But did they read your article? The one that will lead them to your sales team?

Creating engaging and relevant content has become an essential part of modern B2B marketing, but the strategy behind how that content is distributed is just as important. What good is an article that’s perfectly suited for Millennials if it’s only read by Baby Boomers?

Effective content has just as much to do with placement as it does with production.

The Challenges of Content Distribution

Today’s companies face three specific challenges when it comes to closing a deal with potential buyers: speaking to the right audience, overcoming a general mistrust and dodging digital ad blockers.

B2B companies have a particularly tough time reaching the right people because their audiences tend to be more niche than B2C audiences. Many businesses struggle to identify potential consumers when specific titles, locations, and verticals come into play. Even after those groupings are ironed out, marketers still need to determine which channels will reach those people best. Then, they must tailor specific messages that suit the unique interests of each demographic.

Clearly, aligning all of these factors into the delivery of an effective message can pose a serious challenge for B2B marketers.

Once a company does speak to the right audience, it’s confronted by the fact that the average consumer has grown skeptical toward what he or she reads online. According to one study, 92 percent of Internet users say they trust earned media, while only half trust paid advertisements. They also tend to trust their friends, basing between 20 and 50 percent of their purchasing decisions on word-of-mouth recommendations.

To top it off, as digital devices become easier to use, so do their ad-blocking capabilities. In a matter of months, ad blocking went from a marginally disturbing trend that only impacted ad-supported business models to a top discussion point for marketers and advertisers alike. Today, more than 198 million people use mobile devices that are capable of ad blocking.

With so many factors working against marketers, creating a solid strategy for content distribution is critical.

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Strategies for Boosting Your Content Distribution

To capture today’s elusive audiences, you must rethink what it means to be a great marketer in a digital world. These five strategies can help your message resonate with the groups you want to reach:

1. Maximize your SEO
   Test different keywords and buzz terms on different articles to see how far they stretch your SEO outreach. Without being too obnoxious or redundant, pepper them throughout every piece — in the title of the page, the headline of the article and the introduction. So search engines can bring you the audience who’s searching for exactly what you provide.
2. Recycle your content
   Starting every piece of content you produce from scratch is a great way to waste time and energy. Some projects require 100 percent unique content, but not all. Keep a robust library of reusable content, and don’t be afraid to tweak previous work to fit today’s needs. Doing so allows your team to invest more time in the projects that really deserve it.
3. Turn employees into advocates
   People trust other people, even if they happen to work for the company they’re promoting. An essential part of an effective word-of-mouth strategy is installing an employee advocacy program throughout your company. Happy employees make great brand ambassadors, so be sure to also make an internal investment in your distribution strategy.
4. Provide social variety
   If you blanket the same messages in the same manner across Twitter, Facebook and any other social account your company uses, people will start to tune you out. Each channel has unique quirks and user demographics, so be sure to vary your topics and word choice across them. Further, consider posting your material to niche outlets to reach a smaller, yet more interested, group of people. For instance, if you provide products for classic cars, establish your presence on classic car forums and offer targeted incentives to users of those sites.
5. Create interactive content
   Today’s audiences expect content to go beyond words on a page, so go out of your way to incorporate interactive components throughout your marketing material. Quizzes, surveys, games and clickable infographics are just a few ways to get your target demographic more involved with your message and excited by what you have to offer.

Takeaways

When employing these methods and testing new strategies, it’s crucial to collect data to analyze their success. Different metrics apply to different scenarios, but a few to keep an eye on include voice, engagement, traffic generation, conversions, and clicks.

Regardless of the metrics that best suit your campaigns, track them properly and analyze them continuously so your strategy can improve with your insights. Set goals and benchmarks, and then compete against them so your content marketing never stagnates.

The challenges of marketing today are greater than ever, but so are the opportunities. These five strategies can help you get the right material in front of the right people and make the most of your content distribution.

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Marketing teams strive to get the right message to the right audience. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if the people who’d be interested in it don’t know about it. That’s where your marketing team comes in. They churn out killer content that explains what your company is about, what you provide and – most importantly – how it benefits consumers.

However, even with great content and strong execution of typical marketing activities, it’s still difficult to get the desired reach for your content. Employee advocacy is the marketing channel that teams need to amplify the reach of that content and double the effectiveness of their marketing programs.

An employee advocacy program makes it easy for employees to consume and share the content you’ve worked so hard to create. Additionally, it relieves the burden on employees of “doing it wrong” through explaining what’s appropriate and what’s not. Further, you will be able to track who’s involved and reward them accordingly.

Many companies simply send out internal emails that say, “Hey, check out this new article that Joe wrote… forward along the link if you wouldn’t mind,” but there is no way of knowing if that was ever actually done. With an employee advocacy program, content is shared more often with authentic enthusiasm and tracked from start to finish.

Managing Your Employee Advocacy Program

When introducing a new function or technology to your team, it’s a good idea to have someone oversee its implementation. Unfortunately, not every company can hire an employee advocacy manager whose sole responsibility is to manage and monitor an advocacy program. That’s okay, as these types of programs can easily be set up to coexist with prior digital marketing campaigns.

Dynamic Signal, for example, offers software that is an all-in-one platform – an “OS for advocacy.” With an employee advocate system, content is sourced from the web, your owned library or from employee advocates themselves. Mobile and other apps let advocates access and broadcast this content to their networks with little effort. Brands can also track what content is shared and reward top performing advocates.

A typical program can be implemented in as little as a few days and set up with the appropriate amount of automation and scheduling to ensure it doesn’t become overbearing. It takes a little prep work – such as grouping employees, connecting corporate social channels and setting up the proper filters – to ensure that only relevant content is added to the queue. But when complete, the program manager only needs to occasionally review and publish content; the rest of the program essentially runs itself.

IBM – who has the largest employee advocacy program in existence – saw a 5x increase in traffic on their website in 2014. This means that previously existing employees generated a paid media equivalent of $2MM. This new marketing channel not only boosts the effectiveness of your total efforts but drives real, measurable results.

Aligning Advocacy With Your Existing Content & Marketing Programs

The most effective way to introduce an employee advocacy program is to align it with a specifically planned marketing initiative. Let employees know, for example, that advocating will help boost registration for an upcoming event (conference, webinar, product promotion, etc.), then offer them the tools to advocate easily. People respond to deadlines and they are motivated by measurable results. This also lets brands set specific objectives (e.g., event registrations, content shares, leads generated in a campaign, etc.) against which to measure the success of an employee advocacy program.

Of course, not every marketing initiative is appropriate to every employee advocate. For this reason, specific content streams can be created using an employee advocate system to ensure the right employees are receiving the right content to share. Whether it’s geographical (an event in Hong Kong) or by department of interest (marketing, engineering, creative, etc.), these streams do well to limit frivolous posting and reach the people who want to be reached.

The bottom line is that employees who like their job want to talk about their job because they take pride in what they do. As a marketer, finding brand advocates within your team can be as simple as implementing a program and finding employees that want to be industry experts in their field. Being an advocate is an organic way for your employees to generate credibility (through amassing followers in their field) and in turn get noticed by the higher-ups.

If you’re struggling to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or get your content seen, employee advocacy is the boost you may need to amplify your marketing efforts.

The post A New Marketing Distribution Channel: The Employee appeared first on Relevance.