B2B Content Distribution - Key Questions Answered

Today, we discuss a topic that is one of the most interesting to B2B marketers and founders - content distribution.

To many, creating content consistently is challenging. However, a few find distributing and promoting the content they created even more challenging. Let's end that with this edition of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter.

Unlike my usual articles, this one follows a question-answer format where I share my thoughts on some of the most common questions related to content distribution.

Let's begin.

Note: This content has been improved and repurposed from my recent podcast with Sanjana Murali. I have added a few more relevant thoughts that are not covered in the podcast under each question for more depth and richness. Here is the full podcast video:

My thoughts on some of the burning content distribution problems

Q1. What are the most important marketing channels B2B businesses can use for content distribution?

A: I think content distribution as a topic is something unnecessarily made complex. I don't know why. But it's not rocket science. A lot of the things that you do with content distribution and promotion are common sense. But at the same time, people struggle when it comes to having a very structured approach to doing it. And I think that is why we need to discuss some of the aspects related to content distribution.

Now, coming to the question. This is how I look at content distribution channels. I usually categorize them into two.

One is the basic, must-have kind of channels, and the second is advanced or kind of good-to-have channels.

First, let’s talk about the must-have channels.

You should definitely see SEO as a key content distribution channel. You should have LinkedIn marketing since it's B2B. You should also leverage email marketing and video marketing. And if you have the budget, you should also do some form of ads that will help you kind of get that extra push, which organic channels might not be able to do, especially in the early days of your business because organic channels like SEO and videos take time to produce results.

Coming to advanced channels.

And I'm calling these advanced channels not because they're very complicated or very difficult to implement. I recommend my clients at my agency Skalegrow to get started with the so-called basic/must-have channels and then venture into these advanced channels only if they're able to get some success with the other channels.

Examples of advanced channels or good-to-have channels include webinars, partner marketing, event marketing, podcasts, influencer collaborations, PR, third-party sponsorships, etc.

These are channels you venture into to take your content promotion and distribution to the next level. This is how I broadly look at the different content distribution channels B2B companies can use.

Q2: How should companies approach content distribution? Should startups and enterprises employ the same tactics or are they different?

It all depends on your resources. For example, startups that are completely bootstrapped and are struggling with budget might not be able to invest a lot into things like ads or event marketing that have a large upfront investment.

At the same time, there are funded startups that have the resources, people, and money to put into active marketing efforts.

However, assuming that you are a very lean startup and don't have a lot of budget, I would go back to my categorization of must-have channels.

I think any B2B startup should invest in SEO. And SEO not just because you can use it to get traffic to your website. But using something like a blog to create SEO-optimized content will also help you position yourself as a thought leader in your space and showcase that you understand your industry.

Email marketing is another channel early-stage companies should invest in because I think that's one of the best ways in which you can directly reach your prospects. It can be in the form of a newsletter. It can be a sales-driven, outbound email marketing campaign too.

Then there is LinkedIn, which we all know, is a great platform for any kind of B2B business. Whether you're using the company page or the key leaders page of your organization, LinkedIn is a must-have for your B2B business.

And I would also add videos to the mix. Especially if you are an early-stage company, people have not seen you, they have not met you. And video is one of the best ways to show the people behind the scenes. I mean, the very reason why I appear as a guest on other podcasts is because I want people to see me. I'm in the agency business, and I want people to have a feel of who's doing all the things behind the scenes.

These are, I think, the must-have channels. And as the company grows and as they get more resources, then it makes sense to invest in more channels.

Now, when it comes to enterprises, they have the resources. So they have to take an omnichannel approach.

For example, if you look at large brands like the Apples, HubSpots, and Salesforces of the world, they are everywhere. You go to X, you find them there. You go to events, they are there. You go to LinkedIn, you find them there. All of them have taken a very omnichannel approach or omnipresent approach to marketing, wherein they are not just leveraging one channel, but multiple channels.

