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In the digital era, creating stellar content is only half the battle — the other half is getting the right eyeballs on it. These days, there’s an entire ecosystem devoted to getting views using content distribution platforms, and content marketers devote much of their time to this work.

Without a content distribution plan, the time you spend creating content is wasted. A recent Ahrefs study found that more than 96% of content gets no traffic from Google at all. That’s an incredible amount of time and energy put into content that could bring a lot of value to a reader, but never finds an audience. Relying on search engines and organic traffic to help users and potential customers find your content is not guaranteed to be a successful strategy.

With all the tools available, you’ve got a huge opportunity to ramp up your content distribution game beyond search in order to get your content in front of as many eyes as you can. Social media channels, search engine optimization, emails, paid advertising, forum posts, and content syndication are all part of content distribution and promotion. However, doing all of this work manually, per channel, is incredibly time-consuming.

If nobody sees your work, nobody is going to love it or learn from it. You’ve got to have a plan for distribution. To help you start building one, here’s an overview of the five best content distribution platforms to consider.

The 5 Best Content Distribution Platform Options

Buffer

Buffer’s simple and intuitive interface lets marketers manage all of their social media accounts in one place. Not only can you schedule posts across all of your profiles, you also can set them to publish automatically according to your preferred timing. Buffer’s integrated metrics dashboard lets you review and compare your performance, so you can improve your results and create professional-looking reports. The browser extension is also very handy for quickly sharing posts.

A standout Buffer feature is its ability to learn what works for your target audience and make personalized recommendations. You can see examples of posts that worked in the past for each distribution channel to help you boost your engagement. Buffer also integrates with dozens of tools, including Canva, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Zapier, Quuu Promote, Google Analytics, and Feedly.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a mature social media content distribution tool that allows large teams to schedule and publish content across multiple networks from a single platform. Tools integrated into the platform’s core offering allow users to respond to and interact with connections. Hootsuite’s helpful search functionality lets you find and filter the social conversations that matter most to your brand.

That said, Hootsuite’s primary value may be its ability to organize your content promotion. Keeping track of your paid media efforts — PPC marketing, influencer marketing, paid content promotions, retargeting, etc. — can be difficult. But Hootsuite helps you create and monitor all these efforts, along with your earned media and owned media, from a central location. Plus, Hootsuite integrates with many popular marketing tools.

Mailchimp

According to Salesforce, email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800%. That means that there’s a $38 return for every $1 invested. Mailchimp aims to make it easy for small businesses to grow by helping them to create and automate email marketing campaigns that allow customers to engage, buy, and stay loyal. It’s built for users to scale flexibly over time as their business grows.

While Mailchimp has always been known for its email tools, it’s actually a full-fledged marketing automation platform that integrates all aspects of the marketing cycle, from purchase data to advertising. Users especially appreciate the Google and Facebook retargeting capabilities.

StoryChief

StoryChief is a popular content marketing tool that helps teams optimize their content for SEO and distribute it on multiple channels from a central location. The software has a nice interface that’s easy to navigate and makes it easy to plan a multi-channel content marketing strategy.

One of the things that makes StoryChief stand out from its competitors is its SEO content creator. The creator gives you actionable advice on how to improve your content before publishing it, and it allows you to bring in collaborators to improve the content. StoryChief integrates with a variety of tools, including Unsplash, Google Contacts, Buzzsprout, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Soundcloud, Medium, Salesforce, and email marketing software.

Taboola

We could hardly leave ourselves off this list! Our content discovery platform lets you promote your content on trusted publisher websites to quickly reach target audiences on a large scale — much larger than do-it-yourself options. Brands often use Taboola to reach new audiences, increase web traffic, monetize content, optimize campaigns, measure ROI, and generate organic reach.

Taboola users can choose various publishers for paid distribution, taking into account content quality, location, and audience targeting. In a heavily saturated web market, this type of targeted promotion can save a lot of time.

Best Content Distribution Platforms Compared

How to Choose a Content Distribution Platform

Choosing a content distribution platform is an important decision that should involve input and requirements from the team members who will use it most. Modern content distribution platforms offer many capabilities to keep pace with the busy online landscape. Some general areas to consider are:

• Content syndication.
• Social media.
• Email marketing.
• Video sharing.
• Influencer marketing.
• Podcast distribution.
• Content aggregation.

Once you start exploring specific content distribution platforms, it’s helpful to evaluate these four broad product areas:

• User Interface (UI): Modern platforms should offer easy-to-use dashboards and interfaces so users don’t get frustrated.
• Usability: Simple is ideal, so anyone on the team can use the tool without a lot of training.
• Integrations: See if the tool integrates with other marketing tech in your stack — it won’t get used properly otherwise.
• Cost: It’ll be much easier to see an ROI quickly if the platform stays within your budget.

