Learn about using emails. autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Learn about using emails, autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
A successful email marketing strategy will help you grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers.
You can then use this list to nurture leads into prospective clients and customers using emails targeted to your audience and distributed through email services and autoresponders.
This lesson will give you a better understanding of using email marketing to grow your business online.
In this lesson, we cover the following areas:
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Why Use Autoresponders?
Email Drip Feeding And Broadcasting Messages
Email Marketing Services
Email Integration With Your Website
***
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Covering everything you need to know about email marketing is beyond the scope of our course.
If you’re new to email marketing, watch the video below for a quick overview and practical tips to help you get started:
In the wider context of effective content management, it is useful to set goals when implementing an email marketing strategy to include the following:
Integration with Content Strategy: Ensure that email campaigns align with your overarching content strategy to maintain consistency in messaging and branding across all channels.
Ensuring Content Relevance: Deliver targeted email content that resonates with your audience’s interests, preferences, and stage in the customer journey.
Segmenting Email Lists Effectively: Divide the subscriber base into segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and past interactions. Personalize email content to cater to the specific needs, preferences, and interests of each segment.
Optimized Email Design: Design visually appealing emails that are mobile-responsive and easy to read. Incorporate clear calls-to-action (CTAs), compelling visuals, and concise copy.
Consistent Email Cadence: Establish a consistent schedule for sending emails to maintain audience engagement without overwhelming them. This ensures that subscribers anticipate and look forward to receiving your content, leading to better open and click-through rates.
Enhanced Email Deliverability: Ensure emails reach recipients’ inboxes by maintaining sender reputation, optimizing email content, and adhering to email regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act. This fosters better engagement and avoids email being marked as spam.
Improved Email Open Rates: This involves crafting compelling subject lines and preview text to increase open rates. Personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing can also optimize content for higher open rates, driving better campaign performance.
Boosted Click-Through Rates: Develop engaging email content with clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons and relevant links to drive recipients to desired actions, such as visiting a website or making a purchase].
Reduced Unsubscribe Rates: Provide valuable and relevant content to subscribers based on their preferences and behaviors. Regularly review email performance metrics to identify trends and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Performance Tracking and Optimization: Monitor email performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Analyze data to identify trends, optimize content, and refine email strategies for continuous improvement.
Ensuring Email Compliance: Adhere to email marketing regulations and best practices, as well as legal and industry regulations regarding email marketing, including obtaining consent, providing clear opt-out options, honoring unsubscribe requests promptly, and ensuring data privacy and security. Compliance helps build trust with subscribers and mitigates legal risks.
Lifecycle Email Marketing
Lifecycle email marketing is a strategic approach designed to deliver timely and relevant messages to the right audience, guiding them through their journey from awareness to advocacy.
It’s a potent tool for nurturing prospects and customers, influencing purchase decisions, and boosting revenue.
The Power of Lifecycle Emails
There are two key reasons why lifecycle emails are highly effective.
Lifecycle marketing comprehensively addresses all stages of the marketing funnel, including customer acquisition, retention, and upselling, making it a significant revenue driver.
Lifecycle Email Marketing Stages
There are eight stages in lifecycle email marketing:
Awareness: Introduce your brand and grab attention.
Knowledge and Interest: Establish authority and build trust.
Consideration: Nourish interest with targeted content.
Selection: Highlight why your offering is superior.
Purchase: Facilitate conversions and follow up post-sale.
Satisfaction: Ensure customer happiness and engagement.
Retention and Loyalty: Reengage customers and seek upsell opportunities.
Advocacy: Encourage referrals and foster advocacy.
Tailoring Content To Each Lifecycle Phase
Early Phase
Focus on addressing customer pain points without overt selling, building trust through educational content, and setting expectations through welcome emails.
Middle Phase
Continue nurturing post-purchase relationships with thank you emails, onboarding guides, feedback requests, and incentives like discounts or replenishment reminders.
Late Phase
Leverage satisfied customers to drive advocacy through referral programs and reengagement emails, reinforcing relationships built in earlier phases.
Tips For Effective Lifecycle Campaigns
Establish KPIs: Set objectives and benchmarks tailored to each stage to measure success effectively.
Avoid Urgency: Prioritize building value over creating urgency to foster genuine customer engagement.
Personalize Content: Segment your audience based on interests and behaviors to deliver highly relevant content that resonates.
When executed thoughtfully, lifecycle email marketing can be a powerful tool for nurturing customer relationships, maximizing revenue, and cultivating brand advocates.
