Pillar 9: Content Distribution Channels
Now, that you have crafted valuable content pieces and published them on your site, you have to promote the content created. You need obviously to bring your content in front of as many eyes as possible. We all have herd the dictum – spend 20% of your time creating your content and 80% promoting. So practically, your hard work starts after the content was created.
In this stage, you have to decide which promotion channel will you use and how often. It all depends on where your audience hangs out and at which times.
The first major channel is Social Media
These days you cannot afford to exclude social media from your promotion strategy. So, taking into consideration the characteristics of your buyer personas, identify which social media networks fit them best.
For instance, if you target B2B established professionals, LinkedIn is the best option, if your buyer persona is young people under 30, Snapchat or Instagram are better options to consider. Consider using analytics for each social media network to find the insights that you need. Test each potential platform to see which bring in the best results. Most probably you will face a trial and error process till you find the right channels for your business.
Once the social media channels decided, the following step is to create a schedule to promote your content.
Each piece of content will religiously respect this schedule.
A promotion schedule on social media channels might look like:
Day of publish:
One Pin on Pinterest
One Facebook post
One Instagram post
Three Twitter posts
One week after publishing:
One LinkedIn repost
Two Twits three days of the week
One Medium repost
One Pin daily on group boards
Following weeks till one month after publishing:
One LinkedIn repost after one month of publishing
Two Twits three days of the week, four weeks after publishing
One repost weekly on Facebook
One Pin daily for one month in group boards and own relevant boards
Another option for your social media promotion is to use paid advertising. These ads help ensure your content gets seen and setting them up is incredibly easy.
Promote on your email list
Your email list is your greatest asset, as you are its owner and you decide what you want to do with it and how to use it.
If you decide to use your mail list to promote your newly published content decide how many mails you are going to send and when.
Promote through tiers
One option is to use syndication sites to republish your content. These sites depend on niche. For marketing stuff Inbound.org or Business2Community are some great options.
Or you can tag influencers and experts that you quote or mention in your published content and maybe they will share it also.
Or you can network with other fellow bloggers or companies to promote your content to their mail list.
There were lots to do in the beginning and still remained a bit. Let’s continue, shall we…
Pillar 10: Measuring Results of Your Content Marketing Strategy
One of the major challenges of a marketer is to measure the success and results of the content created. Of course, lately the situation has improved dramatically, we have now analytics, but has bounce rate an impact of your content’s success, are pageviews a huge indicator of success? Well, arguably.
Here are some metrics that you want to consider:
· pageviews. Many pageviews translates that you managed to attract the right audience interested in your content and products or that visitors were searching for more information on a certain subject
· time on page. The longer the better. High dwelling time mean the content was considered useful by the readers if it was lengthy enough, for a short text might mean that it is difficult to consume, and readers spend much time depicting it.
· social shares. The more the better, as usual. Even if that will not necessarily translate into more business for you, it is certainly an indicator of success.
· bounce rate. A small bounce rate, well that’s another discussion: what do we consider a “small bounce rate”, means that the audience is interested in your content. And reverse a high bounce rate, means that the audience was not interested. Though, it is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of your content. If your content ended up in front of the wrong audience, that’s just to be expected. If I end up on a blog about food for cats and I am not a cat lover, my visit will be a bounce rate.

KPIs to measure content marketing strategy results. Source: SmartInsights
Experience with your own content will learn you and your team how to identify problems and how to solve them.
After deciding how your measurement process will look like and which indicators will be used, you should also decide on how often you will create the reports and establish some templates for these reports. It will be easier to draw conclusions if you use a uniform template for the reports that will ease the comparison of metrics.
There you have it, the 10 major pillars that sustain a powerful content marketing strategy able to support your future growth and expansion.
This article was first published here.