When it comes to content marketing, the general rule is that you should spend 20% of your time creating content, and 80% marketing that content. But a common struggle for businesses occurs when a lot of time is spent on marketing with no tangible results in traffic.
This is where a content distribution strategy comes into play. Distributing your business’s content can be done in a variety of formats — from blog posts to videos — and through an array of different platforms — from social media to guest posts. Fortunately, there are several platforms out there that can help you distribute your content to the right audience. Here are seven examples.
Outbrain
Outbrain is a vast online platform that promotes relevant written and video content. You can use either an RSS feed of your content or provide a link to one specific piece. Outbrain will either market it as sponsored content or suggest it as a related post on other websites.
Outbrain has an extensive network of premium publishers and issued three trillion content recommendations last year alone. You pay per click, so how much you pay is based on how successfully Outbrain promotes your content. And the built-in smart targeting tool helps businesses reach the right audience, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Taboola
Taboola is a digital advertising company that is often compared to Outbrain because it also promotes news and stories through sponsored links. However, the company is unique in that they solicit user feedback on all recommendations.
Taboola partners with publishers like The Huffington Post, USA Today and The New York Times, and its platform allows you to pick your preference on things like locations and what types of devices your audience primarily uses.
With an 82% effectiveness rate, LinkedIn is considered one of the most effective content distribution platforms. This is especially true for businesses targeting B2B audiences since it generates more B2B leads than Facebook or Twitter.
There are several ways you can distribute your content on LinkedIn. You can publish relevant articles and share them with your network, or you can promote sponsored content on the company’s advertising network.
If you choose to advertise on LinkedIn, the platform has solid targeting capabilities. You can specify things like industries, job titles, and more.
Ultimately, the best content distribution platform will depend on your marketing goals and what you’re hoping to achieve.
Facebook ads
Facebook gets a bad rap occasionally, but the platform has 2.41 billion monthly active users — so the odds are good that you can find your target audience on the platform. It’s also an excellent way to reach both B2B and B2C audiences.
Resulting partially from the platform’s robust targeting capabilities, 84% of marketers use Facebook ads — making it the number one paid social media marketing tool over both Google Ads and LinkedIn ads. And Facebook ads are doable for everyone, no matter how big or small your budget.
Adblade
Adblade is an exclusive ad network with high-profile clients like Forbes, Bloomberg and Fox News. This platform can be harder to get into than other paid ad networks due to its strict requirements: In order to use Adblade, you must have a minimum of 500,000 monthly pageviews.
One of the benefits of using Adblade is that it allows Google AdSense, which means you can monitor your traffic firsthand. The key to using Adblade is to make sure you find the right demographic. Some niches perform much better than others, so you’ll want to do your homework first.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a native advertising platform that is owned by Outbrain. Zemanta will promote your content using a number of different platforms, including Outbrain, Discus, Yahoo! and more.
The advantage of this platform is that you get to experiment with other platforms and figure out which ones work best. However, you will have less control over your advertising efforts, which could be a no-go for some business owners.
Increasingly, many people are getting the news from their smartphones instead of their television sets. As such, news apps have seen a significant uptick in recent years. Flipboard is one of the best news apps because it covers a huge variety of categories and offers its readers a large amount of interesting content.
The company also has an ad format where users can promote their content on the main feed. You can promote videos or articles and drive more traffic back to your website.
Ultimately, the best content distribution platform will depend on your marketing goals and what you’re hoping to achieve. To learn more about how to track your content marketing goals, feel free to check out How to Measure Content Marketing Success.
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