Content Dissemination and Propagation

Great content is useless if the right people don’t see it!?

Creating great content is only half the battle. Identifying the right people for the right content and knowing where to put it is probably even more important.

Understanding your target audience is of paramount importance.

Marketers must identify and define the audience that would consume the content. Understanding audience behavior is just as important. It defines what kind of content would work and where to place it.

Marketers also need to understand the content that needs propagation. Content that is curated with the purpose to target finance professionals would not be relevant to a Sales or a marketing professional and as such need to find a home where a finance professional would consume content.

End of the day the purpose to create content is to educate and influence the audience. Defining your niche and their behavior is key.

Choose Your Space

There are some questions that marketers must ask themselves to understand their audiences’ psyches. For example, “Where does our audience frequent”, “Where do they engage with content?” or “What's the platform that excites them into discussions and decisions?” etc.

While simple, these questions get you close to achieving your goal of finding the right platforms for your content placement,

Marketers must factor in some amount of hit-and-miss in the entire process of content dissemination, which brings me to my next point of being able to employ organic and inorganic means of content dissemination.

Content that is created to serve a specific purpose must be visible to the right audience. For this, one must consider both organic and inorganic modes of content dissemination & propagation.

Organic Dissemination of Content

The easiest and most natural step towards content dissemination is publishing content on company-owned assets, for example, on their website, YouTube channel, and social media.

Marketers must invest in SEO & having a solid SEO strategy.

The SEO strategy must consider all search engines and must concentrate on more than just the big one. A good SEO strategy cannot happen without patience takes a little longer to see results and helps build credibility over the long run.

Most people today spend time searching for solutions on search engines, and if a great piece of content is not amongst the top results, it ends up being a waste.

Marketers must also focus on video content creation. Studies suggest that 84% of consumers tend to make a purchase decision after watching an explainer video. YouTube today is one of the largest search engines, and marketers must ensure that they employ the power of YouTube.

Social Media too, is a powerful tool when it comes to organic content propagation. Social media allows marketers a lot of flexibility in terms of selecting the right audience and ensuring the post reaches them.

While the organic route is essential, it takes time, and the results are not always easily measurable this is where inorganic dissemination of content becomes the other half of the marketing pie.

Inorganic Content Dissemination

Marketers need to aggressively promote content through as many channels as possible. Strategies including cross promotions, Pay-per-Click, and deploying content marketing platforms for better content discovery, as well as the use of social media & search engine marketing, are important weapons in the arsenal.

Marketers need to have a singular focus on driving hard measurable ROI now more than ever.

Content syndication is a somewhat neglected part of the conversation when discussing strategies.

Probably the most widely uses and the most measurable, content syndication and lead generation programs allow marketers to grow their reach to newer and relevant audiences.

By allowing marketers to publish their gated content on relevant websites, targeted leads are generated at various stages of qualification from the top of the funnel all the way down to BANT lead through email and or telephonic outbound promotion of the assets to a targeted audience.

Marketers should look at social media & search engine campaigns either simultaneously or stand-alone as a robust brand-building and lead-generation exercise. Now, what form of paid promotions works truly depends on the nature of the content and the kind of service it caters to. Experience dictates that LinkedIn is the go-to platform for most B2B companies.

LinkedIn, over the years, has developed itself as a powerful tool for marketers to help promote a piece of content.

In addition to that, Search Engine marketing too plays a huge role in promoting content and placing it in front of the right people. Search engines are more user-focused and pull-driven, i.e. a piece of content would only be made visible to those who are searching for a certain keyword or a certain topic, which helps in sifting through the dirt and maintaining focus.