How To Streamline And Maximise Your Content Distribution

You’ve spent time, resources, budget, into creating new content, to then only use that content once. You don’t see the results, and then you move on to the next shiny object. This is a content recipe for disaster. So today I’m going to share with you how we’ve built a clearer roadmap with our content distribution strategy, so it doesn’t feel disjointed anymore. It doesn’t feel cluttered. Plus it allows us to create evergreen content that’s going to remain relevant, and allows us to reshare and redistribute that content forever.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help you try and navigate this cluttered world of digital marketing, and help to challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing and actually moving towards planning intentional marketing strategies for your business.

And the “spray and walk away”, it may work for driveway cleaners, but it’s not going to work with your content strategy. Today we’re going to have a look at on the podcast a massive, common business problem that we see all the time. And we even experienced it ourselves in the past, and we see it far too often as well. And that is the big issue of the content bottleneck. It’s commonplace that we see marketing teams sink a lot of time and resources and budget into creating content, to then really only use that content once, not see the results, and then move on to the next shiny object.

And honestly, if I think about it, that strategy just seems so backward and so wasteful. So today, what I want to do is I want to make an agreement with you today that this spray and walk away content strategy for your business, it ends today. And I think that we need to make the aim of actually building a clearer roadmap towards your content distribution strategy that’s not going to make you feel disjointed or cluttered or lead to poor results.

Because right now, the market is getting really cluttered. AI is making things like Google Ads and Meta ads much more achievable and much easier for more businesses and for more marketing teams. But this means that the importance of creating amazing content and having the right strategy to distribute that content is actually going to be more important now than it ever has been. So today, let’s explore some ideas of how you can build a content distribution strategy to help maximise the potential of your content as well.

So we’re going to start with the solution, which is thinking around streamlining this content distribution in general. Because if the problems that I’ve described so far, if they seem so familiar, there are ways that you can actually make steps to actually simplify the task of creating content. It doesn’t have to be a massive burden, and it doesn’t have to take up so much mind space as it probably is right now.

And these are content distribution techniques that I’ve both learned in building our business, but also learned in working with the content distribution with our clients as well. So I kind of see it from both sides. So let’s break down some of these key strategies, and just a few ideas that I want to share with you to make sure that your content’s actually being seen, and not just seen now, but the main aim is that the content’s being seen for months and even years to come.

So the first step is actually thinking about the content that you’re creating, and creating evergreen content. Because a lot of the issues that we see with businesses in their content marketing is that they spend a lot of resource on creating content that really isn’t designed with ongoing distribution in mind. It’s designed with one kind of goal in mind, and they use it once, and if it works, great. If it doesn’t work, it just kind of throws into the bin. It’s a waste of resource and cash.

And this is where evergreen content can come in, because evergreen content is really a content strategy that begins with pinpointing and finding the right topics that are actually going to suit your audience both now and in the long term as well. Now we see this a lot in a lot of B2B industries. Same with B2C as well, but more in B2B industries, that the type of content that we’ll see there are based on subjects that form the foundation of your industry knowledge, or they tackle problem solving directly related to your field.

And the common types of content for this are things like your how-to content, your industry reports. And that’s going to include relevant information and FAQs, and they’re going to be really relevant to your audience. And the key with that type of content is to focus on the problems that your audience is likely to consistently encounter, not just encounter once and never kind of see it again, but consistently encounter, so that you can redistribute this content often and it’s still going to make sense to your core audience.

And once you’ve chosen your topics, ensure that the content you create isn’t time-bound as well. We need to think about how we can create content that doesn’t include any time-specific data, or based on any events that are relevant at that time that you’re making it. Remember that the aim here is that you’re wanting to build a resource that will be as useful in the future as it is now.

And in saying this, good evergreen content can actually benefit from occasional updates. So I’m definitely not saying create this piece of content and never kind of review it. I would actually encourage that you do give it some occasional updates here and then: things like trends change, new information becomes available, and new data and things like that. So updating your content really does help just ensure that it stays accurate and continues to actually provide value to your audience as well.

So the focus now, we’ve got the evergreen content. So it’s really about trying to build out content topics that don’t require that constant rewrite or that constant re-record. So the focus then moves on to how can we then take that content, that evergreen content, and how can we focus on repurposing that content over and over, to be able to get the most value out of it, and to make sure that more people within your target market and your audience get to see this content as well.

Because repurposing evergreen, or even any of your content, is just one of the major flaws that we see with businesses today. So what I want to do is I want to explore with you now around why it’s such a common problem, around repurposing one piece of content, and what it even does, and some techniques of how to repurpose, and then some ideas that we’ve been able to do here at Done By Nine to make this process easier and to take up less headspace overall.

