The Top Channels For Content Distribution in 2021

May 4, 2019 6 min read

There is no point in wasting your time creating content for your business if said content isn’t properly reaching the audience you are trying to attract. Even content that has an amazing reach but doesn’t convert is absolutely useless.

They say that having unique and good content is only a quarter of the content battle.

So I guess, one of the biggest questions that come to mind for any company is how do I promote my content? Where do I go to promote the content that I put hours into?

No worries, in this post, we’ll cover the main channels that can help you get your content out there especially in 2021.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the more popular content distribution strategies making waves in 2019. Marketers heavily rely on reaching out to these influencers who are capable of convincing these individuals to promote their content to their audience and develop a backlink to their site. This allows them to monetize on both the oncoming traffic from their social media followers and the increase in organic search, which is earned through the backlinks.

As stated by Tim Soulo in a blog post concerning link building, outreaching is not broadcasting. It has more to do about developing relationships, personalizing your messaging and learning to offer value to those influencers so they are interested in the content your offering.

Founder and CEO of Vertical Measures, Arnie Kuenn, has stated that influencer marketing could be a very powerful content amplification method where you work with important individuals or publications in your industry, to promote, produce and distribute content. However, he did claim that this could only work if you have some influence yourself, so developing influence and creating content worth an influential person time is necessary.

In order to properly begin with influencer marketing is to mention others in the blog posts, and then reaching out to them and letting them know that they are mentioned in the post.

Ramsay Taplin from BlogTyrant is well known for pulling this strategy off every time he creates a blog post. He’s stated that one he’s finished writing content, he quickly sends a tweet or email to those he’s mentioned just to let them know they’ll be gaining some traffic from it, and also gives them the opportunity to ask him to revise anything in regards to how he’s talked about them. This strategy has often led to mention our shot out from those mentioned in his posts.

Now, if you’re in the B2C space, something like an e-commerce shop, then reaching out to social channels like Instagram influencers will do you wonders.

Email marketing

With brand emails stacking up in your inbox every day, it may seem like the email marketing landscape is starting to become overcrowded. Although, 2019 will continue to witness strategies that incorporate personalized and authentic emails from business from every industry sector.

Personalization is important for succeeding in email marketing strategy because it allows customers to know that you care about their problems. In fact, 79% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service if they receive promotions specific to them. Ultimately, generic email sent to a long contact list isn’t going to have much of an effect this year.

By implementing email triggers, it is possible for you to automate emails to respond when users engage with your website or content. For instance, if a customer is browsing for a certain product, send a follow-up email with a promotion code for that specific item.

Social media

Social media continues to remains a strong contender for a content distribution strategy. Most companies tend to share the bare minimum of their content on either Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Although using lesser known platforms such as Pinterest as a main source of traffic for your site, can be beneficial. Ifran Ahman from Digital Information World uses Pinterest to spread the word of his site and has stated that a single blog post of his successfully generated over 3,225 clicks from Pinterest in just 30 days.

Ahman encourages all bloggers, content creators and social media marketers to find and join Pinterest group boards (relating to your industry) and promote content there.

The blog post becomes even more effective if it contains graphics or images that are designed with specific social networks in mind. Additionally, companies are also utilizing social bookmarking sites and communities such as Inbound.org, Quora and Reddit, to further promote their content.

There are social channels that work better than others depending on your industry, but social is still a viable channel for both B2C and B2B.

Social media stories

Stories continue to rise in popularity among Instagram, SnapChat Facebook, and even Youtube as people continue to consume digital video content rapidly. At the moment, over 970 million accounts are posting to their stories and 50% of businesses are taking advantage of this strategy.

During 2018, Mark Zuckerburg commented that the growth of stories may exceed the popularity of actual posts:

“We expect Stories are on track to overtake posts in feeds as the most common way that people share across all social apps. That’s because Stories is a better format for sharing multiple quick video clips throughout your day. The growth of Stories will have an impact on how we build products and think about our business, including WhatsApp and Instagram, which are the #1 and #2 most-used Stories products in the world.”

Business has the option to implement stories into their usual social media strategy as a way to connect with their audience. Show behind-the-scenes, employee interviews, or event videos to promote brand awareness and drive engagement.

