Killer Content Distribution

The other day I had one of those “That’s so cool” moments that happen every now and then. I wrote a blog post on team leadership on LinkedIn that got picked up as one of the featured stories on Pulse. By the end of the day, over 3,000 people had read my post with many of them liking or commenting on it. My post went “sort-of” viral. I was so excited.

This was the second time in my life that I had a blog post go “sort-of” viral (the first was a post I wrote after attending Dreamforce 2012). In both cases, a few thousand people read what I had written. Going “sort-of” viral is not too shabby, but it’s not a great long-term strategy for your day-to-day marketing efforts. Creating content and just hoping that someone will find it, and share it, with the world is not going to get you very far. There is so much content being created these days, that if you don’t have a distribution strategy, it’s tough to stand out from the noise.

As you think about your content strategy, make sure you spend equal amount of time creating your distribution plan. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

#1 Create A Central Repository
When you start creating content for multiple personas, that require multiple points of input, and can take the form of multiple different mediums, you quickly realize there is a need for a tool that allows you to keep everything straight. For those already using the Oracle Marketing Cloud, consider adding on the content marketing component. It has integration points with Oracle Eloqua, Oracle SRM and with your blog. It helps you get content created by assigning certain portions out to certain people, gives you editorial control, allows you to repurpose content blocks inside emails and landing pages and keeps track of your content calendar. It’s a slick way to keep your content organized and give everyone visibility into what’s available and where things are headed.

#2 Email Is (Still) King
It seems like every other week, someone is declaring “email is dead” or someone comes out with the next great “email killer” but, you know what, email is still alive and kicking. Social media is great. So are content aggregator services. But, at the end of the day, email still reins supreme. That means you must spend the proper amount of time doing boring email best practices: Short, compelling subject lines, targeted lists, incorporating personas, concise text, images that render quickly, plenty of white space, clear calls-to-action, etc. These things still matter, and frankly, they always will. If you want to make sure the most possible people read your content, making sure you follow age-old email best practices is key.

#3 Repurpose and C.O.P.E.
Once you’ve given proper consideration to dialing in your email campaigns, the next step is Repurpose and C.O.P.E. C.O.P.E. stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. You’re probably doing this in some capacity already without realizing it had a name. You roll out a new white paper on your website and promote it on social media. This is C.O.P.E. Now, think about ways to take this to the next level. Maybe a team member has a speaking spot at an industry trade show. Why not have her take the same content she spent all that time putting together and host a webinar for all the people who couldn’t attend? Then you take the slide deck, add a few sentences of context to each slide and put it out on SlideShare. Record your webinar and drop it on YouTube. Sum up the webinar into a blog post. The list goes on. In no, time you’ve taken one piece of content and turned it into 4 or 6 or 10 pieces of content that is distributed over various mediums to audiences that hang out in different places.

#4 Automate, Automate, Automate
If you aren’t already using a marketing automation platform, like Oracle Eloqua, now is the time to start thinking about it. The power of a tool like Oracle Eloqua is the ability to “Set it and forget it” to steal Ron Popeil’s catch phrase. Once you get all your fantastic content assembled, creating campaigns that automatically suck people in once they meet certain criteria, move them down a nurture path based on numerous decision rules, then pass warm, qualified leads over to sales is a major win. You build, activate, and let it do its thing. The only times you check back in is when you need to re-evaluate to see if the campaign is still working or if you want to update or add additional assets. If a campaign is still working, and the content is still relevant, you just let it ride, freeing you up to build additional campaigns while your lead flow remains strong. #

5 Measure, Measure, Measure
The final component of creating a killer content distribution plan is to measure everything you’re doing. A/B test how you word the text within your personas to hone in the best messaging. Watch trend patterns from your campaigns to see which ones are performing and which ones run out of steam. Track leads as they move from anonymous to closed deals to figure out if there are sticking points in your marketing funnel. Check to see how all of your C.O.P.E. channels are preforming. You might find that for your target audience, focusing on LinkedIn is more important that Facebook or Twitter (or vice versa). Find ways to measure everything you do so you know where to focus on when you need to improve ROI, increase sales, and reduce costs.

In this day-and-age, there’s a lot of demand for your attention. It creates a lot of noise and makes it tough for people to avoid distraction. So, while you’re in the process of defining your content strategy for the next quarter or year, make sure you put ample time into thinking through your distribution plan as well. Hoping your content is so compelling that it makes a splash on it’s own is not a strategy.

What have you found to be helpful to ensure that your content is being seen by your prospects?