Understanding the distinct needs of each stage and crafting tailored content accordingly is the key to unlocking the full potential of this strategy.
Why Use Autoresponders?
Another secret of growing a successful business through content marketing is to have an email marketing strategy that allows you to:
Grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers,
Turn subscribers into prospective clients and customers, and
Train/Upsell existing customers.
Building and managing lists with emails using email services and autoresponders allow you to keep in touch with your subscribers and deliver timely or scheduled email messages, training content, and information of value on a regular basis and at the click of a button.
If you’ve ever filled out an opt-in form online to get more information about a product or service, or signed up for an email newsletter and received an instant response in your e-mail inbox, your email reply was most likely sent via an autoresponder program.
Simply put, autoresponders are email programs that send out pre-written messages. These emails can be in response to trigger requests sent to a specific email address or scheduled to be sent out sequentially whenever a new subscriber opts into your service.
An email marketing and autoresponder service can help your business automate your communications with your target audience.
Autoresponders are one of the most powerful online marketing tools you have available for growing your business online. They are easy to use and once you have set things up, your entire marketing can be automated to keep your business growing 24 hours a day on auto-pilot.
When new subscribers sign up, they are instantly added to an automated sales, training, and/or customer relationship system, and remain on your list until they decide to unsubscribe.
Autoresponders can be used in a variety of ways, from sending welcome emails to building customer lists, following up with prospects, and tracking leads through a sales pipeline.
Some autoresponders, like signup services for e-groups and forums, are one-time deals. They provide a single response for every message received (e.g. email a specific address and you get back email instructions on how to join or access the group).
Depending on your email marketing strategy, you could set up multiple autoresponders to target different groups of users or address different needs.
For example, you may want to set up an autoresponder to send out only important product updates to premium-level clients and another autoresponder to grow and nurture leads (and eventually turn these subscribers into premium clients).
Email Drip Feeding And Broadcasting Messages
Email Drip Feeding
With an autoresponder, you can bulk-write your email messages and then drip-feed emails to your subscribers at regular intervals that you specify.
If you are setting up a series of training emails or an email course, for example, you would create the content of those emails, add these to your autoresponder, and then set up a predetermined schedule to drip-feed your emails and send out messages to your subscriber email addresses.
For instance, you can set up an autoresponder to send subscribers an instant response when they sign up (e.g. a welcome email), then a follow-up message 2-3 days later, then another message 5-7 days after the previous email has been sent, and so on.
You can also program your autoresponder to send one message every day (e.g. an inspirational quote or daily reflection), 2-3 emails per week (e.g. product training or an email course), twice monthly (e.g. a newsletter), once a year (e.g. a subscription renewal reminder), or any interval that works for your audience and keeps them interested and engaged with our email series (and subscribed).
In addition to drip feeding, you can also create a single email message and broadcast it to your list on specific days, times, and intervals of your choice.
Email broadcasting is great for sending out special offers, time-sensitive announcements, product updates, event reminders, breaking news, etc.
Email Marketing Services
Ideally, your business should be capturing visitor details from your website or blog and adding them to your mailing list or newsletter.
There are many self-hosting scripts available, including plugins and add-ons that you can use to send out newsletters and autoresponder messages via your own website or CMS platform.
However, we recommend choosing a reliable third-party (i.e. hosted) service provider to handle your email marketing activities, such as your list-building campaigns, autoresponder setups, subscriber list segmentation, reporting, statistics, etc.
Well-known providers are recognized by Internet Service Providers (ISP) and have higher email deliverability rates. They also provide regular technical support.
With a self-hosted script or plugin, you have to manage all of the technical aspects yourself. While this option may seem sensible while your list is small, as soon as your subscriber base starts to become significant in terms of size and potential value, you run the risk of losing everything if anything happens to your service.
Using a well-known professional autoresponder service ensures reliable email deliverability. The services we recommend using are affordable, provide responsive customer support, and have the infrastructure to keep your data secure. These services also integrate with WordPress, allowing you to build your subscriber list directly from your website or blog.
For example, here’s an email marketing service we use and recommend:
Aweber
You can use a service like Aweber to set up email capture forms for your website and automate your email marketing campaigns.
Aweber is one of the world’s most reliable and popular email delivery services and offers a professional and affordable list-building, autoresponder, and email marketing automation solution with many extensive features like:
Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber, you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types of users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base, and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email, and live text chat.
In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:
Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS feed into emails that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you publish something new on your website or blog.
Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.