While you shouldn’t revamp or toss your current schedule posts. Stories should be viewed as a way to further enhance your online presence to tell the business narrative better. Experiment with different formats that work best for your customers, such as testimonials, how-tos, interviews, Gifs, and more. Be creative with it and have fun while doing so.

As social media continues to improve, stories are a fantastic way to build relationships with your followers in a more engaging manner.

Guest blogging

Despite most people stating that guest posting is pretty much dead, it’s actually still one of the most popular ways to reach out to a new audience by publishing content on other websites.

This strategy allows you to increase your brand awareness, build connections back to your website, and generate referral traffic and even some leads while you’re at it.

Some business like Rhino Public Relations takes this strategy very serious.

Susan Shelby from Rhino Public relations has stated that they contribute one blog per month to SMPS Boston. Which according to Susan, is a local chapter of a national organization. During the previous year, they contributed two articles to the SMPS magazine and plan to continue to do so during this year.

Another place they’ve contributed to is the High Profile Monthly with four articles posted per year and another four articles a year contributed to the New England Real Estate. Both of these local publications are mainly focused on the AEC industry.

It can also help with building backlinks.

Internal/employees

Businesses such as Influence & Co is seriously utilizing the audience of their employees by requesting them to promote their company’s content on to their social media accounts. This includes a variety of people such as marketers, account managers, HR managers, sales representatives and so on.

Almost every single employee will have their own set of an online audience, and companies can use this as an advantage to further promote their content. Another option that allows you to take things further is to ask employees to guest post on other websites and blogs and have them link back to the company website.

Chatbots

Thanks to the advancement of artificial intelligence (A.I.), chatbots have advanced as one of the most popular interfaces to link businesses and consumers. It’s estimated that over 1.4 billion people a year utilize chatbots and as of 2020 chatbots will be in control of 85% of all customer services.

Chatbots are software programs that offer instant responses to help customers with tasks such as ordering items and personal account information. With rapid response times, customers are capable of retrieving information without needing to dial a call.

Business who’ve implemented chatbots are witnessing an increase in both leads and sales. A recent study has revealed that a delayed response by even 10 minutes can decrease the chances of a sale by 400%. At the moment, chatbots are being used to reach many objectives:

Saving time and money
Generating leads and sales
Pushing users to better products or services
Providing 24-hour support
Personalizing experiences

While chatbots won’t be replacing customer services in its entirety, they are some of the best ways to get customers information quickly. They allow an improved customer experience with minimal effort from the customer.

Video

Incorporating video marketing into content distribution strategy continues to be one of the most important moves out there, and shows no signs of slowing down during 2019.

Thanks to social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram for implementing a video feature into their platforms, businesses are gaining high engagement rates for product demos, how-tos, advertisements, and much more.

Using live videos is another option to how brand transparency, marketers can also expect a personalized messaging shot 1:1 and 360-degree imagery for a more interactive experience.

Video marketing isn’t going to disappear this year. It’s important to include video into your strategy and engage with your customers in a new, exciting way.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI has already managed to help many businesses learn how to build effective content distribution strategies based on customer interaction with brands. AI has helped analyze customer behavior through data from websites, social media, blog posts and more. This data lets a brand gain insight on how those customers are finding their products and services.

For example, let’s say you are trying to find a way to increase enrollment for a webinar, AI can help analyze current and past sign-ups to determine who your future prospects are. By leveraging this data, AI assesses personas, emails, or zip codes to target for the next marketing campaign, saving your team tons of work.

Connect your potential customer journey essentially leads to better leads and increased sales. AL is also used to automate the sales process, develop customer conversations, and improve company culture to generate business growth.

Voice search

Verbal communication has been on the rise over the years, thanks to tech like Alexa, Google, Siri, and other smart devices. Studies have shown that 40% of adults use voice-based search and it’s predicted that 50% of all searches will be done through voice by 2020.

This does stir up some challenges for marketers because voice searches display quite differently than text. With a text search, you’ll generate a long list of options, but with a voice search, it’s possible you may only get a single choice read out verbally.

While this is a new and fresh distribution strategy, voice search shouldn’t be ignored as people are increasingly relying on it more than ever before.

Conclusion

The most important takeaway is that the marketing scene changes rapidly on a day to day basis. As a marketer, you have to always be on top of your game and stay on top of all the latest trends.

If you’re looking for custom content marketing that works, then get in touch with us and we’ll make sure to help you grow your content!

– wilson@sumodash.com

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