Good content deserves to go all around

by BARBARA MATIJASIC, EDITION DIGITAL

Delivering the most compelling content to the right audience at the right time is what makes or breaks your work.

This article is a short case study about the distribution strategy behind the ‘For the Love of Branded Content’ report Edition Digital prepared together with Branded Content Marketing Association.

The BCMA is in a privileged position in having access to the leading experts and pioneers in the branded content industry. ‘For The Love of Branded Content’ Part 1 brings together those ‘thought-leaders’ from across the globe to share their ‘love’ and advice on what it takes to succeed in the ever-evolving world of branded content.

It was first published on The Edition hub. We chose the content hub as our core communication channel because content is found more easily this way, meaning of course that it’s also more easily recognized by search engines. And at the same time the content hub allows content to be shared and distributed around other channels very simply.

By choosing a content hub as our core, we’ve decided to do follow this strategy:

Step 1: Creating for your audience

It’s very important to always keep in mind who you are producing content for. What are they interested in? How do they normally consume their content?

Now this report brings together ‘thought-leaders’ from the branded content world to share their ‘love’ and advice on what it takes to succeed in the ever-evolving world of branded content, so we opted for a hybrid style of digital publication with few interactive options because we know the most important parts of the whole report are the essays and authors themselves.

We’ve included images and videos and used landscape orientation as this is more natural for the digital environment.

It’s always good to divide complex content into different parts. By so-called “continuous publishing” you can keep your readers engaged over time. The whole ‘For the Love of Branded Content’ report will be available in 3 parts. However, each piece is communicated as a standalone feature. Another thing we did on The Edition hub is that we’ve also published an article with the story of the report. The goal here was to curate the same content in two different ways and to re-purpose the existing content. 

Step 2: Choosing smart tools that optimise finding your content

When producing reports, you have to make sure it is optimized for SEO. Luckily, Edition Digital's platform has inbuilt SEO fields to make sure your work is seen and adapted for better search engine rankings.

Why is this important? If you get your articles noticed by Google, they get noticed by people.

Step 3: Connect with influencers

Once the report was produced we made sure we emailed everybody included on our mailing lists and informed them that the content they’ve provided is now live. We assumed these are the people who in fact read the report and shared it on their social media platforms.

Step 4: Distribute

When you want your audience to engage, find a way to inform them. So, we’ve used our Newsletter. Direct mailing could be the most efficient communication channel, of course, equipped with good content and appropriate strategy.

Step 5: Let your audience engage

People who are convinced by your content will gladly share it through social media. But you should enable them to do so. What we did during the production itself is that we designed share cards with inspiring quotes for each author.

Neil Patel once said: If you don’t do distribution, you won’t be successful. And great content really deserves to go all around.