As part of our continuing series on marketing strategy, today we’re building a content distribution network. (If you missed the first part in this series about building a target demographic audience, you can find that here.) If you create targeted, beautiful content for your business, but not many people see it, you’ve probably wasted a good deal of time and money. By spending just a little planning time up front, and following through on that plan, you’ll be able to spread your message to the most potential clients, efficiently and effectively. Building a content distribution network is a large part of that plan.
As part of your overall marketing strategy, a plan for how to get your content into the right hands is absolutely critical. Distribution doesn’t have to be expensive. If you want to up your game, you can get into paid distribution and reap the benefits of targeted demographics.
Building A Content Distribution Network On The Cheap
When I was young and starting my first business, I didn’t really have any start-up capital, and couldn’t afford traditional advertising. Not only that, but I was mostly unconvinced of the efficacy of such efforts as television and radio advertising (this was the days when the Web was just getting rolling). I had to think outside the box and be very creative when looking for potential customers. In other words, I had to do it “guerilla style”. Since that time, I’ve not only grown and developed other businesses for myself, but I’ve helped others to do the same, using inexpensive, proven methods of content marketing distribution. Therefore, all of the strategies mentioned here for content distribution are either free or very inexpensive. That’s the way we like it, right!?
Your Contact Database
The very first element to examine when building your content distribution network (and the one most often overlooked) is your existing book of business. These are all of the people who’ve ever purchased a product or service from your company, or anyone who has ever expressed any interest in doing so. Building and maintaining a book of business is absolutely critical, and we’re assuming here that you’ve already got an organized, differentiated database of contacts to deliver content to. Most of you are probably using Constant Contact, Mail Chimp or perhaps an integrated CRM platform of some kind to achieve this. These people should be the first to see and hear your newest marketing efforts, and they’re the first stop on the journey of creating your content distribution network. You should first create a nice email template to send out to all existing clients, to let them know about your newest product or service offering, special promotion, or new area of business. You’ll then want to create a slightly different message, using the same imagery, to reach out to potential clients within your database.
Your Company Website
The next stop on the content distribution network is your company website. Hopefully, you’ve managed to create an organized and orderly way to present updated information to Web visitors. The first place to distribute your content here could be your company bog or news feed. By presenting your new marketing images or video to your blog or newsfeed, you’ll be reaching those people form whom you may not have good contact information, but who visit your site occasionally. Hopefully, your other marketing materials are funneling potential clients to your website, so they can see your new product and service offerings. Creating a unique landing page featuring new products or services, in conjunction with another marketing channel like Facebook, Instagram, or Outbrain can lead to the acquisition of good potential clients. The key to promoting your content on your website is clarity. Make sure the media is in a place where potential customers can see it! Another great practice is the use of good image and alt image tags when embedding the images to the site. For example, if your company is a bakery, and you’re promoting a new stuffed croissant, make sure the image title is something like “ABC Bakery Phoenix AZ–Stuffed Croissants”. Use this as both the image title and the alt image tags. This way, you’ll also get SEO bonus points from Google. You could also use the new imagery in the graphic header, or featured on the top of the fold on the first page. Perhaps a pop up offer? The ideas on how to promote the new content on your site are varied, depending upon the industry and purpose of the images.
Free Social Media
Social media channels should obviously be used as part of your content distribution network, but with care. Some business owners or marketing personnel will simply post an image on Facebook with a sentence or two, and call it a day. This can have some benefits, but there is so much untapped potential here that we simply cannot let it go to waste. Remember that many social media platforms have both unpaid and paid platforms for promoting content, and each has its uses. For example, if you’ve built up a good sized following on a particular social media platform, then posting a well crafted image ad or video with a specific call to action can be very beneficial. Note however, that this requires a well crafted ad with a specific call to action. Just posting an image with a line of text does not really count as terribly effective. It’s also pretty critical to set up a custom landing page on your website to be able to effectively track the analytics of these ads. You want to know what works, and what doesn’t. Finally, in the category of free social media advertising, you should look to the crafty use of hashtags and titles in general. If you’re posting photos of your new stuffed croissants on Instagram, it pays to carefully select a few targeted hashtags. You might try #stuffedcroissants or #phoenixbakery or #foodporn (I hate that designation, but it’s terribly effective).
It’s important to use social media to build your content distribution network, but using it correctly and in conjunction with other marketing efforts is really the way to the most rewarding experience. I’ve said this in multiple blog posts before, but I think it bear repeating here: you simply cannot upload your videos to YouTube, or photos to Instagram, and expect that you’re going to get great marketing results. Any views you get from just uploading your video to YouTube is, at best, incidental, and at worst, accidental! In regards to marketing and branding, it’s best to view YouTube as a distribution warehouse. You customers don’t come to your warehouse to get products. It’s just a holding facility. The product is shipped from the warehouse. It’s best to view your video content in the same way. YouTube makes the distribution of your video content much easier, and stores it for you for instant streaming to the consumer. You should not expect that YouTube is going to bring you lots of viewers. This is not realistic for marketing material.
Paid Social Media Ads
Paid promotion through social media is a great area to work on in preparing your content distribution network. This is an area that is enormously successful for many businesses. It’s a little more complex, and it does cost money but, it doesn’t have to be a lot of money. It can be as little or as much as you specify. Let’s use a small restaurant for our example to show how this works. First, deciding which social media platform will work best for your product or service is important. For example, Facebook has the broadest social demographic, and is a great place to market directly to consumers. It’s mostly shunned by teenagers, so unless you’re specifically targeting teens (in which case, Instagram would be best), then stick with Facebook for now. If you’re marketing business to business, LinkedIn would be the top contender. Let’s take a look at a simple case study regarding paid promotions on Facebook.
Chef Panda is a current Schnebly Hill Media client who serve awesome Chinese food in the Surprise area, We were hired to photograph food items for updating the company’s website, and begin to market on social media. We will often send out a sample image to Facebook and Instagram just to keep our own social media presence fresh with new projects (another great marketing strategy!). So we posted the above image to Facebook, and the response was not only incredibly quick, it boosted our own status as well as that of the restaurant. Just this little mention of the restaurant resulted in a nice conversation that was started about how great the food looked, where the restaurant was located, etc. The owner of the restaurant came to the office today to review the photos, and reported that he’s already had at least three families visit and directly reference the Facebook post as the cause of their visit. That’s pretty powerful stuff, in just 24 hours of the photos being taken, and that’s without any paid promotion at all. Now, imagine that we spent a little bit of money to upload a really nice image of our food with a tagline that says something clever like, “Mom’s Night Off — Mention This Ad for a FREE Appetizer”. The key here is that we can pay to have this ad appear in a very targeted audience’s feed. We can specify that we want the ad to only go to people who reside in either Phoenix or Scottsdale, who are between the ages of 25 – 50, who have shown an interest in food photos, or share their food photos with the public, and who have an interest in Chinese food. Imagine the power of that! If we spent $5 per day to promote this content, and it resulted in 20 extra families visiting our establishment per week, it wouldn’t be long before we’d need to expand!
Good luck, and let us know How we can help!
I hope that this has helped you to see the importance of building a powerful, flexible content distribution network and how this help you reach your target audience with your marketing efforts. Without an effective strategy, you might be creating great marketing pieces that simply aren’t going anywhere. If you’d like to discuss how Schnebly Hill can work with you to create great messaging and imagery while building a content distribution network, let us know! We’d be delighted to help. If you need gorgeous imagery, check out our sister site, Schnebly Hill Media!
