a successful content-centric marketing platform? Ensuring we target the right audience with much more specificity.

Luckily, this is something you’re already tilting toward if you’ve started reducing the quantity of content you’re making to focus on quality. Why? Because a quantity focus means you’re hacking together less-specific content for the masses, rather than highly specific content for the few. A quality focus, on the other hand, means you’re getting deep into the specific details that matter to the much more invested members of your audience. Along with CRM, automation, and social listening technology, you can further personalize content and experiences with the time freed from trying to publish too often.

A paid push to create an audience flow to your highly-specific content gets even better when you apply the same thinking and technology. Programmatic ad buys allow you to get the right ad, leading to the right audience member, in the right channel, at precisely the right time.

The additional requirement for this is better audience understanding and segmentation based on data, rather than gut feeling. Again—more achievable when you’re less concerned with playing the quantity game.

To Sum Up

Content marketing is an amazing way to build a relationship with audiences that ultimately leads to revenue. Can it stand alone as your only means of success in promoting your service, product, or offering? I don’t think so. At least for most, finding the green field in which to build a singular tower in an area of expertise in a burgeoning channel is, at best, a game of timing and luck. Using paid media to amplify the audience for your content significantly increases the effectiveness of your content marketing.

To read more about content marketing and the changing shape of the PESO media mix (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned), look here! If you love content marketing and want to get ahead in a content marketing career, download The Ultimate Guide to a Content Marketing Career eBook, a joint production between Curata and LinkedIn.

Effective promotion requires the same degree of resources and thoughtfulness as creating quality content does. There are an abundance of content promotion tools available to help. Peruse the best of them in Curata’s Ultimate List of Content Promotion Tools. There’s a range of platforms from social media networks, to social media management tools, paid content promotion tools, distribution tools, and advocacy tools.

Good Tools Aren’t Enough

Such tools are an extremely useful part of any content marketing strategy. But while necessary, they are not sufficient for effective promotion. They lack one crucial element: the human element. A 2015 Nielsen Trust in Advertising report asked consumers which forms of advertising they trusted the most. The overwhelming winner for more than 8-in-10 global respondents was recommendations from people they know and trust. Online banner ads and search engine result page ads were trusted by less than half the respondents.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and Newsjacking, Marketer in Residence at Hubspot, keynote speaker. @dmscott
What’s my best advice for marketers creating an influencer marketing program for content promotion? Educate and inform instead of interrupt and sell.

What Not to Do

There are a lot of easy pitfalls to avoid when you’re developing an influencer program for content promotion. Most involve not thinking about an influencer as an actual person, but just as a means to an end.

For instance, don’t ever send a form letter email or mass mailing. (Think about how well they work on you.) Personalize your email beyond just their name and company. Show what you know about them, such as mentioning a hobby you’ve seen them talk about on Twitter.

Never just ask for something upfront from a cold open. Saying “Please share this with your followers” the first time you introduce yourself just establishes you as a clueless jerk.

Research shows 75 percent of brands find it difficult to identify the right influencers in their niche to partner with. Don’t invest time and money on influencer marketing before you’ve vetted your list to find people who are actually relevant. They need to drive real changes in attitude, perception, and adoption patterns. 

A Brief History of Influencer Marketing

Data confirms what should be obvious: we listen to messages coming from specific people we know and trust more than those coming from impersonal organizations.

The first researcher to discover this, Paul Felix Lazarfeld (later with Elihu Katz), published a book analyzing which factors affected voters’ decision making process during Franklin Roosevelt’s quest for a historic third term in the 1940 presidential campaign. The People’s Choice (1944) introduced the idea of influencer marketing to the public sphere.

Katz and Lazarfeld’s later book Personal Influence (1955) is considered the handbook of the theory of two-step communication. It argues most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders rather than large brands or political figures. Ideas then, flow from media to opinion leaders, and from them to a wider population.

Influencer marketing has existed for a half century. But it’s only since social media became ubiquitous that influencers could substantially scale their reach. 

Why Use Influencers?

We already trust people ahead of organizations. And today’s world of information overload means we place even more stock in people with authenticity and credibility. We don’t trust an authentic jackass! Well executed influencer marketing is important not only for content promotion, but also for relationship development and effective SEO link building.

