In the world of B2B marketing, creating content is only half the battle. There’s little use in spending hours creating high quality content if nobody ever finds it. For this reason, it’s crucial to have a content distribution plan.
To give you a head start, we’ve put together a list of effective B2B content distribution channels plus tips on how to get the most out of each channel.
Social Media
LinkedIn is arguably the most powerful content distribution channel for B2B marketers. This is due to the highly targeted nature of the professional networks it enables users to build as well as the extended content lifespan resulting from group discussions (your posts can often remain visible for weeks).
Best practicess:
- Share content on your profile
- Join relevant groups and post content in discussions (don’t be spammy – ensure your content is relevant and promotes discussion
- Consider using LinkedIn ads to reach highly targeted audiences.
The lifetime of a tweet is shorter than that of a mayfly. However this doesn’t necessarily mean that people won’t view and re-tweet your content.
Best practices:
- Use rotating scheduled tweets to extend the lifespan of your content (spread out your tweets to avoid being labeled as a spammer)
- Use the search function within Twitter to find users who are tweeting about your area of expertise. When relevant (e.g. your content answers a question someone is asking), reply with a tweet that includes a link to your content.
Google+
If you’re targeting Google employees or internet marketers, Google+ is the right platform for the job. All jokes aside, Google+ is becoming an increasingly effective B2B content distribution channel.
Best practicess:
- Publicly share content on your profile
- Share content with targeted audiences via circles
- Click the +1 button on all your content (encourage employees to do this too)
Facebook is widely regarded as a network for communicating with family and friends as opposed to business networking. Despite this, it can still be an effective B2B content distribution platform. The key to getting the most out of Facebook is to ensure that your content is being exposed to people who will actually care about it - if not, you’ll just become a nuisance to people.
Best practices:
- Segment your friends into lists so you that you only share content with people it’s relevant to
- Create a page and share all content on it
- Consider Facebook advertising to reach highly targeted audiences
- Join or create groups around your area of expertise. Share content with relevant groups.
Pinterest is the new cool kid in the world of social media. It has passed the fad stage and appears to be here to stay. Whilst still largely unproven as a B2B content distribution channel, an opportunity exists for early adopters.
Best practices:
- Create pin boards around your area of expertise. “Pin” your content to these boards.
- Re-pin the content of other users when relevant
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking sites have waned in popularity in recent years. However, there are some still some sites that are worth submitting your content to.
Best practices:
- Use online tools that automatically submit your content to multiple bookmarking sites
- Submit content to relevant business-oriented bookmarking sites
- Do not submit your content to hundreds of sites, as this will raise red flags to search engine spam detectors. Only submit content to the best and most relevant bookmarking sites.
Image, Video & Audio Sharing Sites
Multimedia content, video in particular, is playing an increasingly important role in B2B marketing. Multimedia content is appealing to users because of the interactive and sensory experience it can provide.
Best practices:
- Optimise multimedia content with keyword-centred titles, descriptions and tags (don’t go overboard – make sure the title and description are user-friendly)
- Use mass submission tools such as TubeMogul to submit your content to multiple sites at once.
In the early days of email marketing it was common practice to use scrapers to build vast databases of people to send unsolicited email to. However, the development of anti-spam laws and advanced spam detection software brought this to an end. Now, it’s common practice to give users free access to content in exchange for the right to send them emails.
Best practices:
- Use marketing automation software to create lead nurturing email campaigns
- Use outbound email to provide news updates and to promote special offers
- Enable readers to subscribe to your blog via email.
RSS
RSS (really simple syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video, in a standardised format. It’s a great way to increase exposure.
Best practices:
- Enable RSS subscription to your blog
- Invite relevant organisations to add your blog RSS feed to their websites
- Manually add your blog feed to RSS directories.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging exposes you to untapped and highly targeted audiences and as a result, has the potential to drive a steady flow of referral traffic to your website.
Best practices:
- Reach out to websites/blogs that are relevant to your area of expertise
- Re-purpose existing content into guest posts.
Press Release Distribution Sites
Whilst press releases are no longer as powerful as they once were, they still have a role to play in B2B content distribution. Press releases have the potential to drive referral traffic and inbound links.
Best practices:
- Include one inbound link per 200 words
- Do not write more than 1000 words per press release
- Do your research before selecting a paid service.
Affiliate Links
If you're affiliated with other organisations, why not ask them to link to your website? Gaining fresh inbound links will give your website more authority in the eyes of search engines and it will also drive targeted referral traffic.
Best practices:
- When possible, include both an image link (with optimised alt tag) and a text link (with optimised anchor text)
- Ask for links on pages that receive higher levels of traffic (this will provide more link juice and more referral traffic).
Learn more about content marketing
To learn more about how you can use content marketing to drive revenue, download our FREE ebook The Content Marketing Revolution:
Are we missing anything? Let us know in the comment section below.
