In the world of Content Marketing, getting people to pay attention to your content is accomplished with Content Distribution. It’s akin to media planning. There are three different types of Content Distribution, Earned, Owned and Paid.
- Earned – This refers to the attention your content gets because of the inherent value it has to your audience. Your content earns viewers because they have deemed it worthy of consuming and sharing. Forrester Research defines it as “when customers become the channel.” Content distributed via Earned channels is widely understood to be the most trusted form of content.
- Owned – This includes any content that is published on a web site that you own.
- Paid – Any content that you pay a third party to distribute
While a combination of Earned, Owned and Paid Content Distribution is the most effective strategy for reaching the widest possible audience, our focus is on helping our clients create content that will gain significant attention without large media budgets. The most important step in earning attention is making the effort to truly understand what type of content your customers will value by defining your Content Pillars. Then, create content in different formats and with specific channels/platforms in mind to increase engagement and to make it easier to share. You can also earn more attention for content that you publish on your own site by applying SEO best practices that will make that content easier for search engines to find and rank higher in search results. Significant and measurable distribution results can be achieved by working smart, creating relevant and useful content and being strategic about where you publish. If you do choose to allocate budget for promoting your content, the results from your Earned Media efforts will provide you with great data that can be used to identify which content, in which format, performed best on which platforms. Always test different versions of your content in different channels to learn what works best before putting money behind promotion.
Active Mind 