Too Much Content to Share? Focus on Targeted Distribution.

6 minute read

Upland Admin

too much content? focus on targeted content distribution Most content marketers struggle to produce enough content. But occasionally, marketing teams have the opposite challenge.

In fact, we recently had someone share with us that they had too much content. They had so much content, in fact, that they didn’t know how they could possibly share all of it through their channels—specifically social channels—without talking about themselves too much.

Content distribution is one of the most important parts of a content marketing strategy. After all, if you don’t get your content in front of the right people, it won’t deliver traffic, leads, and opportunities that ultimately close in new business. But how do you figure out what to share and where—especially when you have a content operation churning out tons of content?

The key is to share your content strategically. Don’t try to push every asset on every channel. Otherwise, you’ll have too much to share and your audience will get overwhelmed by the amount of content you’re asking them to consume.

Instead, focus your distribution strategy on these steps.

1. Review Your Channels

Take stock of your content distribution channels. Just as content audits are a crucial first step in understanding the state of content in your organization, reviewing your distribution channels will help you make informed decisions about where and how to share.

Reviewing your distribution channels will help you make informed decisions about where and how to share.

Write out everywhere you currently share content. And be specific. For example, if you have both a LinkedIn group and a LinkedIn company page, list those as two distinct channels instead of simply writing “LinkedIn.” Or, if you have a newsletter that goes out to blog subscribers, list that as separate from nurture tracks or campaign email blasts. After all, you’d share different types of content in those circumstances.

2. Align Content to Channels

Different content types and topics perform better on certain channels. How you share content depends on:

  1. The audience on those channels—think in terms of your personas
  2. The stage of the funnel that channel covers—top, middle, bottom, or post-purchase
  3. The action you want people to take on those channels

Look at all of those channels you identified in Step 1. Now, write out the types of content and topics will work for each, and how you can use those channels to encourage valuable action.

For example, blogs and social media tend to be used to distribute top-of-funnel content. This type of content is less product-centric and focuses on attracting new visitors with entertaining or educational topics. The valuable action here is to get their contact information by having them download content, or subscribe.

But what about that product-centric content? Email is a fantastic channel for sharing content about your product if you can target buyers getting close to a purchase decision, especially if you’re using marketing automation technology to track behavior and buying signals, then deliver content accordingly. The valuable action is for prospects to engage with product-centric content and look at valuable pages such as pricing, or to request a demo.

And channels can have multiple purposes. For example, even though email is great for delivering product-centric content to later stage prospects, it’s also incredibly effective for building trust with educational, entertaining content.

3. Communicate with Your Team

Once you think through where different types of content should be shared, sit down with everyone responsible for those channels and start strategizing.

When new content gets created that’s relevant to their channels, you’re going to need a way to share that content with them. Talk through those steps. Workflows are one of the most difficult challenges for marketing teams to tackle, and this communication stage is crucial for properly distributing content.

Here at Kapost we use the “content pillar” approach. For each content campaign, we create lots of different types of assets: blog posts, infographics, videos, eBooks, presentations, etc. Some of those are meant for top-of-funnel distribution, such as infographics and short videos. We identify our top-of-funnel assets, look at who we’re targeting with that specific information, then decide how to distribute those assets.

For example, this infographic is all about hiring. We know that most of the hiring is done by director- and manager-level positions (important audiences we’ve identified during persona research). We also know that about 57% of our LinkedIn group, the Content Marketing Academy, is made up of senior, director, or manager level people. That makes it a great distribution channel for that piece of content. We also have these personas identified as a segment in our marketing automation software. We can specifically target those personas who are already in our database.

But to get this content shared, our community manager and marketing automation team had to be in the loop on who we’re targeting and the topic of the content. We use Kapost to tag the right funnel stage and persona for each content asset created for this campaign, then have a meeting 1-month before launch with our community manager, marketing automation team, and online marketing manager for paid distribution. Once our distribution plan is discussed based on what we know about each channel, who we’re targeting, and what actions we want them to take, we assign roles, responsibilities, and timelines in our platform.

4. Moving Forward, Tag Your Content

A key part of execution is establishing this process for all new content assets moving forward. Tag your content with personas, buying stage, and calls to action so the people in charge of distribution can find the content that’s right for specific channels. By incorporating these steps into your content marketing process, you’ll know what to share and when, taking the questions marks out of the distribution equation.

If you’re one of those lucky marketers who has too much content and you’re not sure how to share it, PAT YOURSELF ON THE BACK. That’s a great place to be, especially when producing enough content is one of the main challenges for marketers. But, your problem still needs a solution. And that solution is to understand your distribution channels, organize content accordingly, and communicate with your team.

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