To test drive Aweber for free, enter your details into the form below, or click here to sign up for an account:
To learn more about autoresponder services, go here:
Additionally, see this section for more information on email marketing services and tools, including tools for building lists of email addresses for your marketing campaigns: Content Promotion Tools & Resources
Email Marketing And WordPress
If you use WordPress, you can easily add opt-in forms to your site to capture visitor details and turn them into subscribers for your newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
For plugins that can help you integrate email marketing with your WordPress site and add opt-in forms linked to your autoresponder service, go here: WordPress Engagement Plugins
Additional Email Marketing Resources & Information
These useful resources cover areas like creating autoresponders and opt-in forms, and managing your subscriber lists and will help you become a better email marketer:
Write Better Emails
A FREE, 7-day email course on how to write welcome emails and autoresponder series, plus fill-in-the-blank email templates that will help make sending emails easier.
If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, this FREE guide will help you master easy email marketing strategies to turn listeners into subscribers, build your brand, and grow your podcast.
Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.
This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.
Here are frequently asked questions about email marketing:
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending emails to a list of contacts to promote products, share news, or provide customer support.
Is email marketing still effective?
Yes, email marketing remains highly effective due to its direct reach and ability to personalize content to diverse audience segments.
How do I build an email list?
Build an email list by offering value through content, using sign-up forms on your website, and encouraging subscriptions through social media and other channels.
What are the best practices for email design?
Keep emails responsive, use eye-catching subject lines, maintain a balance between images and text, and ensure clear call-to-action buttons.
How often should I send emails?
The frequency should be based on your audience’s preferences and the purpose of your emails. Regular testing and feedback can help determine the optimal frequency.
What metrics should I track in email marketing?
Key metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. These indicators help measure engagement and effectiveness.
Why is segmentation important in email marketing?
Segmentation allows you to tailor your messaging to different parts of your audience based on their behavior, demographics, or engagement levels, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.
How can I improve my email open rates?
Improve open rates by crafting compelling subject lines, personalizing emails, optimizing send times, and maintaining a clean email list.
What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email to a small portion of your audience to determine which version performs better before sending the more successful version to the rest of your list.
How do I know if my email marketing is successful?
Success can be measured by looking at analytics to track opens, clicks, conversions, and how these impact your overall marketing goals.
Can email marketing help in customer retention?
Yes, regular and personalized email communication can strengthen relationships with customers, keep them informed, and encourage loyalty.
What are the legal requirements for email marketing?
Compliance with laws like GDPR in Europe and CAN-SPAM in the U.S. is crucial. These laws mandate permissions for email collection and provide guidelines on opt-outs and data protection.
Summary
Launching an effective email marketing campaign with high-converting opt-in forms and autoresponder messages that deliver value to subscribers can mean the difference between struggling online and building a successful and profitable digital business presence.
Build a strong relationship with your subscribers and nurture them by providing content of value at optimal intervals, and the people on your email list may never want to unsubscribe.
Action Steps
If email marketing is important to your business, you can’t afford to risk having disruptions and experiencing regular problems with your email service.
Make sure that you have signed up with a reliable, professional, and well-known email service provider…it will save you time, money, and headaches in the long run!
Resources
Email Marketing Planning Template – Use this free template to organize emails you will send to different segments of your database, track A/B tests, summarize results, gather data on email performance, compile data on Excel or Google Sheets, and automatically calculate delivery, open, and click through rates.
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Content Distribution
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Your business has to share and promote its content using various channels to reach as many people in its target audience as it can.
In this lesson, we cover the following areas:
What Is Content Distribution?
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Content Distribution Channels
Managing Your Content Distribution
What Is Content Distribution?
“Content distribution is the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your content. It’s how you provide your content to your audience members for their consumption through various channels and media formats.”
One of the challenges of promoting content successfully is that businesses today have many different options to get their content in front of people but limited time to manage the process and limited resources to engage in a truly effective multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy.
For example, you can promote your blog posts and other resources via organic and paid channels, using email marketing, video marketing, press releases, pay-per-click advertising, social media, influencer outreach, content syndication, etc.
Some of these methods can also deliver better results if distributed in conjunction with one another, such as posting blogs, videos, social media updates, and email newsletters.
If we look at the above, for instance:
You can include a video in a blog post and links to your post in a social media post (for free or using paid methods) and an email newsletter.
You can also promote your video on social media (for free or using paid methods) and in your email newsletter, in addition to including it in your blog post.
You can promote your email newsletter on your blog and social media and encourage new subscribers to signup while asking existing subscribers to share your emails on their social platforms with their friends and followers.
