“Produce great content, and the traffic will come.”
How often have you been fed this advice? As a content marketer myself, I truly understand the value of producing great quality content. It’s really hard work.
And it can be soul-crushing when you realize that the content you put so much work into is not bringing in any traffic. What could be the reason?
Here is the reality of content marketing - great quality content is only half the battle. What differentiates a successful content marketing campaign from others is content distribution.
What is content distribution planning?
Content distribution planning is the process of strategically deciding when, where, and how your content is to be shared in order to meet its intended goals, and reach the right audience.
Content marketing is essentially a mix of content production, and content distribution.
When you plan your content distribution right, you are going to witness the real effects of compounding. It’s not just about how many likes and comments you get for your social media post. It’s about how each of your content distribution channels support and amplify the others, working together to build momentum.
First things first - the budget
In an ideal world, you will have a near infinite budget to propel your content to success. However, in a real-world corporate setup, everything is measured in terms of the Return on Investment (ROI).
Content costs money, content distribution - even more. Content marketing only makes sense when the ROI is as good as other customer acquisition channels.
Any business has multiple customer acquisition channels. There is an outbound sales team that does cold outreach to bring in new customers. You also have an SEO team, a performance marketing team, and perhaps even an event marketing team to acquire customers from across different channels.
Each of these teams own a P&L. That is, they are provided with a budget, and are expected to bring in revenues that are at least a few multiples of this budget.
For example, if your business allocates $100K a month to the performance marketing team, they are expected to bring in at least $500K worth of leads to the business with this budget. That’s a 5X ROI.
If your content marketing team is not delivering at least 5X on its campaigns, then it no longer makes sense to continue investing in this channel.
In other words, if it costs your team $500 to produce and distribute a piece of content, it should bring in at least $2500 worth of leads to the pipeline.
There are two ways to achieve this:
- Bring down your cost while sustaining the same volume of leads, or
- Acquire more leads while keeping content production and distribution costs the same
Budget allocation across different channels is the basis of content distribution planning. Let’s discuss this in greater detail.
Understanding your content distribution channels
Content distribution channels can be categorized into three main categories - owned, earned, and paid.
Owned channels include your website or blog, email mailing list, social media profiles, and SMS list to mention a few. These are channels you own and have complete control over. While owned channels are technically free, you may still need to pay for your CMS, marketing automation, hosting, etc. This includes tools like WordPress, GetResponse, and StoryChief to mention a few.
Earned channels include media mentions, Search engine rankings, social shares, guest posts on other websites, and other user generated organic distribution of your content. When you have top quality content, earned channels tend to perform really well. Again, while this is technically free, you will still need outreach tools to send cold emails, or social referral tools like StoryChief for better customer advocacy.
Paid channels include search engines (Google, Bing) and social media ads (Facebook, and Instagram), and sponsored partnerships (influencers, affiliate marketing, etc.). With a large enough budget, you can leverage paid channels enough to drive momentum across all the other content distribution channels.
Owned channels offer you the maximum leverage, given that you own these channels. But the distribution is limited to the audience you already have. Paid channels help correct this by taking your content to an audience that you don’t own yet. But it costs money that needs to be spent judiciously. Earned channels bring you free traffic but you have no control over the audience it brings, and the ROI is unpredictable either.
Content distribution planning involves strategizing the right distribution of time and money across these different channel categories. Here is a step-by-step guide to planning your content distribution.
Step 1: Build a content calendar
Content distribution planning is most effective when you exactly know what your costs are, and how much budget you have to play with.
To work these numbers out, you have to start with a quarterly content calendar.
Why? Because, most organizations already have quarterly budget allocation plans in place. Using this as a starting point is a good way to align your content distribution plan with processes that are already in place.
For the sake of this article, let’s assume that your organization has a $60,000 budget for content marketing this quarter. That’s $20,000 per month. Let’s also assume that your full-time content creation staff costs $10,000 a month in salary and other expenses for the various tools outlined earlier in this article. This leaves you with $10,000 each month for content distribution planning.
Assuming an expected ROI of 5x, it is then expected that your $10,000 of content distribution delivers at least $100,000 worth of leads (five times the monthly budget of $20,000).
If one lead is worth $500 in annual revenue for your organization, then to deliver $100,000 worth of leads, you need to generate at least 200 leads a month from your content marketing efforts.
Now, these 200 leads could come from just one fabulous piece of content, or several regular blog posts. Your content calendar should be based on several factors including resources, strategy, and leverage.
Resources here refer to your team bandwidth. How many pieces of top-of-the-funnel content can your staff produce each month.