So for the purpose of this article, what I thought could be helpful was actually using this article, this piece of content, and the actual plan that we’ve built for this piece of content, for both the distribution and also all the different pieces of content that we can actually generate from it. So the repurposing of that content.

So firstly, with this piece of content, we’ve written it as a piece of content to assure that it’s relevant, firstly, to our target audience. So it’s relevant to the people that we’re trying to reach with our marketing efforts. We’re also trying to ensure that it’s packed full of valuable insights. It’s got new ideas, new strategies, new info to help build our authority and share our knowledge of our core product, which is building marketing strategies. So we could just release this as a blog, share it once on LinkedIn and Facebook, and it’s kind of out there.

But if we do that, it’s guaranteed to then only reach a very small fraction of our audience in its current format, and doing it only once, it means that, again, it’s an even smaller amount of that audience. And this is where repurposing that key piece of content comes in.

So when I’m creating content, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to actually think about how I can build valuable segments into that content. Those valuable segments could then be transformed into other smaller or different pieces of valuable content at any time. So in this case, we’ve got this article that I’m presenting to you now. This has obviously also been recorded for a podcast, because you’re listening to the podcast now.

This is going to be uploaded, distributed, and we use a tool called Buzzsprout. And Buzzsprout, what this does is it publishes the audio version of the article across all major podcast platforms. It does it all for us. So Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, Google Podcasts, all of the major players. So that helps with the distribution of the audio version.

However, instead of just recording the podcast with the mic, I’ve also set up a camera, and I record the video version of this content as well, because video, what this does, I find, is it allows me to convey the same information, but it’s a really much more engaging, dynamic way to be able to present that information to you via video. And it really also opens up new distribution channels. So it opens up things like YouTube, if we wanted to use that, or Facebook or Instagram Reels or LinkedIn video content as well.

Because for some of your audience, video or podcast may actually be their preferred way of consuming content. And by recording both with audio and video, it allows you to actually reach them more effectively and meet them where they actually are. So we can’t always assume that your audience has time to literally sit down and read through the blog that you’ve written.

So, in summary, right now, already for this article, we’ve got three different formats all stemming off that same piece of content. We’ve written an informative article. It’s intended direct to my target audience. We’ve recorded that article and topic as a podcast. And I’m also capturing the recording of that podcast on video. So we’ve got three core pieces of content right now, and three different long-form pieces of content. And so, like I say, they’re all using long-form.

So now what I’ll challenge myself and challenge you to do is think about how you can take those long-form pieces of content and break those down even further into bite-sized chunks. So this goes back to the planning that I was talking about above. So when I was talking about writing the content, I try and write and plan our content in ways that make it easy for us to actually cut up and distribute that content into smaller chunks, while it also then allows us to link back to and promote the long-form version of that content as well.

So a smaller snippet of this video can then link back to the full video if people did want to watch it. But we want to make sure that those bite-sized chunks also offer as much value to the viewer or the listener. But with this piece of content as well, I want you to have a think about taking the key pieces of that content, using that planner that I was talking about, and then thinking about how you can use it in even more ways.

So again, if we take this article for an example, I’m going to take some short text-only snippets of content that can be shared as thoughtful LinkedIn posts, just by themselves, just for a text-based post. I’m then going to cut up some bite-sized video clips, and I’ll share some tools on how we can do this later as well. But I’m going to create some bite-sized video clips that we can then share on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Facebook, YouTube Shorts if we wanted to, and then we use the text from the article as the basis of the caption.

Another way is I’m then going to cut down the format of this full article, and we’re going to share this content via a LinkedIn newsletter, which I’ve found can be a really great way of reaching your audience. People can subscribe to you on LinkedIn, but also it goes to their inbox. So you’re kind of getting two lots of distribution within one, and it also allows us to be able to embed the full podcast into the LinkedIn article. So that’s another thing we’ll use for this distribution.

I’m then going to add this to our blog and our business’s website. I’m going to make sure it’s optimised for SEO, and I use the blog as a way to encourage people to visit our website. And that’s a way for us to be able to get our branding, our messaging, a bit more about who we are, get people intrigued about the business, and it also allows us to be able to collect a little bit of data on those people as well.

And also we’ve got our own newsletter distribution. We build it out in a tool called HubSpot, and we send out monthly emails to our subscribers and to our clients and to our database, and we package up our best performing content from the month and redistribute it direct to your inbox. And you’re more than welcome to sign up for that as well. You can do that on any of our blog pages on our website.

