If you have already accessed this link, I think you already know what distribution is and how important it is in your business and marketing management.
Therefore, I am not going to get into details about this but instead, discuss the distribution strategy, a concept that is as important as the whole distribution process.
We live in a century where new channels of distribution can appear out of nowhere, capture the market and die suddenly without any notice. What is valid for all of us is the fact that, as marketers, we now have more options than ever when it comes to selecting the distribution channels. These channels are the routes the goods, services or the content take in order to reach to the end user from you, the producer/seller. And now, they can be traditional, like the offline channels but also digital, where you are actually bombarded with options.
What about creating a content distribution strategy for a blog? What does one need to know and how can they create it in order to maximize the results?
Well, let’s start with the basics:
Distribution strategy definition
As I have already stated in the opening section of this article, the distribution strategy focuses on finding the correct and efficient routes of spreading the content throughout the digital environment. Based on the type of the blog and ultimately, its purpose, these channels can spread across multiple platforms and address many types of readers/content consumers.
Why do we need a distribution channel strategy?
If I would present you with two apples, a green apple and a red one and you like the green apples, the choice is easier to make. If, however, I come to you with 100 fruits that you did not even tasted before and let you choose the one that you would probably like best, it would be an almost impossible choice to choose correctly.
As marketers, we now have to deal with similar issues. We have so many available channels of distribution that we really need to focus on the preliminary stage, the one that helps us prepare and find the right ones for us. This is what strategy means in its initial stages. You need to analyze all your options, choose the right ones and not base your choices on anything that resembles the above example. You need to know about all the possible “fruits” that you may get and which one is good for you.
Types of distribution strategy for the modern marketers
There are many channels available for the modern marketer, beside the traditional ones. I am referring to the digital market of course, a marketer that allows us to think big right from the start and internationalize our efforts even if you are just at the beginning. There are numerous distribution strategy examples you can learn from and I will present you with some of your best options right away. First, however, let’s take a look at some of the most important types of distribution strategies you can develop:
- E-commerce
- Blogging
- Direct mail marketing
- Social media
- Advertising
Content distribution strategies
Since almost everything that is published online can be viewed as a type of content, we’ll discuss the strategies based on this term.
Content is everything. It is and should be at the core of your efforts and the direct line you need between the brand and the customers. You don’t have to create new content every day, you could also do document content about your product or service.
Content is the reason people get online, besides communication. They need answers to their questions, information on specific goods or services, knowledge, advice and so on. Let’s explain everything by looking at the top 5 content distribution channels and strategies listed above:
1. E-commerce
If you are in the retails business, the Ecommerce channel is probably the best choice for you. A lot of companies -even individuals – choose to sell their products and services online and this is a good thing because you get the following:
- Unlimited exposure – internationalization
- Non-stop availability – No opening hours. Clients can visit your shop 24/7
- Better interactivity and communication
Who uses Ecommerce platforms as main marketing channels and as their main channels for a selective distribution strategy?
Well, everybody who wants to sell something online. Ecommerce is a great choice for every brand and company that has something to sell, be it digital or physical in nature.
2. Blogging
When it comes to content distribution, blogs and websites with blogs may prove to be one of the best solutions available. Why?
Well, a blog can support almost any type of content and, as long as you host it, it allows you to be your own master and deal with your content the way you want and need to.
What can you post on a blog? Besides the traditional informative articles, you can post tutorials, product description, reviews and technical sheets, how to’s, educational material, infographics, videos, podcasts. As some of you would say, ‘the sky’s the limit’.
3. Direct mail marketing
A blog or a website can at the same time, besides delivering the content, collect subscriptions for newsletters.
This is one of the traditional and most effective ways of direct marketing. Why?
Well, when you distribute a newsletter, you address it to people you already know to be interested in your brand and/or products. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have subscribed to it, anyway.
With newsletters, as a channel of content distribution and at the same time as a marketing distribution channel, you can communicate with your audience, and deliver your message straight to their inboxes, daily, weekly or whenever you think there’s some content your need to be shared with them
4. Social media marketing
Social media is the most popular communication channel available today. Is it therefore great as a marketing and content distribution channel as well and of course, suitable for advertising, altogether.
Most of today’s companies, brands and websites have already set up at least one social media profile or page. It helps them communicate with fans and customers and at the same time, deliver information and data regarding the brand at the latest news around it.
5. Digital advertising
One of the most popular types of indirect marketing channels is the paid advertising. You can do it directly by talking with websites webmasters or, you can do it via advertising channels such as Google Ads or other similar services. You can also pay for advertising on social media channels and deliver your messages across them to billions of users from all around the world.