You can promote your latest blog posts, videos, or newsletter issues on various social media platforms (for free or using paid methods) and invite them to share these, engage with them, subscribe to them, etc.
To coordinate all of the above content distribution, however, you need a plan.
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Having a plan helps to ensure that your content reaches the right audience, via the right channels, at the right time.
If you haven’t got a content distribution strategy in place, here’s one from HubSpot that you can use.
Let’s take a brief look at this plan and what you need to do to implement it:
Research your target audience – This should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team.
Choose your content distribution channels – See the section below.
Decide on your content types – See this lesson: Content Types
Set your content distribution KPIs and goals – These should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team and see this lesson: Content Metrics
Your content distribution channels are the channels through which the content you create gets shared and promoted.
Choosing the right distribution channels helps to ensure that your content reaches as many target audience members as possible.
Your target audience and resources will determine which channels you use to distribute your content.
Traditionally, there are three main types of content distribution channels:
Owned Media
Owned media is any type of content that you create, own, and have full control over.
This content normally resides on your own website (e.g. your blog), your social media accounts, and any additional locations where you store assets that you own.
Owned media can include:
Your website and company blog
Self-hosted videos and podcasts
Images and infographics
E-books and guides
Whitepapers and reports
Recorded webinars
Courses
Email marketing campaigns
Essentially, any content that you create in-house or outsource by hiring people to create or produce it for you where you have an agreement to own the finished content is considered to be owned media.
Paid Media
Paid media is where you pay to promote your content. Paid distribution channels can expose your content to your target audience quickly and more easily than using owned methods, but it costs money and it’s only effective as long as you are paying. If you stop paying, it stops showing.
Paid media should be worked alongside other channels. For example, you can use data collected from successful paid campaigns to drive content creation for owned and earned channels.
Earned Media
Earned media is content that someone else creates, which you haven’t paid for but it benefits your business.
Essentially, this is where someone who is not a part of your organization is giving your organization promotion or coverage.
Earned media can include:
Customer reviews and testimonials
Positive feedback on review sites
Backlinks
Having your products or services featured, included, or mentioned in externally-hosted or published media (e.g. listicles, roundups, newsletters, etc.)
Press/news coverage
Awards and public events
Earned media can be considered as being “organic’ media and can often be generated using owned and paid media, or a combination of these.
For example, if you publish a high-quality content item on your website (owned media) that gains high-ranking authority, share it on your social media channels, and/or promote it using paid channels (paid media), and other companies then link to it or promote it, that’s using owned and paid media to gain earned media.
Shared Media
With recent development in social media, marketers like PR professionals have been asked to embrace a new distribution channel, where the content is partially owned and partially earned, called shared media.
“Shared media is content that is shared across social media or shared between multiple owners. It doesn’t have a concrete, explicit definition, because as social media evolves, shared media changes too.”
An example of shared media is someone liking or commenting on a post on your organization’s Facebook page. This action is recorded on your company’s social media page and the user’s profile but neither your company nor the user owns that content.
Reciprocal Linking
Although Google disapproves of any form of link spam, reciprocal linking is a widely-used practice on the web.
Typically, this will involve another website offering to link to your site from an existing article on their site if you agree to add a link to their site from an existing article on your site.
Essentially, this is an “I’ll link to your site if you link to my site” arrangement between websites, and it happens all the time.
So, if you plan to engage in reciprocal linking activities with other sites despite what Google says, it’s best to have a set of guidelines that you can supply to anyone who contacts you with an offer to exchange links, especially if the other party is offering to provide you with ready-made content containing a link to your site that you can simply paste into your site as a new post or add to an existing post.
Reciprocal Linking Guidelines
Developing a set of guidelines for how other sites should supply content to you and what you will accept (or reject) will help to reduce time-wasting (e.g. by sending you unacceptable content or content that needs to be completely reworked) and dealing with content that is totally off-brand or that doesn’t match your tone and voice, quality standards, etc.
Here are some things to consider when creating guidelines for accepting reciprocal link exchanges:
Backlinks and anchor texts should match the content and style of your blog posts.
Copy supplied must be in the same format, style, and tone of voice as your blog posts.
Images supplied must meet your minimum image dimensions (to avoid pixelation).
Copy or anchor text must not be hypey or salesy –it should be informative and provide value to your audience.
No links in the introduction or conclusion (this will just send visitors away from your site).
