Content is key but what’s the point of it if you’re not reaching your audience? You can’t just write content and hope it gets found, you have to promote it. You need to push your content onto the screens of your audience and potential customers and this is accomplished with content distribution.
Content distribution is more than just sharing a link or posting on social media. It consists of three main categories: paid media, owned media and earned media. While you may use one way more than the others, together they can be very effective.
1) Paid Media:
This category distributes your content to a targeted, paid audience. It is a way of advertising to a bigger audience, rather than to just the people who already know or follow you. Examples of paid media are display ads, paid search or sponsorships.
Why use it? You can use paid media to advertise to a targeted audience on the channels they’re already using. When you’re just starting out, paid advertisements can be very beneficial to boosting brand awareness and sales.
2) Owned Media:
Any media that you can control is owned media. This is the content that you post on your own platforms like your blog, your social media account or your website. You can control this because you know when it’s posted, you can edit it, you can delete it — you may not have these options on another platform.
Why use it? You should use a platform that you own, like your website, to publish your content. When you do this, you can always refer back to your own website through advertisements. You will be driving traffic to your site and possibly create conversions.
3) Earned Media:
When a customer, a friend or any one else posts something about your business or shares your content, that is earned media. This can also be when someone in your industry takes notice and endorses you (PR). It is essentially word of mouth curation.
Why use it? When a customer vouches for your business, it builds credibility. The customer is showing others that they can trust your business. This trust leads to new customers.
Content distribution is an important part of marketing. Creating quality content will help your business organically through SEO efforts, but actually promoting that content will show results faster. Your beautiful, new website deserves to be seen!