Many B2B marketers are investing a significant proportion of their marketing budget in content creation and this figure tends to increase every year.
However, simply creating content is no longer enough, especially when you take the amount of fresh content that is published every second into account. It’s a noisy world out there and your content must be discovered and consumed by your target market for your efforts to pay off.
Once you’ve created a new blog post, whitepaper or video, it’s important to target the right distribution channels to boost the reach of your content. This all depends on what channel your target audience is using regularly.
Social Media
Organic social media posts can be the simplest way to get your content into the hands of your target market. While LinkedIn company page posts and Tweets are the obvious go-to’s, don’t discount other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
With the recent algorithm changes negatively impacting the reach of business accounts on many social media platforms, many savvy B2B marketers have opted to supplement their organic social media posts with a paid social media strategy. CMI & Marketing Profs report that this figure is 71%. Paid social advertising allows you to tightly define who you want your content to reach and pay the social platforms to distribute it to them while enabling you to track and measure your ROI in real time.
If you have the benefit of a large staff, you can also leverage their networks to boost the reach of your content. Think of your team as in-house influencers! A simple, incentivised employee advocacy campaign, where employees are rewarded for sharing your content on their own social media accounts, can have a huge impact.
Another tactic we recommend for companies who have multiple team members who author content for the company blog is to use LinkedIn Articles. Simply creating abridged versions of your blog content and adding a link back to the full blog post to give people the opportunity to dive deeper into the topic can increase your website traffic if done correctly.
Your existing email database is another great way to promote your fresh content, especially as it is made up of people who have already shown some form of intent or interest in your products or services.
If you already send out a regular email newsletter, be sure to include your most recent content within in. On the other hand, if you don’t send a regular newsletter and are publishing content less frequently, consider sending out a solo email about each new blog post you publish.
These tactics will not only get your content seen by your target audience, but will help to build the know, like and trust factor and ensure your business stays at the top of their minds.
Podcasts and Webinars
If your content marketing consists mainly of written content, you could be missing out on forging a connection with prospects who prefer to consume information via audio and video.
Furthermore, a CMI & Marketing Profs study uncovered that 64% of B2B marketers increased their use of audio/visual content in the past year, so now is the time to get involved.
Consider how you could repurpose your existing content into new formats, such as podcasts, live webinars or YouTube videos to reach a fresh audience.
Similarly, you could pitch your organisation as a “guest” speaker on a relevant podcast or YouTube channel based on some of your most recent blog posts.
Other Websites
In recent years, blogging platform Medium has proven to be a great way to connect with millennial influencers, particularly in the tech and creative sectors. You can import your company blog posts into Medium within minutes and add them to your own branded publication, with no SEO penalty.
In addition, guest blogging for industry websites and those of associations relevant to your target market can also be lucrative for B2B marketers. Why not make a list of the top 10 in your sector and email them with a polite feature pitch?
Lastly, the often overlooked Quora can be another effective way to get your content seen by those who are actively looking for solutions to problems you can solve. Search for questions people may have asked that can be answered by your existing content and provide a simple, helpful response that links back to your blog post. This not only positions you and your team as thought leaders but also paints you in a good light by providing great value for free.
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It’s important to keep in mind that not every piece of content will be right for dissemination on each of the channels we’ve mentioned, but this should give you a good starting point. Our closing advice? Test different channels, analyse the data and adapt your content distribution strategy accordingly.
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Would you like your B2B content to reach more people within your target audience? We can help you build a winning content distribution strategy that will boost the impact of your efforts. Get in touch with Philip Martin to discover how DMA Partners can help: philip.martin@dma-partners.com.