Content Distribution Strategy

What is a Content Distribution Strategy?

Content, whether in the form of a video, a newsletter, an ad, or anything else, needs to reach the target audience at the right time to make an impression. A good content distribution strategy, then, finds the best ways to provide content to audiences.

Content distribution involves using at least one of a number of distribution channels: paid, owned, or earned. Paid distribution channels include advertisements; owned channels include company newsletters or websites; earned channels include shares and reviews.

Why Is It Important to Have a Content Distribution Strategy?

If your audience doesn’t know you exist, they won’t know to visit your site or buy your product. If they know you exist but have no positive impression of your brand, they have no reason to visit your site or buy your product. An effective content distribution strategy enables you to reach the customer segment that will best respond to your content.

What Internal Data Should I Have for a Good Content Distribution Strategy?

To create a content distribution strategy, you should begin with company data including transaction history and customer demographics. You should also take stock of good content you have used in the past which can be republished or repurposed into a different format (by changing an informative case study into a video, for example).

Finally, if you are going to distribute your content through paid channels, you will need a budget. While this is not necessary, most distribution strategies use more than one channel, and paid distributors are effective.

What External Data Is Essential for a Good Strategy?

The best external data for a distribution strategy concerns the audience: their online behavior, their location, the times of day they use social media, and so on. The more information, the better.

General social media and online data (especially keyword and website traffic data) also help, especially if you attract a larger audience. You can see trending topics to take advantage of, evaluate your reach, and discover new distribution partnerships.

What External Data May Prove Useful for a Good Strategy?

Additional useful data sources include a product or trend forecasting. As with social media and online data above, these resources help you stay ahead of trends and keep your content topical. Depending on your product, news data also helps you stay topical.

What Are the Main Challenges of this Use Case?

One of the greatest challenges of creating an effective content distribution strategy is the enormous amount of competition for increasingly short attention spans. Moreover, people invest more and more in ad blockers and VPNs. These impede your ability to effectively reach your target audience. Thus, you have to change your focus to creating increasingly narrowly targeted advertisements or partnering with increasingly more niche influencers.

Additionally, there are budgetary concerns. After giving new content or new distributors some time to build impressions, companies must constantly evaluate the return on investment for every distribution channel and prepare to make changes or retire content that doesn’t bring enough results.

Interesting Case Studies and Blogs to Look Into

Outbrain: Shelter Finds a Home for Content Discovery
Shane Barker: 10 Influencer Marketing Case Studies With Insane Results

Tangible Examples of Impact

As content explodes worldwide, Spherex is building a gold standard to track, monitor, customize, and monetize IP as it is licensed around the world and across platforms. Using its AI technology, the team at Spherex will work with Cinedigm to guide their international licensing and enable them to geo-adapt content and references to match the cultural sentiment in targeted countries.

Yahoo! Finance: Cinedigm Partners With Spherex to Expand International Content Distribution Capabilities