by Fronetics | Sep 24, 2019 | Blog
Although content is extremely important, it’s only effective if it gets in front of the right audience. Here’s everything you need to know about content distrubution.
Highlights:
- Content distribution is the act of promoting content to online audiences in multiple media formats through various channels.
- Don’t fall victim to the “spray and pray” strategy where you post every piece of content anywhere and everywhere to increase the chances of achieving your desired results.
- Kick things off by looking at how each channel you want to use matches with the audience, your goals, and the priorities outlined in your overall content marketing plan.
Video transcript:
I’m Katie Russell, a marketing strategist here at Fronetics, and today we’re going to be talking about content distribution 101.
Content distribution is a term that’s often thrown around in marketing circles without any specifics attached. Given the growing popularity of content marketing, brands run the risk of having content lost in the shuffle. Here’s what you need to know to start implementing a successful content distribution strategy.
What is content distribution?
First off, what is content distribution? Content distribution is the act of promoting content to online audiences in multiple media formats through various channels.
There are three main components in the process for enabling your brand to build (and grow) communities of loyal, engaged consumers:
- Evaluate your distribution options
- Develop and document your strategy
- Promote your content
Evaluate your distribution options
Let’s start with evaluate your distribution options. Don’t fall victim to the “spray and pray” strategy where you post every piece of content anywhere and everywhere to increase the chances of achieving your desired results. You want to make sure your content is getting in front of the right people, with the right messaging.
Whether you are new at content marketing or a seasoned expert wanting to make the biggest splash possible, you need to decide which channels make the most sense for distribution. Some channels are more appropriate for your content than others, so you want a clear understanding of the unique value proposition of each, and how strongly those benefits align with your audience, brand voice, and goals.
Develop and document your strategy
Once you’ve generated a list of the most viable distribution options, building a strategy is the next step. Kick things off by looking at how each channel you want to use matches with the audience, your goals, and the priorities outlined in your overall content marketing plan. Resources and content types will help establish your editorial strategy. Make sure to document the details of your distribution decisions, so the information can be referenced easily, updated as necessary, and shared throughout your company.
Promote your content
Simply posting your content and waiting for your ideal audience to magically discover it won’t cut it. Make sure you are:
- optimizing your content with keywords, backlinks and calls to action
- repurposing and repackage top performing content
- consider sponsored content on social media sites
Want more information on how to successfully implement a content distribution strategy? Visit us at fronetics.com.
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by Fronetics | Feb 6, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Here are three tips for creating a content strategy that will help advance your business goals.
If we’re adamant about one thing at Fronetics, it’s creating a documented content strategy. But, as a recent Harvard Business Review article suggests, many strategies fail because they are not actually strategies.
This begs the question: what constitutes a real strategy? According to Freek Vermeulen, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, “A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do.” The keyword here is “clear.”
Here are three strategy-creation tips to help you create a clear content strategy that aligns with and furthers your business goals.
3 content strategy tips
1) Show your work.
Just like in high school math class, arriving at the right answer isn’t enough — you need to communicate the logic for how you got there. As you create or refine your strategy, take a step back and examine the reasoning behind each choice.
Says Sly Bailey of the UK publisher Trinity Mirror, “If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.”
Understanding the reasoning behind each of your choices allows you and your team to fully believe in your strategy, and ensures you carry it out optimally.
2) Trickle down doesn’t work.
Many implementation efforts fail because executives see strategy creation as a top-down process. On this topic, Stanford Professor Robert Burgelman writes, “Successful firms are characterized by maintaining bottom-up internal experimentation and selection processes while simultaneously maintaining top-driven strategic intent.”
In other words, while you need top-down strategic direction, this will only be effective if you simultaneously empower your employees to create bottom-up initiatives that meet the strategic intent.
3) Flexibility is key.
Another source of failure for implementation efforts is the institutional unwillingness to change habits. “People are often not even aware that they are doing things in a particular way and that there might be different ways to run the same process,” says Vermeulen.