Beyond the usuals, if you look at a lot of these players, they are using Q&A platforms like Quora for example. They also host their content on PDF hosting websites like Slideshare, Scribe, or Issuu. They also use innovative tools like Sendoso that combine the physical and digital aspects of technology (Sendoso is a direct mail tool that helps you send direct mail to customers with items like branded swag). That’s a unique distribution channel enterprises can use today.

There are also platforms like, for example, Influ2 which is an ad platform using which you can advertise to specific people and not accounts. Then there is another tool called QuuuPromote which can be used to automatically promote your social media posts.

These are just a few examples of different or unique channels large enterprises use. But long story short, enterprises have to take an omnichannel approach. And more often than not, out of the ten or 15 channels that these companies use, it is four or five channels that give them the biggest boost. And you wouldn't know which are those four or five channels unless you experiment a lot with them.

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Q3: Let's talk about AI since it's growing in popularity in marketing today. Do you think it will have an impact on content distribution?

It depends on how you define distribution. I like to look at content distribution holistically because the very foundation of distribution is having high-quality content. You need to create content for you to be able to distribute.

In that sense, AI definitely has a role, and AI can accelerate your content creation process. There are different kinds of AI tools today that help us expedite the process of content creation, starting with ChatGPT.

In addition to ChatGPT, there are AI writing assistants like Jasper or Copy AI. That's one category of tools that can help you create content faster. Then there are automated video generation tools like Synthesia, Rephrase, and HeyGen, that can help you create AI avatar-based videos.

Another example is text-to-speech conversion tools like Speechelo, ElevenLabs, and Speechify using which you can create professional voiceovers.

Like these, there are different kinds of AI tools that make the process of content creation easier and faster, which would mean that you can then go ahead and distribute your content faster.

The other way in which AI helps distribution is content repurposing. Tools like Repurpose.io or Vizard can convert one form of content into another.

For example, let's say you have created a long-form video that is in the 16:9 aspect ratio for YouTube. Now you want to repurpose them quickly into shorts or Instagram reels, which have to be in the 9:16 aspect ratio. You can use these tools to quickly repurpose them and convert them into smaller snippets, which you can promote on different channels or formats.

This is how AI can speed up your process of content creation, by which you can then go ahead and distribute content much faster.

Q4: What are some of the things that most companies are doing right when it comes to distribution, and what do the vast majority of companies get wrong?

One thing that I've seen is, 7 years back when I started my career, there were a lot of founders, especially in the tech space, who were not very convinced of doing aggressive marketing.? They believed if the product is good, it should market itself. That was the mindset of a segment of B2B founders and marketing leaders. Not a lot of companies were using digital channels as actively as they should.

But now things have changed. People realize the importance of content distribution and promotion. This is the reason why you see a lot of startup founders, even before their startup becomes a thing or achieves product market fit, they would have built some kind of a personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn or YouTube. In essence, people today understand the importance of content creation and content distribution.

Now coming to misconceptions.

The first one I would pick is the belief that good content promotes itself.

99% of the time it wouldn't.

Creating quality content is not enough. You have to use different channels to distribute it. This is why you see a lot of leading brands and marketers in the world distributing the same content, maybe in a repurposed format, on different platforms like YouTube, X, LinkedIn, email, etc. If creating quality content was the only thing to be done, they would have just added it to their website and would be sitting back and relaxing. They do a lot of repurposing, they do a lot of reproducing, they do a lot of redistribution.

So good content does not promote by itself most of the time.

The second one is more of an opportunity that people don't use enough rather than a misconception.

It is not using enough channels that they have easily access to. ?I'll give you a very specific example. Take LinkedIn newsletters.

I don't see a lot of B2B brands using it as much. It is such an excellent channel for distribution, especially if you already have a good number of followers on LinkedIn.

Let's say your company page has around 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. Or it can be the profiles of your founders and key leaders. When you start a LinkedIn newsletter, what happens is that an automated notification goes out to all your followers, and roughly 5 to 10% of people accept and become subscribers on day 1.

So a follower base of 50,000 with a 5 to 10% acceptance rate means that you get anywhere between 2500-5000 subscribers with the first edition of your newsletter. A portion of them become your permanent readers too.