Strategy refers to your lead generation strategy. Do you want to publish one well-researched study to acquire these 200 leads? Or, would you rather use your resources to publish five pillar content pieces that can deliver organic leads for many months into the future?
Leverage refers to where you stand in terms of owned media and brand reputation. An organization with 100,000 followers on LinkedIn can drive thousands of views to each of your content pieces.
A study published by an organization like HubSpot can drive hundreds of earned media mentions organically compared to one published by a new startup. A pillar post from such an organization is also more likely to hit the top spots on Google much more easily than an article published on a new blog.
Acknowledging your leverage is important to building a content calendar that can drive meaningful results.
Step 2: Budget Allocation
Not all pieces of content deserve the same level of distribution. A survey report, for instance, has the potential to drive hundreds of brand mentions that can lead to several hundred leads over its lifetime. You could potentially spend an entire month’s worth of distribution costs on just this one study.
Among blog posts, you may have some Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU) or customer onboarding material that is targeted at your nurtured or converted leads. Such blogs and content resources are typically distributed via owned media channels like your mailing list or social media channels.
Ultimately, it is a good idea to allocate most of your content distribution budget to Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU) content that is targeted at your unacquired audience.
Furthermore, it is not necessary to distribute your distribution budget evenly across all your TOFU content pieces. Some of these articles may enjoy good traction simply through organic distribution channels. You may minimize your distribution spend on these content pieces while allocating a larger share of the pie towards content that needs it.
Step 3: Deploying a staggered distribution approach
In the previous section, we talked about allocating your content distribution budget selectively to content pieces that need it. But how do you arrive at the exact allocation?
I recommend what I would like to call the “staggered distribution approach”.
Staggered content distribution works something like this. Each month you publish content according to your content calendar. For each published article, follow a standard protocol with respect to content distribution. This could be something like this:
- Day 1: Feature the article on the blog homepage
- Day 2: Share the article on Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Day 3: Repurpose the content into small bites that can be distributed to your media outreach channel
- Day 4: Distribute your article to your content partners. This could be other blogs you cross-promote.
Do note that all the content distribution channels deployed here are either owned or earned. Do not invest in paid just yet. This content distribution plan should ideally spread over a 2-3 week period.
Once this initial distribution period is over, collect the traffic metrics pertaining to the performance of the article. It could look something like this:
You now have all the data to determine what articles deserve further distribution via paid channels.
The key metric here is conversion rate. It is calculated as a percentage of the number of leads generated from the overall traffic. A high conversion rate signifies better ROI and such content pieces are often good candidates for paid content distribution.
In the above example, we could probably pick articles 3 and 4 for paid content distribution.
Step 4: Planning your paid content distribution
Allocating budget to assets
At this point, you know how much budget you have to play with, and also know what content you need to distribute through paid channels.
The next step is to decide how much money you are going to allocate to each of your assets. Also, you may need to decide how much money gets spent on Facebook ads, Google, or other paid distribution channels.
One simple and effective way to do this is by distributing the available budget across the different content assets based on their conversion rate. In the above example, article 3 has a conversion rate of 0.6 while article 4 has a conversion rate of 0.31.
Article 3’s allocation would be
___0.6__ * $10,000
(0.6+0.31)
In other words, Article 3 gets about $6500 while the rest of the $10,000 paid channel budget gets allocated to Article 4.
Now that you know how much budget each of these articles get, we now need to decide what channels this gets allocated across.
Allocating budget to channels
Ideally, you may want to consider a multivariate testing approach - spread the budget across different channels to see what gets the maximum ROI, and then pour more money into this particular channel.
However, this may not be viable with a limited budget. The alternative approach is to dig into your analytics to see where your current leads came from, and replicate this.
For example, Article 3 received over 200 visits from Earned channels with a further 75 coming from search traffic. You may want to look deeper to see which of these visits translated into leads.
If all the three leads were acquired from search traffic, for instance, then it makes sense to promote it via search engine ads.
Alternatively, if your article got highlighted in a popular industry newsletter, you could explore a potential sponsorship opportunity on the same newsletter. The idea is to amplify your content assets on channels that are already proven. This helps maximize your return on investment.
Another approach is to split your budget into smaller chunks and spend them across different related paid channels, and based on the results plow more budget into channels that work.
Keep experimenting with your content distribution planning
The content distribution planning strategy highlighted in this article is based on what has worked for me. However, this is not a hard and fast approach. Every industry and content is different, and there are always instances where something that works well in an owned or earned setup does not translate well in a paid channel.
The secret is to keep experimenting to see what works for your specific content assets and invest in more of the same.
It is also important to note that paid content distribution is not mandatory. As a business you may also consider moving more of your budget to grow your owned channels, or hire a larger team. This could help you scale your assets and build a stronger base for the future.