Only add links to relevant articles that provide value to the post & reader (avoid home page, product page, etc links)
Ensure that the link isn’t too close to other links (i.e. not in the same sentence or paragraph as another link)
Anchor text should not exceed four words
Links supplied must be clickable (so you can check where these are pointing to).
As you can see, this is quite a lot of work. however, it’s your credibility and reputation on the line, so you should do your best to protect it.
Balancing Content Quality & Quantity
An additional consideration in your content distribution strategy is the “frequency” of your distribution.
If you post content too often, your audience can become fatigued and start ignoring your content or your new content notifications. If you post too little or too infrequently, your content may not build enough traction for people to engage meaningfully with it.
Your content distribution strategy, therefore, needs to be balanced so that you are not only distributing the right content to the right audience via the right channels but also at the right frequency.
Managing Your Content Distribution
Managing published and distributed content can be challenging. It not only requires managing the content in the channels but the channels themselves.
Knowing which type of channel you use to distribute your content, therefore, can help you to better manage your content.
For example:
Owned Media – This content is completely under your control. So, as long as you have good content management systems and processes in place, you should be able to effectively manage all content in your owned channels.
Owned media pros: You have complete control, you can publish content directly on your site, social networks, etc. and it can cost less overall.
Owned media cons: Your audience can be limited and all your owned channels require maintenance.
Paid Media – Although you have influence over the content in paid media channels, often your control will be limited either by someone else’s rules (e.g. an external webmaster or publication), or by a lack of systems, transparency, or the willingness of 3rd parties to share, divulge, or provide you with full information or access to the management of the content.
For example, if you employ an agency to manage and distribute your content on paid distribution channels, they may have proprietary systems, knowledge, or methods for obtaining results that they may not be willing to divulge, disclose, or share with you.
Paid media pros: Instant results, easier to target your audience, easier to track and measure, and having control over the message and the copy.
Paid media cons: It can be expensive and create a dependency on channels that may not scale as you spend more money.
Earned/Shared Media – One of the main difficulties when managing earned or shared media content is that it’s almost always outside of your control.
Tracking earned or shared content metrics from shares, likes, and followers, for example, doesn’t necessarily give you the ability to manage the content being generated by users or followers. This challenge has even led to the development and adoption of earned media management strategies by communications professionals.
Earned/Shared media pros: Boosts trust and credibility, and increases brand awareness and reach.
Earned/Shared media cons: Can be difficult as it takes time and effort to earn, and can generate negative publicity (e.g. someone could create a meme ridiculing your brand or product and it then gets shared virally online).
It’s important to note that as more cross-channel marketing opportunities arise, what distinguishes one type of distribution channel from another can become a little blurred. This seems to be especially true with social media.
For example, social media is technically earned media, but it also allows for paid media content placements through advertising, “boosted” posts, etc., and owned media (e.g. when you post content on your own social channels via Facebook, X[formerly Twitter], LinkedIn, etc.)
Content Distribution Checklist
Creating valuable content is only half the battle. Effectively distributing that content is equally vital for success. Content distribution ensures your carefully crafted pieces reach the right audience, maximizing their impact.
Use the following comprehensive checklist to streamline your content distribution efforts:
Channel Selection: Identify relevant channels such as social media, email, and third-party platforms.
Audience Segmentation: Tailor content distribution strategies based on your target audience.
Optimized Titles: Craft catchy and SEO-friendly titles to boost click-through rates. These headline generating tools can help.
Performance Metrics: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content metrics and gauge the success of your distribution efforts.
Leverage Influencers: Collaborate with influencers to expand your content’s reach and credibility. Use these social media tools to help you find influencers.
Repurposing Content: Repurpose content for various channels and formats to maximize its utility.
Email Newsletters: Incorporate content into regular email newsletters for consistent engagement.
Monitoring Trends: Stay updated on industry trends to align content distribution strategies accordingly.
User-generated Content: Encourage and amplify user-generated content for authentic engagement.
Content Distribution – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content distribution:
What is content distribution?
Content distribution refers to the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting content across various platforms and media channels to reach a target audience. This can include blogs, social media, email newsletters, and more.
Why is content distribution important?
Content distribution is crucial for maximizing the visibility and impact of your content, helping to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.
What are the main channels for content distribution?
The primary channels for content distribution include owned media (such as websites and blogs), paid media (such as PPC advertising and sponsored posts), earned media (such as press coverage and guest posting), and social media.
How can I develop an effective content distribution strategy?
To develop an effective content distribution strategy, consider the following steps: identify your target audience, select the right channels based on where your audience is active, create high-quality, engaging content tailored for each channel, and use analytics to monitor and optimize your strategy’s performance.
