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| Hey good folks and happy Thursday! I hope whenever you are, fall weather is starting to set in. It is not here in Austin, where they say yesterday was our “last” 100 degree day for the year. I don’t believe it for a second. All right, let’s dive in! Distribution is one of the most important things when it comes to content marketing. After all, just because you publish it, doesn’t mean anyone will see it. But, what happens when your distribution channels are, well, saturated? When you have reached your current audience as much as you reasonably can? How do you build audience development into your content marketing strategy? The answer, for me, has long been partnerships. A company’s partner ecosystem is a critical lever for growth and expansion because partners often have access to audiences you have not saturated. This is why guest author programs or co-branded webinars and research programs can be so effective. Because when someone else is putting their stamp of approval on your assets, and sharing it with their audience too, everyone benefits from a visibility and authority boost. Do this enough times, and you start to grow far faster than you would on your own. In fact, in my early content marketing days at BigCommerce, when I had absolutely zero budget for content, I used partners to write nearly everything. They were both my production and my distribution strategy––and it worked, really, really well. Our name became associated with PayPal and Amazon, companies far bigger than ours. When I worked at Mashable prior to BigCommerce, we did the same thing. Branded content was a division built literally to work with partners to help those partners get in front of new audiences in relevant ways. Publishing survived for a long time in the early internet days thanks heavily to the income produced through those divisions. What’s nice about partner content marketing, too, is that you can use it to hit all of your goals: SEO/AEO, lead generation, brand, thought leadership, etc. So, to lean back on one of the truisms of content marketing and just humanity is general: when you are at a loss for what to do next, it’s better to go it together. No matter how much has changed in content marketing, this has not. I doubt it ever will. A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE You do you! One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do. THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT
Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email. Very excited to be here with y’all. Tracey | ||||
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