Digital advertising is a type of indirect marketing. Compared with newsletters, blogging and social media, you don’t own the distribution channels in this case but you own the content and you can adapt your delivery strategy based on several criteria such as demographics and social groups.
How to create a successful distribution strategy for a blog – Preliminary setup
There are several things you can check on your list in order to make sure your strategy is successful.
Here are some pieces of advice that I am sure they can be of help in this area:
1. Research the competition
Keep a close eye on everything that happens in your niche. Find out what your competitors do and try to clone their success. Find out what channels are they delivering their content on and how successful they are on each of these channels. Research how they distribute the content and at the same time, the way they communicate with the audience.
2. Know the audience
Study your potential customers and find out exactly who you are addressing. It is important to know the group that your customers are part of in order to adapt the message to the and of course, choose the right delivery channels.
3. Know your goals
The selection of the delivery channel for products, services and marketing depends as well on the goals you set in the initial stages of your marketing strategy. You need to know what you want to achieve in order to know what type of content you can deliver and where.
How to create a successful distribution strategy for a blog – Effective setup
You know who you are, what you want, what is it you want to achieve with your blog and of course, your content. Now, it’s time to really dig into the problem and start doing something for real. Here are the steps you can undertake:
1. Set Up a blog and start creating content
I am not going to go into detail about how to set up a blog. I am going, however, to talk a little bit about some things that matter in the long run. These are things that matter as well for setting up a successful channel marketing strategy:
A. Use a good simple theme
This is one of the first steps and most certainly, one of the essential ones (after you find a good domain name and a good hosting). What matters here is to choose a theme that is easy to customize, and at the same time, one that has all the modern features required for a modern blog such as:
A.1. Readability and UX:
Maybe you are familiar with the term, maybe you don’t. However, you need to get used to it because it matters a lot especially when you depend on content. In simple terms, readability refers to the ease the reader goes through your content. It refers to proper styling, the use of bullets, headings, subheadings, lists and so on. At the same time, it refers to white space as well and of course, the size and shape of the chosen fonts. User experience and readability go hand in hand as one complement each other. A user oriented design will be readable and vice versa.
A.2. Test for readability
For better understanding of what readability is, I suggest installing Yoast, a very well designed plugin for WordPress that will help you improve your posts based on SEO and readability as well.
Or, if you don’t want to install yet another plugin due to speed limitations, you can always use a web based tool such as The Writer, which can help you deal with this kind of problems very easy.
A.3. Mobile friendliness and performance(speed)
Another set of important things you need to take care of is the mobile version of your page and of course, their speed. They are also related to each other and in many ways, depend on one another.
These days, nobody can ignore the mobile audience. There is a good chance that all your audience uses smartphones and tablets and, as most of the people do, they use them while commuting in order to read their news, study, get informed. It’s obvious therefore that you need two things:
- Responsiveness
- Speed
Responsiveness is achievable through web design. If you are using WordPress, make sure your selected them is recent enough in order to meet the mobile standards. If not, make it so. Adapt.
Speed, on the other hand, depends on a lot of factors such as the hosting, the number of plugins you have installed etc.
However, you can work your way around all these problems with Google AMP Pages, a feature that was launched a few years ago in order to help website owners deal with mobile speed.
You can use AMP as a plugin, is easily configurable and highly effective as it strips the page of all unnecessary scripts and delivers it clean to the mobile user. With AMP, it loads as fast as a basic Html file with two lines of text and nothing else.
B. Start doing a keyword research on your topic
Keyword research is essential at this point because you need to know which are the best keywords to base you content upon. It will also help you create content based on trends and interests, green content as they call it, which will add value to your website for indefinite time.
Let’s say you would choose to write about “Instagram Marketing”.
Here are some possible results given by Google’s Keyword planner:
You can take the most popular result but at the same time, you should look at the suggested keywords and start to build some content based on those who have minimum or medium competition. Thus, you can rank high, way faster and build a strong community around your blog.
c. Select the first 5 keywords you want to start ranking in your industry
For this part, you can choose 5 keywords suggestions from the above step or, you can just type in your main keyword in Google Search and see which are the most popular sequences based on your industry interests.
Here’s an example of possible choices:
- Instagram marketing
- Instagram influencer marketing
- affiliate marketing Instagram
- how to use Instagram for marketing
- Instagram marketing tools
D. Start strategizing with your content
Now that you know what your content should be about, at least at the beginning, it’s time to really start populating your blog with a couple of posts. Here are some pieces of advice to help you make this step even more productive:
D.1. Create a blog post and try to answer all the questions you find about your keyword
Most people, when they are searching the Internet, they are searching for answers to their questions.