What are some best practices for content distribution?
Best practices include understanding your audience’s preferences, repurposing content for different platforms, maintaining consistency in posting schedules, engaging with your audience, and continually refining your strategy based on analytics.
What are the benefits of a content distribution strategy?
A well-planned content distribution strategy helps increase brand visibility, drives traffic to your website, engages your target audience, and ultimately contributes to lead generation and sales. It ensures your content reaches the right people at the right time through the right channels.
How often should I distribute content?
The frequency of content distribution depends on your specific audience, the nature of the content, and the platforms you are using. It’s important to maintain a balance between keeping your audience engaged and avoiding content overload. Regular analysis and feedback can help refine your content calendar.
Can automation help with content distribution?
Yes, automation tools can significantly aid in scheduling and distributing content across multiple channels, ensuring consistent presence and allowing you to focus on creating quality content and analyzing performance.
Summary
Content distribution is vital to the success of your organization’s content strategy.
What type of content you publish, how you publish it, where you publish it, and how often you publish it can all have a significant impact on your audience’s engagement with your brand.
Content is normally distributed through owned, paid, and/or earned media. Recent developments in social media have seen the emergence of a new distribution channel called shared media.
Make sure that you and your content team clearly understand the different types of distribution channels and the challenges of managing not only the content distributed via those channels but also the channels themselves.
Resources
Content Promotion Kit – Includes a content promotion checklist (PDF), an editable checklist to customize for your business, templates for sharing content with leads, customers, and influencers, and templates for promoting content on social media.
Use these content promotion tools and resources to help your content reach a wider target audience.
Content Promotion Tools And Resources
Use these content promotion tools and resources to help your content reach a wider target audience.
After creating content, your aim should be to promote it effectively through all the distribution channels specified in your content marketing strategy.
The tools and resources in this section will help you reach the widest possible audience of targeted users with your content.
***
Search Engine Pinging Tools & Services
Before you start publishing content online, make sure that your website is configured and optimized for search engines. This includes adding your sitemap to search engines as explained in the Search Engine Optimization Tools section.
Platforms like WordPress have built-in pinging features where every post you make is automatically notified (i.e. pinged) to various online resources. WordPress SEO plugins can also enhance this function.
If your site does not run on WordPress, then consider using a service like the one below to notify search engines when new content is published on your website.
Pingler
You can use Pingler to notify search engines about your newly-published posts or pages.
Simply enter your post title and post URL, select one or more categories, and click the “Ping!” button.
Pingler will then automatically notify many Ping services about your post.
Pingler allows you to ping around 100 search engine crawlers for free. It also offers a premium service that automatically scans your site for newly added content and pings around 1,000 services.
Ideally, your business should include email marketing in your content marketing mix.
The services below can help you automate the process of capturing visitor details from your website or blog and adding them to your email list or email newsletter.
Aweber
Aweber is one of the world’s most reliable and popular email delivery services and offers a professional and affordable list building, autoresponder, and email marketing automation solution with many extensive features like:
Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber, you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types if users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base, and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email, and live text chat.
In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:
Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS feed into emails that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you publish something new on your website or blog.
Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.
To test drive Aweber for free, enter your details into the form below, or click here to sign up for an account:
MailChimp
Mailchimp is a leading email marketing and automation platform providing an all-in-one marketing solution for businesses.
Mailchimp provides intelligent marketing and automation tools to target your customers and track your results, like pre-built customer journey workflows, predictive segmentation, AI-powered content tools, data-driven recommendations, and 300+ integrations, in addition to a reporting dashboard, website building, and hosting,
You need email addresses to promote your content using an email service.
You can search through websites manually to find contact information and email addresses, or use the tools below.
Hunter
Hunter is an email-finding tool that lets you find professional email addresses from websites and provides a list of the people working in a company with their names and email addresses.
Hunter searches for emails from domains using filters and email patterns with verifiable public sources and lets you save and export emails to your CRM.
Hunter also has a Chrome extension, so you can find and add email addresses to your list using your Chrome web browser
Verifalia is a service that validates email addresses, cleans email lists in real time, and helps to reduce your bounce rate by keeping your mailing lists free of invalid, risky, and mistaken email addresses.
ContactOut is a tool that lets you find email addresses and phone numbers, build lead-generation lists, and send out personalized emails to a large list of contacts.
The software also has a search engine that allows you to search for leads by name, company, title, or location. You can also filter your results by company size, industry, or other criteria.
