More and more companies are using content marketing as a means to generate leads. They produce white papers and infographics, write blog posts and offer webinars. But the content does not find its audience on its own: content must also be distributed accordingly.
The terms Content Promotion and Content Seeding are used for distributing content across channels. Both terms are often used synonymously, although many refer to the paid distribution of content as Content Promotion. However, defining these terms is not the point of this post. Still, it should be noted that there are paid and free ways to bring users to your content.
Distribute content for free
SEO
Content Seeding or Content Promotion is about actively distributing content across other channels. Nevertheless, the work starts with the content itself. Ultimately, most blogs and websites are found through search engines. Therefore: If you offer a white paper on a landing page, you should optimize this landing page accordingly. The same applies to all website or blog texts. SEO is too complex to discuss here. In a nutshell: provide quality content and use relevant keywords that appear in the URL, the meta description, the page title, and the alt attributes of the images you use.
Social media
Just about every company is active on one or the other social network. Interesting content should be shared across these channels accordingly. On Twitter and Facebook, you should work with hashtags to extend the reach beyond existing followers. If the post and the content it links to are appealing to users, they might share it with other users as well.
Email marketing is not necessarily the best way to generate new leads for data protection reasons. But it is great for keeping existing leads warm, for increasing traffic on your blog or for qualifying leads via downloads. After all, content is not just about generating leads - lead nurturing matters as well.
Comments & Forums
Various topics have large online communities. It may be worthwhile to identify relevant forums and, if appropriate, to talk about your own content there. It may also be useful to comment on other blogs or social media posts by referencing your own content on the topic.
Paid content promotion
Most forms of paid content distribution are known as Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. This term refers to the billing method: providers are paid for every click on an ad.
SEM
You almost always come across search engine marketing when you use a search engine. Google displays promoted content usually at the top of the search results with the reference "Ad." In order to do SEM, you have to research the relevant keywords for your content. The ad is served when a user searches for one of the specified keywords. You can choose whether the keywords must match exactly or not.
Social media
You can start different campaigns via social networks like Facebook or Twitter. If you want to distribute content that is not published on one of these platforms, for example, on Facebook, select the "Traffic" option in the Power Editor. Thanks to targeting, the target group can be defined very precisely (interests, age, language, gender, location etc.). Using social media campaigns, you can generate a lot of traffic in a short period of time. Whether this traffic is any good (i.e. users actually engage with your content) remains to be seen.
Content Distribution Networks
"You might also be interested in ..." You may have already encountered content that is promoted through content distribution networks such as Ligatus and Outbrain. The content is usually found at the end of articles. Publishers make parts of their page available to these networks to promote other content. A very large readership can be reached this way. The targeting also works well. The advantage is that unlike Twitter and Facebook, the content distribution networks distribute content across platforms. Hence you reach users who are not active on social media.
Read more: Content Marketing.