And, lately, Google has been awarding the pages that manage to answer such questions, by placing them in front of other web searches, in what we call the ‘featured snippets’.
D.2. create visuals that you can use in your article to describe your content
Visuals are an important part of you content strategy. They are easy to understand, they convey a message faster than text and they add to the overall aspect of the page.
However, while generic images are great for blog posts, images that describe the content and break your paragraphs are even greater. Here’s an example from one of my posts:
And here is an example that shows why the above idea was a good one. As you can see, the image appears first in Google Image Search:
D. 3. create an infographic
Another good idea for a blog content, especially a piece of content that is more likely to be shared across media channels, is the Infographic.
Recommend to read: How to design an infographic in 9 simple steps
Here’s a great example and I am going to share with you some reasons about why the Infographic is a good choice, as well:
- Images transmit the information faster and easier
- You can design your content and make it look more lively
- Infographics transmit only the essentials and this trait alone, makes them widely popular
How to distribute an infographic?
1. Create a dedicated page for your infographic – landing page or a blog post. In this example we published the infographic on our blog:
2. Publish the infographic on Pinterest and use the same headline you used on your core home.
3. Start doing outreach and do guest posts to attract backlinks on your website
4. Re-post the infographic in other type of content. For example I re-posted the infographic on Linkedin using a .pdf format and published as a doc. Here my example.
Now that you have your article, let’s look at what distribution channels we can use for this strategy:
2. Newsletters
Articles with or without visuals are great for spreading information but the blog only, may not be enough in order to capture the whole targeted audience. This is where newsletters come into place, as another well established content marketing channel able to deliver good results.
What you need to do?
Well, technically, setting up the newsletter is quite easy. You need a dedicated plugin, install it on your blog and include somewhere in your sidebar, the call to action. Or you can create a dedicated landing page where you show all the benefits of the subscriber.
Here is an example of my dedicated landing page for my newsletter:
In this case you could also promote your page using social media.
You can choose to deliver newsletters weekly, monthly or, whenever you publish something new.
3. Social Media
Social media is yet another great content distribution channel and it works very well with a blog. Here are some pieces of advice to be taken into consideration regarding this channel:
- Announce on all your social media accounts and pages whenever you publish a new article. It may be as well a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn status.
- Share all your visuals on visual based social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. Link back to your article.
- Join social communities such as Quora and answer some of the most popular questions with your own articles. Here’s a simple example of an answer I gave on Quora based on an article I published on Bannersnack Blog.
- And here’s another example of a LinkedIn share based on the same principles.
- Get in touch with your social media fans and always respond o their messages. Answer their questions as well and, if you have answers that match your articles, feel free to share the links.
Here’s a simple example for using social media effectively in your content distribution strategy. I did it, with this article, for which I created a video in just three minutes, using only texts. Later, I published the video on Instagram and connected my social media profile with the article.
4. Communities
There are a lot of communities out there for every niche and industry you can think about. More than sure, you’ll find some that will match your content. Forums, social media groups, communities like Reddit, Quora etc., can prove to be quite effective if you want to spread the word about your blog and build a personal brand.
Here’s a similar example from Growth Hackers, of a piece of content based on the same topics I mentioned earlier on the social media chapter.
5. Video strategy
Yesterday, video content was the next big thing. Now, we are already there, as video has become a synonym of content on the World Wide Web. According to these stats, video makes for nearly 45 percent of all Internet traffic which is a big thing compared to only a decade ago. Moreover, the same source suggests that a website is 50% more likely to appear on the first page of search results if it includes video content.
Moreover, all the major social media platforms are focusing on video content and strive to deliver more and more features to meet the demands for this type of entertainment. We all know YouTube but lately, Instagram with IGTV, LinkedIn and Facebook as well, encourage video distribution.
If you are just blogging and have nothing to do with video content, you can still use this channel as a proper marketing tool. How?
Well, you can create a video based on one of your articles.
Here’s an example from Ross Simmonds, who published an article about LinkedIn marketing tips and later, a video on YouTube, based on the same subject.
Conclusion
In order to be effective as a marketer you need a proper way to select your distribution channels and at the same time, to invest time and awareness in setting up an effective distribution strategy. The most important thing here is the content and you have to find your niche regarding the type of content you are going to publish and share with the public and of course, the channels you are going to use in order to spread the word.
What types of strategies are you using and on what channels of marketing distribution?
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