This is a useful tool for recruiting new team members or doing email outreach campaigns.
A FREE, 7-day email course on how to write welcome emails and autoresponder series, plus fill-in-the-blank email templates that will help make sending emails easier.
Effective social media marketing requires capable tools that can help you promote your content and manage, track, and analyze your content performance results across various social media platforms.
Use the tools and services below to promote and track your video promotions and video content performance.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4’s enhanced web data stream measurement feature is enabled by default and captures core user interactions like file downloads, outbound linking, and video tracking.
You can track how videos are performing on your website on Google Analytics by going to Behavior > Events > Top Events.
From there, click on Video to see how many users clicked on “play” and what percentage of your videos they’ve watched (e.g. 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%).
There are also WordPress plugins you can use like the one below for video analytics and reports.
Video Analytics – MonsterInsights
Monster Insights automatically tracks YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML 5 video events, so you can measure who watches your videos, and for how long.
The video below provides more details on how to set up tracking for your video performance on Google Analytics:
YouTube Studio provides metrics on how your YouTube video campaigns are performing.
Log in and click on the Analytics tab to access performance data, including views, estimated minutes watched, average view duration, traffic sources, devices, playback locations, audience demographics, audience retention, and more.
Additionally, you can access video engagement reports with data metrics on subscribers, likes and dislikes, favorites, comments, sharing, annotations, etc.
For more information on using YouTube Analytics, watch the video below or go here: YouTube Analytics Help Guide.
If you promote videos on Facebook, you can view video performance data in Meta Creator Studio.
The Insights tab in Creator Studio gives you a variety of metrics on the performance of your video content, such as:
1-Minute Video Views: The number of times your videos were played for at least 1 minute.
Minutes Viewed: The total number of minutes your videos were played including time spent replaying the video.
3-Second Video Views: The number of times your videos were played for at least 3 seconds, or for nearly their total length if they’re shorter than 3 seconds, within the selected time range.
Video Engagement: The number of people who reacted, commented, or shared one of your videos.
Note: Videos tracked in Creator Studio for Facebook don’t show insights into specific videos. Instead, these are aggregated based on the Page or Pages you select to review.
You can, however, see performance insights for specific videos by scrolling down to the Top Videos tab. This will display a list of your top videos, with information like the Page it was posted on, date added, minutes viewed, 1-minute views, 3-second views, and engagement.
For an even closer look at the performance details for a specific video, click on the video title or image.
Wistia is a video hosting solution with lead capture tools and analytics.
With Wistia, you can include call-to-action forms and buttons and use its advanced in-depth analytics to analyze user demographics, track engagement with viewers, and see which actions users take after watching your video (e.g. make purchases).
Wistia integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to see how your video campaigns are performing. It also includes CRM integrations, engagement statistics, and heat maps.
SproutVideo is a video hosting service that offers excellent editing, encoding, privacy, and API customizations.
SproutVideo’s video engagement metrics and deep analytics let you track how users react and interact with your content using heatmaps, see what users did before and after watching your video, and use calls-to-action, lead capture methods, and email marketing integration to improve your results.
Conviva’s Streaming Insights Platform delivers real-time measurement of premium streaming video, measuring video consumption and engagement across many social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, etc.), and bringing census-level streaming TV metrics with audience intelligence from social media platforms.
Conviva’s tools provide actionable insights with a comprehensive, real-time, cross-device collection of all your streaming data across your entire streaming audience.
Anchor is Spotify’s free podcasting and hosting platform.
This podcast analytics tool is an all-in-one solution that helps you create engaging podcasts and host unlimited episodes at no cost and enables you to distribute your podcast to all major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts with just one click.
Check out these additional podcast tools and services for promoting and tracking your podcasts:
Chartable – Track your full funnel and grow your show to find the most effective audio channels for growth. Use podcast analytics to track all your data in one place, stay on top of your chart ranks & reviews, and track podcast charts and podcast reviews from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, across over 150 countries. Also, get ranks across all stores and countries, recent reviews, and more delivered to your inbox daily or weekly, plus notifications about your podcasts.
Podbean – Get comprehensive statistics with all the insights you need to track how your podcast performs.
Backtracks – Backtracks Podcast Analytics collects podcast listener metrics and listener data. It can tell you if a podcast download results in a play, so you can learn what’s working and what’s not in your podcast content and ads.
Transistor – Get stats on downloads, listens, and streams from all listening apps.
Blubrry – IAB v2.1 Certified Compliant statistics and insights to help you analyze your listeners and grow your show, for any podcast, on any hosting platform.