I can even call out SEO as an example because there are still today a lot of companies that are not creating SEO-optimized content, which would help them scale in the long run.

That is the second missed opportunity when it comes to B2B content distribution.

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Q5: Let's talk about tools for a brief moment. What should a content distribution tech stack look like? I know you mentioned a lot of tools, but do you want to point out some essential tools and some nice to have kind of tools?

As I said earlier, content distribution does not exist without content creation. So pretty much anything that you could use for content creation can be brought into this category.

But let me start with a platform that you can directly use for content distribution.

It is QuuuPromote. It is an automated social media promotion platform. It will help you find real people who are interested in sharing your content. This might not work for a very niche industry. However, for popular industries, QuuuPromote can be an excellent place to distribute content.

Other than this, I'll go back to content creation tools.

If I talk about the essentials, there are content writing tools. They include grammar and plagiarism checkers like Grammarly for example. These are your content writing assistants.

You can also bring SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, or any SEO tool of your choice into that category.

Email marketing is also an excellent distribution channel. Any email tool like HubSpot, Convertkit, Mailchimp, or Zoho are examples.

Design and video editing tools can also be considered under content distribution because they are key in your content creation process. Starting from something very simple like Canva to Adobe Creative stack, there is a wide variety of video tools.

Now, when you create and distribute content, you also should be able to analyze the effectiveness of those content items, which is where the analytics tools come in. And we don't have to mostly go for any paid tools.

You can use Google Analytics, Google Search console, and the analytics provided by the native platforms to do that.

In addition to these, I would say there are some good to haves. AI content writers and AI video generation platforms are great examples of these. You could also use tools like SparkToro or Buzzsumo for content research to know where the discussions related to your niche are happening.

I would also go ahead and add website personalization tools like Adobe Target or Hyperise. They can dynamically change content based on the characteristics of the person visiting the website. Even that is an example of content distribution.

The list is quite extensive, but I can categorize them into three - content creation, content distribution, and analytics. This is how I broadly look at it, in

I would suggest you go ahead and do further reading on the topic. You can refer the below article where I discuss 70+ B2B content marketing tools.

70+ B2B Content Marketing Tools You Should Know

Q6: For those who don't wish to invest too much into paid channels or expensive tools, what is your advice on building a strong distribution engine?

In content distribution, like anything in marketing, there's a lot of experimentation. In my agency Skalegrow, it's like for almost every client, we have a different approach because their business is different, their industry is different, the regions they are targeting are different, and the target persona is different. You have to consider all these factors when you approach content distribution.

But broadly speaking, the way I look at it is, start with the essentials. We spoke about channels like SEO, LinkedIn marketing, email marketing, video marketing, etc., as the absolute essentials.

Start with these. Do different kinds of experimentation, see what channel is working, and what is resonating with your audience, collect feedback, and then achieve a certain level of maturity with these channels. Make sure that you're comfortable creating and distributing content.

Once you start to get some traction on these channels, move to the good to haves. It can be webinars, it can be partner marketing, it can be events, it can be podcasts, whatever you think should be the next step or the next set of channels for you.

I'm not trying to suggest a 'one-size-fits-all' approach here because every business is different. Basically, you divide this into two steps. Start with the absolute essentials, achieve some level of maturity, and then move on to the new channels.

One thing to keep in mind is that you should not be rigid with your approach in any channel. What works today might not work tomorrow.

Let's take LinkedIn, for example. The algorithm keeps changing every now and then. There was a time when carousels used to get easily 40% to 50% more impressions compared to your other content types, which is not happening much on LinkedIn today. Similarly, videos used to get a lot of views and impressions. But that's not happening anymore on LinkedIn.

So things keep changing. Algorithms change, rules change. Make sure you adapt your distribution strategy accordingly.

Looking to take your B2B marketing efforts to the next level? Try Skalegrow

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More learning resources

Skalegrow has a blog that has more than 60 articles on various topics in B2B marketing. We discuss content, ABM, demand gen, martech, LinkedIn marketing, and much more there. Check it out here.

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As always, until we meet next time, happy learning!