Two overlooked elements that need to be part of your distribution strategy
What does your distribution strategy look like? If you’re just relying on email or social media to spread your organization’s message, keep reading.
Distribution strategies are tactical plans for sharing content and engaging with your audience with the goal of growing reach and brand recognition. They can include social media frequency and tone, specific language for media outreach, and paid promotion budget approach. Overall, they should paint the vision and offer guidelines for how your organization presents itself.
But if your distribution strategy only focuses on social media or newsletters, it’s time you broaden your approach. Review what your digital ecosystem looks like and what benefits you can offer your audience, then ask yourself two things:
Who can I work with outside of my organization to carry my message to a broader audience?
What are some of the topics that intrigue my audience, and how can I bring value to that topic?
I spoke with Kristin Oakley, growth editor for new initiatives at Quartz, about how she uses these two questions as the baseline for growing Quartz’s audience. She recommends developing partnerships and implementing SEO best practices into your editorial workflow.
Partnerships work best when two organizations use their unique strengths to help each other grow their reach and audience. These relationships may involve varied business goals from each side, but the overall outcome should be a mutual effort to elevate one another. Meanwhile, a proficiency in search can improve your organization’s organic discoverability. You can be successful at SEO if you anticipate the questions your target audiences may be asking themselves.
AMS homes in on the answers to these two questions in the Growth Editor Bootcamps we host for marketing and communications leaders around the country. But if you can’t make it to our bootcamp, here are two guiding principles that can help you get started in the interim.
1) Develop partnership arrangements that are mutually beneficial and build on your current distribution efforts.
If you want to grow your audience in a specific channel or platform, find partners that have been successful within that space. Start by identifying like-minded publishers with overlapping audiences and contacting them to work together.
Figuring out what other people are doing, and how that fits into the news ecosystem, will help you define the kind of partnership you want to have. Social media partnerships are a simple method for reaching a new audience. They’re a low-lift ask for partners and they show immediate results as well as long-term growth.
Facebook’s layout allows for ease of sharing, Oakley explains, so Quartz has focused on video and link-sharing partnerships to grow its audience on multiple Facebook pages.
For instance, The Atlantic shares videos from Quartz’s native Facebook page, QZ, and vice versa. Quartz has used video partnerships in particular to grow an entirely native Facebook page, which she says has helped them generate diverse content for partners.
“I think the benefit of partnerships is reaching a larger, wider Facebook audience. We have overlap between the people that like our page as well as our partners, but there’s always going to be more people,” Oakley says. “Facebook has the easiest partnerships to create because of the ease of sharing in general. Facebook is designed for this and that’s what enables it.”
Another piece of advice from Oakley is to find out how potential partners present themselves digitally and what their strategy is. You have a solid understanding on what your organization does, and it’s just as important to understand the goals, messaging, and audiences of potential partner organizations as well.
Partnerships by definition should benefit both of you, and you should have a deep understanding of their organization if your brand is going to be associated with it. Finding an overlap in audience interest can also be critical to a partnership’s success.
“Most of our partnerships is about finding the overlap between publications and finding what both audiences will be interested in. It’s definitely an art and it takes good editorial judgment and it requires a good understanding of what other publications are doing,” Oakley says.
2) Optimize headlines for search by answering burning questions about a certain topic.
Through social media and newsletters, you’re delivering content directly to your followers and subscribers, hoping they will be interested enough to click on your content. People are already searching for the topic or news item you’re covering, so you know they’re already interested. Oakley refers to it as “service journalism.”
Search traffic, however, behaves differently. “On social, they’re encountering it out on the wild, that means there’s a lot of distractions around it. With search traffic, someone is making the effort to learn about something,” Oakley says.
By studying your publication’s search traffic and the behaviors of readers that find your content through those means, you can predict potential search patterns in order to lead readers to your content.
For example, Quartz’s article on the 7 Earth-like planets and the potential for alien life was one the top stories on Google when we searched for the “7 planet solar system”. Searching for keywords like “NASA”, “alien life”, or “solar system” brought up different publishers covering the same news item. Some people Google questions, while others search for terms or phrases associated to particular news coverage.
That said, you are still competing for their click once they go searching, so your headline will help you stand out. “You need to show why you bring value to that topic. Think about how you can briefly explain how your article does that,” she explains. So to make a successful SEO headline, try to anticipate the story angle that will answer people’s burning questions on emerging topics or news items.
Learn more about what you can do to grow your audience by registering for Atlantic Media Strategies’ Growth Editor Bootcamps. Also be sure to sign up for our newsletter, Digital Trends Index, a weekly roundup of the top trends and insights at the intersection of media and technology.