Fireside – Get accurate, real-time download stats and analytics. Every unique download is tracked and counted accurately.
Simplecast– Industry-leading publishing, distribution, analytics, and sharing tools for podcasters.
Castbox – Measure your subscribers, streams, and downloads with robust podcasting analytic tools.
Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing
If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, this FREE guide will help you master easy email marketing strategies to turn listeners into subscribers, build your brand, and grow your podcast.
If your content marketing strategy includes creating eBooks, guides, or online courses, you may want to promote these using the tools and self-publishing platforms listed below.
RebranderPro
RebranderPRO is an online tool that lets you turn PDF reports and guides into rebrandable reports that you can share with resellers and affiliates.
The tool also provides tracking and analytics to measure the performance of your shared content (e.g. downloads and clicks).
Practical applications of using RebranderPRO include:
Creating retail price lists or product catalogs that your resellers, distributors, or affiliates can rebrand with their business details, website URLs, or merchant/affiliate IDS and distribute to their clients.
Promoting lead generation reports and guides with an affiliate program. Your affiliates can then rebrand these with their affiliate ID, distribute them on their website, and share these with their audiences.
KDP is a free service from Amazon that lets you self-publish eBooks and promote these to a global audience.
KDP gives you control of your book and lets you edit the content and pricing as often as you like after publication.
Additionally, KDP’s promotional features help you create more exposure for your books, books can be read on all devices, and the KDP lending library pays royalties on popular and widely read/shared publications.
For more information and to set up a free account on the Amazon Kindle platform, go here: KDP
See the resources below for more information on promoting eBooks, guides, and reports, and a step-by-step tutorial on formatting and uploading your eBook to Amazon’s KDP:
If you plan to create and sell eBooks or Guides, then consider adding these to digital marketplaces like the ones shown below:
ClickBank.com – ClickBank is an e-commerce platform and affiliate marketplace where product owners and affiliates can connect with each other. Add your eBook or Guide and let affiliates promote it for you.
JVZoo.com – JVZoo is an e-commerce and affiliate platform that allows you to sell and promote unlimited products from one account.
Lulu.com – Lulu lets you print and publish books directly using print-on-demand technologies.
If you plan to create and sell eCourses, video courses, etc., then consider adding these to digital marketplaces like the ones shown below:
Skillshare – Skillshare is an online learning community offering thousands of courses and classes on all kinds of topics.
Udemy – Udemy is a marketplace where course creators can publish and sell courses online.
See the resources below for more information on creating and promoting online courses and using learning management systems (LMS):
For more information, tools, and resources on promoting your content with QR codes, go here: Using QR Codes.
Content Marketing Management Tools & Services
Here are some comprehensive tools and services to help you manage and track the performance of your content marketing campaigns.
Hubspot
HubSpot is an “all-in-one” marketing software with an integrated CRM platform that provides tools for blogging, social media, email marketing, SEO, landing pages, marketing automation, and web analytics.
HubSpot’s software is comprised of marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations “hubs” that work seamlessly together to help you grow your business.
CoSchedule lets you organize and run all of your marketing from one place.
CoSchedule provides a marketing suite of products to help you coordinate your team, projects, and processes, manage marketing requests, etc., content marketing training, and tools to help you analyze and improve your headlines, email subjects, and social messages.
CoSchedule also offers a free content marketing calendar, which you can use to run your editorial calendar.
CoSchedule also integrates with:
Applications – e.g. WordPress, Evernote, Google Docs, Office 365, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive,
Social networks – e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram
Email services – e.g. MailChimp, Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact.
Contentsquare helps you analyze user behavior to understand what is and isn’t working on your web pages, assess page elements in terms of impact, performance, and usability to identify areas for subsequent updates, and conduct a customer journey analysis.
StoryChief is an all-in-one content marketing platform that provides centralized and unified content workflow, collaboration, planning, publishing, analytics, and reporting tools, integrated content calendar, and many other features.
With 1,000+ integrations, StoryChief allows content teams to publish content to any CMS or intranet and is a widely used tool for multi-channel marketing campaigns, managing social media marketing activities, content data, SEO, and a whole lot more.
Watch the video below for an overview of this tool:
The video courses below cover many basic areas of content promotion and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn ways to increase your conversions by improving your processes and how to set up sales funnels that will help you sift through serious buyers, filter out non-serious buyers, and create a long-term, high-converting customer list.
This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.
Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.
Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.
Learn how to use news releases effectively to boost your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your website, and generate new leads for your business.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.