So that’s just a few ideas that I’m going to execute from this piece of content that I’m recording right now. I could even take this much further, and I encourage you to try to think outside the box when it comes to repurposing and distributing your content as well.

So, I don’t know, a few extra ideas on how you could take this even further, a piece of content like this. You could take the key ideas, create a PDF, share that PDF on LinkedIn with the most valuable info, and get that out as a more visual post. Canva is a great tool to be able to help you create that. Maybe you could think about creating an e-book, a white paper guide, and have people download it from your website. Or you could use this content as a way to actually use it as a topic and host a webinar. Maybe it’s with your current clients, maybe it’s with new clients, use it as a lead generation. Maybe host a local lunch and learn session, with a focus again on the same piece of content, but you’re just delivering it, repurposing it in a slightly different way.

So by creating evergreen content and then repurposing your content in different ways, you’re not only going to maximise the return of the time and effort that you’re putting into your content, but you’re also ensuring that your valuable insights and knowledge are reaching as wide and as a diverse audience as possible, and not just now, but forever.

So let’s talk about distribution. How can we actually distribute this content? Because the above all sounds all well and good. But the question now becomes, how the hell are we actually going to keep track of all this content? How are we going to distribute it like we’ve planned out above? Especially if you don’t have a marketing team like I’ve got, very fortunate to have here. I’ve got a marketing team behind me to be able to do this.

But the main tool that I find that I can’t stress enough, and what’s really changed the game even for us, is literally having a true, in-depth, overall marketing strategy. And the strategy really needs to clearly identify your audience, their problems and their desires. This is the first step. The second step is then coupling that strategy with a content plan, and this is what we call, at Done By Nine, our Marketing Blend.

So if you’ve taken the steps above, you’ve probably got so much content now, because we’ve cut up that long-form piece of content into all these bite-sized chunks of content scattered across your Google Drive. It’s taking far too long for you to find all that content, let alone actually cut and repurpose that content. So for this we built out what we call our content library, and we use this with our internal team.

So a content library sounds extra fancy, doesn’t it? But if I’m being honest, it’s essentially a Google spreadsheet. It’s got the key information on all the pieces of content that we create. However, it’s also built in a way that just promotes the different methods that it could be distributed, alongside when it was last distributed, which means we can keep track of when it was last seen, and when we can repurpose and reuse it, so that content can live forever.

So on that document we’ve got some key columns on that spreadsheet, and some of the items that we track are things like your content title: what is it even called? We link to the content draft, and this helps us pull text for the captions and things like that. We also link to the published version of the content on our website, so we can refer to that in the captions.

We link to the podcast recording if we’re going to promote the podcast. We link to where the full long-form video is being housed, plus we link to all the variations of the long-form videos and audio and their short-form versions, the ones that we talked about before that we cut up. We put them all into Google Drive, and we link them from that spreadsheet. So all that content is linked directly from the spreadsheet to that piece of content on Google Drive, which makes it so much easier for me and the rest of the team to be able to locate that content.

And also we keep an idea and tracking of the date it was last updated and posted, so that we can really ensure that the content is, again, still relevant. It’s going to help us keep track of what content we created months and months and months ago, but it’s going to help us keep on track really with what is actually still relevant in the marketplace now, and hasn’t been shared recently to our ever-growing audience.

So literally having this content database and this home to our content really has been a massive game changer for us. It did take a lot of hard work, but it’s keeping the entire team on the same page. It’s collating this home of where the content actually lives, and it’s helping us free up, especially, some headspace for me when it comes to facing content blockages, and helping us create and manage and curate our content marketing strategy over the long haul.

So I’ve spoken a bit about some of the tools that we’ve been using. So what are these tools? Obviously, the main one is a Google Sheet. This is housing our full content library, and like I said, this is your starting point. This is what I recommend that you need to do straight off the bat. Trust me, build this now, instead of having to go back and tidy up all your old content. It’s not a fun process. It’s something we had to do. Took a lot of time, a lot of resource, but we’re paying back dividends for us now. But it was a tiring process. So if you don’t have much content yet, build it the way that you want it. Make sure it’s collated on a Google Sheet, easy for you to be able to access in the future.

But we also use a lot of tools to actually help speed up our content creation process. So with our podcasts and videos, we use a tool called Descript. Now, what this does is it actually records and transcribes all our videos and our podcasts that we create, which then allows for real fast editing of the transcript. And when we’re editing the transcript, that’s also tidying up the recording, and quickly removes any mistakes, ums and ahs, and all those kind of gaps and things like that. So it makes it really seamless, and you do that all by editing literally the transcript. You don’t even need to know how to edit different pieces of content.