It’s important to identify and effectively work against the bad habits that hamper your strategy’s effectiveness. As Vermeulen describes in his book, Breaking Bad Habits, “There are various practices you can build into your organization to make it work.” This often involves identifying key processes, and asking, “Why are we doing it this way?” If the logic isn’t clear (see above), this process is likely a good candidate for change.
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by Fronetics | Jan 23, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Measuring the success of your content is important in evaluating your writing for SEO strategy. Here’s how to do that.
This week, we’re wrapping up our series on writing for SEO. In this series, we’ve explored how search engines are changing, how people are changing the way they search, and how to make use of topic clusters and pillar content. Now, with a better understanding of the changing SEO landscape, it’s time to think about how to measure the success of your content.
As with any marketing effort, having a documented strategy for your content’s search engine performance — and a plan for measuring the success of your strategy — is key. You might be asking yourself, “How do I measure the success of a piece of content?”
Should I measure the success of one post at a time?
When it comes to SEO, the answer to this question can be complicated, largely because it’s not a great idea to evaluate the success of your campaign on a post-by-post basis. It’s too narrow a definition of success to account for the complex network of direct and indirect benefits of effective SEO writing.
Take brand-driven content, for example. Your focus isn’t about generating individual sales, but rather about elevating your brand, raising wider awareness, attracting new talent, or generating backlinks. If you based the success of brand-driven content on the number leads it generated alone, you’d think it was performing terribly. But your post may, in fact, have generated hundreds of backlinks and be getting lots of traffic.
Evaluating by cluster topic
So how do you evaluate success? Rather than looking at your content on a post-by-post basis, consider how all the content under each cluster topic performs as a whole.
According to HubSpot, “Measuring the entire topic cluster against all of your core business metrics will enable you to include residual benefits coming from content that doesn’t align with direct conversion goals.”
As you look at the performance of your topic clusters, consider the following four questions:
- Which topics perform best at driving traffic to your website or other web presence?
- Which topics earn you the most leads?
- Which topics drive the most revenue for your business?
- Which topics earn the most backlinks/coverage?
It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, what you’re working toward — and what will work best for your search visibility — is creating content that people want to see. Writing for SEO is ultimately about creating better content, increasing search engine visibility, and providing the best possible experience for your site visitors.
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by Fronetics | Sep 25, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Use the first months to lay a solid foundation for your content marketing program so it can begin generating leads and sales.
So you decided it was time to jump into the content marketing game. You’ve been crafting the perfect content. You’re posting on a regular basis. You’ve identified your target audience and have been researching keywords. You’ve even learned a thing or two about SEO.
But you have no leads or sales to speak of. And your boss is breathing down your neck for results, FAST. Is it time to throw in the towel? Absolutely not!
Content marketing is a long-term solution that helps businesses build brand awareness, grow their audience, and generate new leads and sales. But, like any good relationship, it takes time and effort to achieve results. You shouldn’t give up before the seeds you sow have time to bear fruit.
To understand the time table for content marketing, let’s look at some markers for the first six months.
Month one
Learn about your target audience and understand their needs.
In order to get the ball rolling in content marketing, you have to understand who you are trying to reach. It’s important to think holistically when considering who you are trying to reach at a potential prospects’ company. Typically, your target audience falls into two categories: Primary (decision makers) and Secondary (influencers of the decision maker). Going one step further, you need to identify your target audience’s needs and pain points so that you can direct your content marketing strategy at creating awareness around those needs.
Document a content marketing strategy.
You would never operate your business without 1) creating a strategy, 2) documenting it, and 3) following the strategy. A content marketing strategy outlines the methods by which you will target, reach, and engage your audience. Research and execution of these tasks can be quite complex. Writing out a plan and assigning appropriate resources can offer clarity and guidance to your organization throughout the course of your program.
Month three
Create and publish content.
93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. However, less than half (42%) of B2B marketers say that they are effective at content marketing. One of the reasons these marketers are ineffective: bad content.
When you are creating and curating content for your business, focus on original content that stands out to current and prospective customers. Valuable and relevant content is not a sales pitch. Rather, it is content that communicates valuable information to customers and prospects so that they have the knowledge to make more informed decisions. Moreover, it is content that establishes your business as a reliable source of knowledge — as the thought leader within the industry.