More on Content Distribution Platforms

What Are Content Distribution Platforms, and How Do They Work?

Content distribution platforms help to automate and streamline the process of sharing your content to a broad audience beyond your website — or wherever a piece of content was initially published. Mismatched content and platforms can be ineffective and potentially damaging to your brand’s reputation. On the other hand, a well-chosen platform ensures that your content doesn’t land just anywhere, but where your audience is most receptive to it.

Content distribution platforms can help you collaborate on content, optimize it, choose where to repromote or reuse it, schedule promotions, and then gauge impact and success easily on an ongoing basis.

These platforms allow you to plan and schedule content promotions across channels, such as paid, social, forums or communities, and more. Within each of those channels can live many specific platforms or options, which add up very quickly if you’re doing the work manually. Modern marketing teams have to automate content promotion and distribution to ensure a broad range of viewers.

Why Do You Need Content Distribution Channels?

No matter which types of content distribution tools or content distribution companies you choose, remember that making sure your content reaches the right audience is just as important, if not more important, as writing it in the first place. Creating one valuable piece of content, then distributing it and repromoting strategically, will bring much more traffic — ideally evergreen traffic — than creating multiple pieces of content that aren’t viewed.

Your content marketing strategy becomes much more effective when you build in content distribution planning up front. This is particularly important if you’re working on a small team or have limited resources to create new content.

Benefits of Choosing the Right Content Distribution Platform

When you have the right content distribution in place, you can focus on what really matters in content marketing: Understanding and engaging with your audience. If content distribution is turnkey with a trusted platform, you’re able to develop new content ideas, try new formats or channels, expand into new audience segments, and focus on data and results to keep improving.

You’ll likely also save time and money using the right content distribution platform, since it will help eliminate manual work like repetitive posting.

What You Should Consider Before Acquiring a Content Distribution Platform

Consider what your broader marketing goals are, and make sure you understand what success will look like, before you acquire a content distribution platform. This will vary widely between a small e-commerce company and a large B2B SaaS company (and many variations in between).

Start the process by defining goals and KPIs for your particular organization — it may be increased organic traffic and share of voice for brand building, or it may be increasing click-through rates and acquiring more leads to boost the sales funnel.

Then, with a clearer idea of your content distribution needs, ask these questions as you’re researching content distribution platforms:

1. How will it help plan and publish content? You should be able to easily publish content across channels and schedule it ahead of time.
2. How will it improve teamwork and content quality? The right platform should help your team collaborate on content before it’s published or shared.
3. How will it aid audience responsiveness? See if you’ll get notifications, and what kind, when readers engage with your content, so you can reply quickly and build relationships.
4. How will it spark new ideas and further options? Make sure you can use the platform to easily reuse, repromote, and repurpose content into new formats or for new channels.
5. How will it show you results? Adopting a new platform requires solid analytics and reporting to make sure you’re getting the most value from it. Make sure you can create useful reports to share widely.

How to Build an Effective Content Distribution Strategy

An effective content distribution strategy takes into account your industry, your business goals, your marketing strategy, and your marketing resources. Use this checklist as you’re getting started:

• Research all potential channels, especially less traditional ones.
• Choose the right promotional channels.
• Use consistent branding.
• Consider appropriate repurposing for each piece of content.
• Coordinate content distribution across social, content, web, and comms teams.
• Make it easy for employees to share content.
• Test and learn on available channels.
• Capture the right metrics.
• Revisit the strategy regularly.

Key Takeaways

If you’re creating great content for your brand, don’t let it sit on the shelf gathering dust. It’s worth spending time promoting it to as many people as you can once you’ve put the time and resources into creating it. Try some of the best content distribution platforms out there to see what works best for your audience and get more eyeballs on your content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are some tips for effective cross-platform distribution?

Sharing content across multiple digital channels is a must. Cross-platform distribution can help you reach a wider audience. It’s also essential for building a brand, as a web user needs to see your messaging and branding many times for it to resonate. Make sure your content is consistent across all channels.

What are the three platform categories for content distribution?

Generally, content distribution platforms fall into three categories: Paid advertising, social media, and posting to niche groups and communities. In a digital world, each category contains many possible options and brings their own nuances, benefits, and challenges. Consider how to incorporate a mix of these categories and which tools will work best for your business and content goals.

What is social media content distribution?

Social media is an extensive, extremely varied market, with many options on where, when, and in what format to post content. Your LinkedIn strategy won’t be the same as your Facebook strategy, for example. Social media content distribution, then, is a way to take this and other factors into account when you’re planning which content to post when and on which channel. Use your business and marketing goals, your understanding of your audience, and past data to decide on your social media posting strategy, then continually gather data and refine accordingly.