As the amount of Content pushed out there is increasing minute by minute, a shift is happening as I write these lines. One could say that we’re moving from content marketing to marketing content.
I think everyone can agree on the fact that hitting the „publish“ button isn’t enough anymore. I started blogging back in 2010 (on a blog which doesn’t exist anymore) and I can remember that I didn’t have to work much on my distribution. Sure, back then blogging wasn’t an isolated phenomenon, but still, you didn’t have to allocate much time to executing your distribution tactics. I didn’t publish articles to generate leads at that time, but getting people to read your stuff still is your goal.
At the time I put 4, 5 hours of my time into researching and writing an article and only 30 minutes to one hour in distribution. Nowadays, I’d say I allocate at least twice that time into distribution to get similar results.
When talking to people interested in adopting an online content strategy, I systematically notice that a lot of thought is put into content creation (how to make this content valuable and relevant for potential customers) but much less into distribution and promotion (via respectively owned and paid media). „We’ll just publish it on Facebook.“
So what does this growing importance of smart and effective distribution mean for businesses?
You need to allocate additional resources to Content Distribution
Yeah, you need to allocate even more ressources to this content marketing thing. A few years back you could just publish it once on Facebook and a couple of times on twitter and that was it. This isn’t enough anymore. Not only are there so much more channels available, the attention span of your leads is also smaller and smaller and the amount of content calling for their attention much bigger.
An excellent resource you can subscribe to, in order to learn about efficient distribution is relevance.com
[bctt tweet=“From Content Marketing to marketing content: you need to allocate more ressources to distribution.“ username=“MaelRoth“]
You need an evergreen Content Strategy
The second implication of this reality is that you really need to think about an evergreen content strategy. If you’ve been publishing for some time, you have (hopefully) already noticed that some of your content continually attracts visitors. That’s your evergreen content.
„Evergreen content is that which is still interesting and relevant weeks, months or even years after its initial publish date. It doesn’t date like news, and the value is that it can deliver traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.“ (econsultancy)
The article on Econsultancy pretty much says it all about evergreen content, so I recommend you read it as soon as you can.
Once you’ve identified your evergreen content, I recommend you also break down the channels which work best for each piece of content. Why is that? What does it mean for future distribution tactics? Maybe it even impacts the content creation itself?
Content Marketing comes before marketing your Content!
Even though the title may be kind of provocative, I will never be the one to say that Marketing Content is more important than the content itself. I actually published a long blogpost in German about this.
The best distribution in the world will fall flat if your content just isn’t good… Let me finish by quoting Rebecca Lieb (Altimeter):
„Smart marketers know that, and they know that the best content begins with a strategy. Not with a channel.“ – Rebecca Lieb