ANN HANDLEY
Ann Handley, head of content at MarketingProfs, world’s first Chief Content Officer, author of the WSJ bestseller Everybody Writes @MarketingProfs
Don’t launch an influencer program because you want influencers to promote your content. That’s the wrong mindset—because it’s both short-sighted and one-sided.Instead, there are far better reasons to launch an influencer program:

1. Launch an influencer program to cultivate relationships with people who align with your bigger story, values, and purpose.

2. You want to give them access and insight.

3. It would be great to work with them long-term.

A by-product might be that they’ll promote your content—because they want to and are motivated by your success (and vice-versa). But that’s a by-product of a successful relationship. Not the reason to launch a program.

SEO Benefits

Part of effective SEO requires marketers to generate back links to our sites in order to rank higher in search engine results pages. Google prioritizes links from larger, higher quality sites such as say—the New York Times, over links from some student’s content farm blog in Russia. Back links are ranked as a vote of confidence about the quality and reliability of a website.

As you develop a relationship and trust with an influencer, both parties link to each other’s content. For example, linking to each other’s social media posts on accounts such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and sharing guest posts on each other’s blogs that link back to each other’s websites. You both help to extend each other’s audience and reach.

Branding Benefits

The SEO benefits of link building from an influencer relationship are arguably secondary to how they position your brand on the web. Links imply relationships between entities. Associating your brand with other known entities is an indispensable signal—for both humans and search engines—in determining which brands are credible and trustworthy. It’s a long term strategy that requires resources and patience. The benefits however, like compound interest, accrue over time.

Influencer marketing also provides short-term results though. It can drive immediate traffic and sales. Publishing content on an influencer’s site gives you access to an already large and established audience. Influencer marketing should be thought of as an accelerator to your content marketing strategy. It amplifies (rather than replaces) your other content promotion options.

Building an Influencer Network

There are a plethora of social media ranking and monitoring tools available such as BuzzSumo, Klout, sproutsocial, TrackMaven, Traackr, and Lumanu (for micro-influencers). They will help you search for relevant influencers by subject, degree of influence, location, and other parameters.

GINI DIETRICH
CEO of Arment Dietrich, keynote speaker, author of Spin Sucks @ginidietrich
The very best thing marketers can do when creating an influencer relations program for content promotion is very carefully, hand-select the people with whom you want to work. There is nothing worse than being on the receiving end of a pitch, when it’s not a fit for you at all. Plus, it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the people you may want to work with in the future. Most likely, you’re going to work with only a handful of people so do your homework. Cultivate the relationships. And then make the ask. This almost guarantees 100 percent success.

Once you narrow your list down to the most likely candidates, it pays to personally evaluate the substance of a potential influencer’s work. You can learn a lot from their comments, reviews, and posts on social channels. Kristen Matthews of GroupHigh advises evaluating influencers against content fit, reach, and engagement. This helps you filter out the least relevant fits for your brand, and forces you to read their content and determine if outreach truly makes sense.

Influencers are People Too

When you’ve done your homework and you’re ready to reach out, remember that an influencer doesn’t owe you anything. Especially not a response to some random stranger rude enough to ask for something without offering anything in return. Show that you share interests, goals, and priorities. Compliment them on an article, video, or SlideShare they created that you liked. If you’d like someone to contribute content to your blog for example, tell them about your readership and how you’ll be promoting it. That way they can assess whether your audience is large enough and targeted enough to their area of expertise to be worth their time engaging.

ARDATH ALBEE
Author of Digital Relevance, CEO of Marketing Interactions, keynote speaker @ardath421
Creating an influencer program takes a commitment to provide value to the influencer. The most important thing is to see the situation from their side. What’s in it for them? Why should they care? And will what you’re asking for complement what they are passionate about? Once you’ve matched those things up with the influencers on your list, do something for them. Comment on their blogs, share their social posts, ask intelligent questions that show you know what they care about. Do this before you ask for anything in return. Influencer marketing is about building mutually-beneficial relationships. And it’s something that marketers need to get better at if they hope to put influencer marketing to work successfully. Essentially, you get what you give.

Keep it short and sweet, and at the end of your email outreach, clearly state a proposed next step. It’s important to then stay in contact. Retweet them, like their status updates, email to let them know about upcoming projects you have that they may be interested in collaborating on. All relationships require maintenance, and influencer relationships are no different.

Define Objectives

There are typically multiple objectives in any content marketing plan, whether it’s to increase brand awareness, website or blog visitors, social sharing, or leads generated. There are also multiple stakeholders to consider. Your brand may want to grow expertise on a given topic, influencers may want exposure, and prospects almost certainly want expert information. Write these down so you can measure how well you achieve them.

Keywords and Headlines

Clarify which subjects to focus on by defining the headlines you want to write in terms of the search terms and customer questions you want to address. Use keyword research to determine what your prospects are interested in and how to address their concerns.

TopRank Ceo Lee Odden suggests that, “Topics represent the themes and areas of focus for planning editorial and for sourcing influencers. Topic alignment between brand, influencer and community is essential for mutual value to be created.”

The type of content you choose will usually be dictated by your content marketing plan, but remember, some content formats are more conducive to influencer co-creation than others. These include webinars, eBooks, whitepapers, long form blog posts, and SlideShares.

MICHAEL BRENNER
CEO of Marketing Insider Group, keynote speaker, co-author of bestselling book The Content Formula @BrennerMichael
Marketers need to start from the perspective of the influencers and answer what’s in it for them, before asking for favors and content. Book them to speak at your events, pay them to write a series of articles, invite them to participate in other events for free such as webinars and Twitter chats. Most influencers want to build a relationship with the brands they support and are happy to offer their time and insights once there is some mutual trust.

The Planning Process

Make the process of working with you as easy as possible. For example, rather than always asking them to write something for you from scratch, offer to write the first draft of a blog yourself. Or rewrite an older (high performing) post of theirs, allowing them to edit it as they see fit. If the quality of work is equal, busy people will always choose to collaborate with those who make life more convenient.

You will send and receive many emails before you and your influencer have managed to hammer out a subject and format that aligns with both parties’ needs. Once you have completed content you’re both happy with, make it easy for them to promote it. Provide assets such as pre-written tweets, embed codes, shortened URLs (with tracking code for the particular campaign). Make it easier to share your content—and it will be shared more.

Measure Results

Sharing is only one metric to measure the success of your influencer marketing promotion plan however. Curata focuses on metrics such as leads and revenue generated, and the quality of backlinks, time on site, scrolling time, and bounce rate which are all crucial to SEO rankings. Other metrics such as social shares and page impressions tend to be vanity metrics. They look good, but don’t always count for much (towards your business goals at least).

Follow Up

When you’ve published your piece and distributed it through all your, and your influencer’s promotion channels, email them and thank them. Follow up and let them know if their content did well, or if there’s any comments for them to respond to.

CARLA JOHNSON
Keynote speaker, author of Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Chief Experience Officer at Type A Communications @CarlaJohnson
The best advice I have for marketers creating an influencer marketing program for content promotion is relevance:To influencers – Spend time researching their content and what matters to them. Are many of their followers part of your market? Make sure their audience is actually one interested in what you deliver. Also, how can you ensure your outreach is beneficial to influencers themselves? They get many asks, make sure that the relationship you want to build is one they believe is relevant and worth their time.
To your audience – Do your homework to find the most appropriate influencers. Just because someone is influential doesn’t mean they’re the right influencer for your brand. Think about what channels your buyers use and match those with your influencer outreach. No sense investing in YouTube influencers if your buyers hang out on LinkedIn.
To your brand – Invest wisely and do your homework. Which influencers can help you meet the business objectives of your brand? Every company’s goals are different and there’s aren’t any one-size-fits-all standards for influencer programs. What worked beautifully for another brand may not be something that brings success for you.

Influencer Marketing: Integral to Content Promotion

Content is not king. Not unless people can find it, and not unless it’s presented well enough to hold people’s attention ahead of the avalanche of other competing content out there.

One of the best ways to introduce new people to your content is to get someone with a built-in audience to tell them about it. Influencers have an authenticity and credibility that other entities can’t match. We take messages from them more seriously than from other sources. Google does too, which means building a relationship with an influencer also helps improve your domain and search engine results page rankings.

Finding the right influencers isn’t hard with the social media ranking and monitoring tools available. Engage with them respectfully and genuinely. Measure the results. Do it right, and you won’t just have developed an effective way to amplify your content promotion, you may just find you’ve developed a new friend. For a thorough examination of how to measure the results of your influencer marketing content promotion, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.