So it’s a really great tool, and it also allows us to actually highlight sections of that transcript that we like, going back to what I was saying earlier around building up the content into those valuable segments. We can highlight those segments in the transcript, and then we can actually export them out as separate short-form video clips, along with the captions as well. They actually put the captions on, which are based from the transcription, and we use those for our short-form videos. It’s a really simple, easy process.

In terms of blogs, we edit our blogs using an AI tool called Grammarly. Really well known, it’s great, helps us spell check, grammar check, and we do that before we post it to our WordPress website. And then with content distribution, there’s a lot of countless social media scheduling tools available that you can trial. However, we opt for literally just being able to schedule content direct from the social media platforms themselves. So Meta actually has a really good scheduler built in for Facebook and for Instagram. And as our content plan is curated back out in that content library that I’ve already described, it really is really simple for us to then translate that into an actual scheduling tool.

And if the above does seem a bit complicated, honestly, start with building out your content library. It really is the big game changer. But then once you’ve got all that going, you’ve got your content, you’ve got your evergreen, we’re getting that out, I do think it’s really important as well that you just track the results. Track the results of the content distribution. It’s a really critical aspect of any content strategy, and it’s really simple. Without measuring, you’re not going to know what’s working or what’s not.

It’s also going to help you build the base and the data around why you need to move away from this spray and walk away mentality that you may have right now. And one of the key benefits of actually tracking your distribution is that it’s actually going to help you identify which channels are actually most effective for your audience as well. I’ve mentioned video and podcasts and blogs, but that could not be the same for you and your audience. And that goes back to your strategy, identifying who you’re talking to, and then testing.

Using those examples above again, we find that our audience engages with content on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, for example. We find that newsletter emails, they get much higher click-through rates than some social media posts. So we use that data to help curate our plan in the coming months as well. So for us, knowing this can actually help us then also better allocate our resources to the channels that are actually going to help us drive those results.

And it actually really encourages us to try and find new ways to distribute that content, find new ways to communicate with our audience in a way that’s actually meeting them where they are. And you’ll actually also start to gain a real good insight into your audience. What type of content do they actually like? What topics are they interested in most? When are they most likely to even engage with your content? And this is going to help you inform not only your distribution strategy, but also the content creation strategy, building the evergreen content, which is what we touched on right at the top of this podcast as well.

And over time, you’re going to start to be able to see more accurate goals and build more accurate KPIs for your content distribution as well. And you’ll be able to see what’s achievable based on your past performance, and allow you to set new targets for you and the rest of the team as well.

So let’s make this agreement: the spray and walk away content strategy for your business, it’s going to end today. We’re in an AI-driven world. Your content’s becoming more and more important. Creating and implementing an effective content distribution strategy is getting even more critical. So challenge yourself. Create some evergreen content designed for ongoing relevance to your audience. Couple that with a clear repurposing strategy to maximise the potential and the reach of your content. And then build an efficient content distribution plan, and this is going to help you streamline this process with a content library. It’s a hub where you’re going to keep all your created content, and it’s going to help you organise and distribute your content, not just once, but forever.

And so I do really hope that this has been a helpful podcast to get you thinking around your content strategy. Are you creating content that is for the here and now, or are you creating content that can be used for years and years, or months to months to come? And that’s what I really want you to think about. Not only creating that content in the first place, but breaking it down into valuable segments to then be able to repurpose that content. Use some of the text from it on LinkedIn, break up some of the videos and use that as well, and just break up that content distribution plan. Get this piece of content that you’ve spent all this time writing and recording seen by as many different people and as often as possible.

And look, if you need advice about your content marketing strategy, or your marketing strategy in general, obviously that’s what we do best here at Done By Nine. You can go along to our website, donebynine.com. If you look at the top, you’ll see podcast. You can see all the other articles that we’ve released, all the other episodes we’ve spoken about. I think we’re up to about episode 26 or 27 or something like that. So a lot of content in there for you to be able to look over and read and listen to and watch.

Plus, if you do actually want to get some one-on-one time with me and the rest of the team around your marketing strategy, you can go to our contact page, or literally just go through our website. You’ll see all the calls to action across there to be able to start and get in touch with me and the rest of the team, and we can sit down with you and share with you our content plan, how we organise our content, and start to implement that within your business as well.

So hopefully you’ve been able to get away some really key pieces of info. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out: jordan@donebynine.com is my email address. We look forward to seeing you at the next episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast.