Is the information new or unique?

Your first step toward developing promotable content is to ensure your content concept is somewhat unique. If your content is the same old story about your industry or brand the media will see right through that pitch.

Consider if there are experts or influencers you can interview to ensure your content is original and different from the existing competitive content landscape. In addition to exclusive interviews and expert insights, new research and data provide your content with an immediate boost of originality when pitching to media outlets.

If your broad content topic isn’t new, there might be a helpful, new content format that would aid the reader experience and provide more value to them through actionable insights tailored specifically to their situation. Take time to consider how you can plan innovative content formats that will present the information or data in a fresh and helpful way.

How will the content serve the journalist and their readers?

The next step in developing promotable content is to ensure that it will serve media contacts and their readers. Ideally, the content will align with and support the current reporting trends of industry publications. Media contacts will consider sharing your content when it can augment an existing story idea or bring a new story idea to the table.

The connection between the content and the larger trend should be easy to identify. The more you have to explain to make the connection between your content and the trend industry trend, the more difficult it will be to pitch to a media contact.

Ensure that your content does not favor the brand or show a product bias. It should never feel like a sales pitch to a reader. These kinds of content marketing mistakes will immediately eliminate your content from a journalist’s consideration.

The ultimate question to ask to ensure it will serve media and their readers is actually quite simple: Will this piece of content save the audience and journalist time, money or both? If you can answer yes to this question you are on the path to content promotion success.

Is the content properly optimized for reader engagement?

It’s crucial to remember the importance of user experience when developing new content. The experience had when visiting the web page hosting the content, as well as consuming the content itself, should be simple and painless. More than that, the experience should actually be engaging and interesting.

Remember that user experience must be optimized for a variety of audiences. Visitors could land on the page while exploring multiple pages of the hosting website. Media contacts or influencers may visit the page directly to consider sharing it with their own networks, while referral traffic to the page stems from earned media coverage. During content promotion campaigns, the hosting website and related content landing page need to be optimized around the content to inform referral traffic unfamiliar with your brand or website.

The post 3 Questions to Ask When Developing Promotable Content appeared first on Relevance.

Understanding content economics

As Mark Schaefer explained content shock in economic terms, the amount of content available [supply] is greater than the amount of content that can be consumed [demand]. The supply of available digital content is doubling every nine to 24 months, yet the demand for content is finite and quickly approaching a consumption limit.

This slight upward trend of consumption is not sustainable, as each person will eventually reach a limit to the amount of content they can consume. Businesses must prepare for the future of content shock and pivot to a content promotion mindset.

Businesses continue increasing content development

The conventional ways for content to reach an audience are more competitive than ever before. For businesses that means fewer page views, fewer conversions, fewer leads and fewer customers as a result.

Data from the Content Marketing Institute 2014 Survey affirms that brands are making big plans to continue expanding content marketing efforts in the next few years.

Today, 90 percent of B2C marketers and 93 percent of B2B marketers are creating content for their prospects and customers. As more and more companies pursue content marketing as a full-on strategy, earned media coverage will be crucial for brands to overcome content shock.

Affirming the increase in supply of content, 72 percent of B2C marketers and 73 percent of B2B marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago. As the market continues to flood with content, brands must place an increased emphasis on earning media coverage and endorsements from journalists, influencers, brands and advocates who already have large audiences.

Even with an increased emphasis on content marketing, only 34 percent of B2C marketers and 42 percent of B2B marketers consider their brands effective at content marketing. Marketers must learn that merely increasing content quantity or quality won’t guarantee effectiveness. Media coverage must be earned in order to get your content in front of the right people.

Perhaps most important of all, 60 percent of B2C and 58 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 months.

Earned media crucial for content marketing success

If better content quality or quantity isn’t necessarily the answer then how should that expected content marketing budget increase be allocated? Investing resources to earn media coverage of your content will pay back in multiples.

Earned media will increase brand credibility and trust in the marketplace while also growing new audiences. As content marketing matures, businesses will thrive when they take the next step to include strategic earned media and promotion in their content marketing efforts.

For more tips on how to maximize the impact of your content through promotion and earned media, review The Content Promotion & Distribution Cheat Sheet.

Image credits: businessesgrow.com, Content Marketing Institute

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With over 53 percent of website traffic still originating from organic search and 89 percent of B2B marketers using organic social media for distribution, the channels available to amplify content are more diverse than ever. The challenge is planning for them early enough to maximize impact.

Here are four strategies for prioritizing distribution during content development — not after it.

1. Build Your Distribution Plan Before You Write a Single Word

Once you’ve identified a content topic, your next step shouldn’t be outlining the piece — it should be mapping out where and how it will reach your audience. Start by identifying the channels that align with both your target audience and the content format you’re planning.

For example, a data-driven industry report might be best suited for LinkedIn distribution, email campaigns to your subscriber list, and outreach to journalists covering your sector. A how-to guide might perform better through SEO-optimized organic search, YouTube video adaptations, and community forums. A thought leadership piece could be pitched for earned media placement on industry publications.

By identifying your distribution channels early, you can shape the content itself to perform well on those platforms. This means writing with SEO in mind from the start, planning pull quotes for social media, and structuring content so it can be easily repurposed across formats.

2. Develop Content That Serves Multiple Audiences

When you prioritize distribution during development, you naturally think beyond your immediate customer base. Your content needs to resonate not just with potential buyers, but also with the journalists, influencers, and industry voices who can amplify it through earned media coverage.

Research what’s currently trending in your industry. Use tools like Google Trends, social listening platforms, and AI-powered content intelligence tools to identify the topics and angles that are generating discussion. Create content that contributes original data, unique perspectives, or practical frameworks that others in your space will want to reference and share.

Content that earns organic mentions and backlinks does double duty — it builds your authority with search engines while simultaneously expanding your reach through third-party credibility. In 2026, with AI search tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT increasingly citing authoritative sources, creating reference-worthy content is more important than ever.

3. Leverage AI to Optimize Distribution Timing and Targeting

AI has transformed content distribution from a manual, best-guess process into a data-driven science. Sixty-seven percent of brands now use AI for content marketing, and distribution optimization is one of the highest-impact applications.

AI-powered tools can analyze your audience’s engagement patterns to determine optimal posting times across each channel. They can identify which content formats perform best for different audience segments. They can even predict which pieces of content are most likely to generate engagement before you publish them, allowing you to allocate promotion budgets more effectively.

Incorporate these tools into your content development workflow from the beginning. Use AI insights during the planning phase to validate topic selection and angle, during production to optimize for specific channels, and post-publication to refine your approach based on real-time performance data.

4. Seek Feedback and Build Relationships Before You Publish

One of the most overlooked distribution tactics is engaging your target amplifiers during the content development process itself. Before you finalize a piece, reach out to a handful of key industry contacts, journalists, or influencers and invite their input.

This approach serves multiple purposes. It improves the quality of your content by incorporating expert perspectives. It builds relationships with people who can amplify your content once it’s published. And it creates a sense of investment — people who contribute to content are far more likely to share it with their own audiences.

In practice, this could mean interviewing subject matter experts for quotes, sharing early findings from original research for feedback, or inviting beta readers to review a comprehensive guide before launch. Each touchpoint is both a quality check and a distribution seed.

The Distribution-First Mindset

Research consistently shows that only 37 percent of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and among those who do, distribution planning is often the weakest link. Yet the data is clear: 72 percent of very successful companies invest in paid content distribution channels, compared to just 51 percent of minimally successful ones.

The takeaway is straightforward. Stop treating distribution as the last step in your content process and start treating it as the first. When distribution drives your content development decisions, you create content that’s inherently more shareable, more visible, and more effective at driving the results that matter to your business.

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