Promote content on multiple channels.
Understanding your target audience and which social media platforms they’re using is invaluable information. If you want to reach potential and current customers, you need to be where they are. You need to make it easy for them to find you and to engage with your business. And if your competitors are already active on social media, start by finding out where. If these platforms align with your ideal customer, don’t be afraid to kick start your social media presence alongside them.
Month six
Analyze your performance.
Track and analyze your metrics on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Take a look at what is working and what is not. By tracking and analyzing your metrics you can see, for example, what type of content is most effective and which distribution channels are helping you achieve your goals. You’ll also be able to find opportunities for improvement. Look at the feedback you are getting through your engagement with customers and prospects, and make adjustments to your strategy as needed.
Expand your content creation.
If you’re focused on growing your business or creating awareness through the creation of engaging content, then you need to be ready to try new things. Have you been successful with blogging and Facebook posts? Then it’s time to try making videos and joining Twitter. And don’t be afraid to pull from other worthy sources. Content curation will serve to establish your business as a trusted resource and increase your brand visibility, all without over-promoting yourself.
Remember that when it comes to content marketing, it is important to think: marathon not sprint. An effective content strategy requires patience and determination. Many companies make the mistake of giving up on a content strategy too early. Give your relationship with content marketing time to play out, and don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy along the way if you find some things are working better than others.
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by Fronetics | May 4, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Having a documented content marketing strategy increases effectiveness and provides a baseline for measuring ROI.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness, broaden your customer base, and grow your business. Yet of the 88% of B2B marketers using content marketing, only 30% feel their efforts are successful. Why do so many organizations feel they are failing? Simply put, they do not have a documented content marketing strategy in place.
You would never operate your business without 1) creating a strategy, 2) documenting it, and 3) following the strategy. Nor should you launch a marketing program without having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and how you plan to do that.
A content marketing strategy outlines the methods by which you will target, reach, and engage your audience. Research and execution of these tasks can be quite complex. Writing out a plan and assigning appropriate resources can offer clarity and guidance to your organization throughout the course of your program.
Also, remember that content marketing is more of a marathon than a sprint, and achieving results often takes months, even years. Documenting your strategy allows your team to keep focused on your goals and your plan for achieving them in the interim.
Here’s why you should take the time to draw up a plan and then write it down.
A documented content marketing strategy is more successful than an undocumented strategy or no strategy at all.
Research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute reveals that businesses that document their content marketing strategy find their efforts significantly more effective than those who don’t. Among B2B marketers surveyed:
- 60% of those with a documented strategy rate themselves highly, in terms of content marketing effectiveness.
- Only 32% of those with a verbal strategy rate themselves highly.
- Of those who rate their organization’s content marketing programs as not at all effective, a mere 13% have a documented strategy.
Further, organizations who meet regularly to check in on their content marketing strategy are much more likely to find it successful — 61% of the most effective marketers surveyed meet daily or weekly to review their progress.
A documented content marketing strategy helps measure ROI.
Many B2B businesses struggle with content marketing or have trouble garnering C-suite support for the program because return on investment is notoriously difficult to measure. In fact, more than half of marketers say one of their top challenges is measuring content effectiveness (57%) and/or measuring the ROI of their content marketing program (52%).
Having a documented strategy in place gives your organization measurable goals against which to compare your results. Your strategy should:
- Document what you hope to achieve through content marketing — more leads, higher conversion rates, more newsletter sign-ups, etc.
- Outline a specific methodology for executing those goals
- Assign human resources to each of the tasks
- Designate intervals at which to check in and evaluate/adjust your efforts
- Offer a time frame for completion
Documenting your strategy in such a way clarifies where you are investing time and resources so that calculating ROI is less of an abstract process.
Content Marketing Institute’s research confirms that content marketing success increases when there is organizational clarity about what success looks like, and that organizations with a documented content marketing strategy feel they are successful at tracking ROI. While only 21% of marketers feel they are successful at tracking ROI, that number rises to 35% when there is a documented strategy in place.
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