3 Common Content Distribution Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

4 minute read

Upland Admin

Content distribution is a critical aspect of marketing campaigns.

No matter how compelling your content, if you’re not delivering it in the right way to the right people, it won’t drive any results.

But planning a distribution strategy isn’t easy. And many marketers fall into the same traps. Here are the three most common content distribution mistakes—and tips for avoiding them.

1. Bad Timing

Most marketers rely on their robust databases to drive the traffic, leads, and revenue for major assets. Sending an email at the wrong time can botch your entire campaign. 23.63% of all emails are opened within the first hour—and that number drops off precipitously as the hours tick by.

What can you do to avoid timing mistakes?

Start by researching the time of day that typically sees the most engagement, then iterate based on your results. Here are some optimal delivery times across email and social media.

Email

MailChimp has some great benchmark data. As the graph below shoes, the peak time to send emails across MailChimp’s system is at 10AM in the recipients’ own time zones.

mailchimp email benchmark data

Unless you have good reason, avoid sending emails much earlier, or later, than that window at first. Then test your own database to see what the results are. Iterate based on the data you collect.

Social

You generally want to post on social media during the times of day that users are most likely to be idle, for example, taking a break from work, commuting, or waiting in line at the post office. This infographic from FastCompany reveals the best and worst times to post across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn:

social media post timing

Use these benchmark email and social data points to start planning your content distribution.

2. Inappropriate Targeting

Targeting your content to the wrong people will foster lackluster engagement, and high unsubscribe rates. Irrelevance is the number one reason buyers don’t read content.

Unfortunately, most marketers have no idea who they’re even supposed to be targeting in the first place. Out of the 93% of B2B marketers who have adopted content-driven marketing, only 23% are focusing on buyer personas.

The first step to being great at targeting is to develop buyer personas based on your current customers and prospects. Identify their pain points, their motivations, and their questions. And understand what kind of content they need at each stage in their buying journey—from awareness through post-sale.

Related Content: [Webinar] How to Target Content Using Buyer Personas in Kapost

Once you build personas, segment and target based on the data you’ve collected. This is where marketing technology comes in. Marketing automation solutions like Marketo, and social listening platforms like Hootsuite, are essential resources for most marketing teams. But beware: investing in too many tools presents problems of its own. Here are three key things to consider before investing in marketing technology.

3. Inconsistent Messaging

In a frenzy to feed the ever-expanding list of distribution channels—social, blog, email, webinar, video, paid—marketers forgo strategy in favor of volume. They’re creating content in an ad-hoc manner, and failing to provide the consistent brand experience buyers expect across various channels and devices.

And they’re paying the price. According to SiriusDecisions, up to 70% of B2B marketing content goes unused. It doesn’t have to be this way.

By slowing down, taking a step back, and putting more time and effort in content strategy planning, marketers can create a high quantity of high-quality assets with fewer resources—and headaches.

At Kapost, we champion the “content pillar” approach to content creation and distribution. Here’s how it works: stakeholders from across the organization identify key themes and customer pain points they feel should be addressed with content. Then, marketing creates one meaty content asset like an eBook or whitepaper to tackle that theme head-on. From that asset, many other assets are derived, including social posts, blog posts, nurture emails, videos, presentations, landing pages, and much more.

Below is a real life example of one of our very own content pillars, The Content Marketing Hiring Handbook:

the kapost content pillar approach illustrated

If you’re interested in implementing a content pillar within your team, check out this digital workbook, The Multi-Channel Content Distribution Guide. It contains step-by-step instructions for planning, executing, distributing, and optimizing your own.

In an age of increasing buyer independence, excellent branded content experiences have become less of a luxury and more of a requirement. If you’re not delivering the right content in the right place, your readers and prospects and customers may abandon you altogether. Avoid these common mistakes, and you’ll be on the right path.

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