In this episode, Justin discusses the 9 essential steps for creating a successful distribution strategy in 2024.

He provides his top strategies and valuable tips for content marketers looking to enhance their distribution efforts. Stay tuned for a full breakdown of the key components that drive successful content distribution strategies in 2024.

If you like distribution and repurposing playbooks, you'll love my weekly newsletter (it's free). Join 2,400+ subscribers here: https://news.justinsimon.co/

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

1. Optimize content marketing ROI through effective distribution assessment.

2. Enhance content quality and impact by planning distribution beforehand.

3. Integrate distribution details into your content roadmap for effective reach.

4. Refine distribution efforts by ranking content based on relevance.

5. Achieve successful content distribution through building momentum and collaboration.

***

CONNECT

🔔 LinkedIn: @justincsimon

🐦 Twitter @justincsimon

✉️ Email: hello@justinsimon.co

***

SPONSOR

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of my podcast production.

They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your podcast.

Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.

Visit hatch.fm to learn more.

So if I were going to start a distribution strategy in 2024,

this is the exact nine step system that I would follow.

My clients and coaching students have actually been using this

system over the past year to ten x 100

x, even 500 x. Yeah, 500 x

the ROI from the content that they're creating on their marketing teams.

But I've got a bit of a disclaimer. Distribution isn't a

magic pill. This is not something that if you sprinkle the fairy dust on,

is going to completely change your content marketing program

before you can distribute effectively. You have to

actually know your audience deeply, create content they

enjoy, and be willing to put in the work to make distribution even

worth it to begin with because it isn't worth actually distributing that

content if nobody enjoys it to begin with. But if you follow this

system, you might be surprised at how much new content

you actually have to create every week. You might be able to go from two

new blog posts a week to one. You might be able to go from

multiple videos and webinars and all these things that you're trying to

do, you might be able to actually scale those down and get more ROI out

of the things you're creating, freeing you up to create better content,

to be able to actually be strategic, to talk to your customers to

understand what they want versus just assuming and thinking, hey, I've got to be able

to get content out and the whole process goes awry.

So stick with me because this is the first time I'm breaking down this

entire system exactly like this, step by step. So

let's get into number one, assess. This is the

baseline for your distribution strategy. Assessing

evaluating what your current distributions efforts

are and then building a strategy moving forward. If we don't

know what path we've been on, if we don't at least take a look back

into the rearview mirror, it's going to be nearly impossible to know where we want

to go, what we want to cut, what we want to change, any of those

things. So step one is assessing where you're at. And the

easiest way to get started is to look at the

last, maybe 90 days. Or you could even look at the last q

one if you wanted to get maybe two separate snapshots, or the previous year's

quarter, whatever quarter you may be in, and take a look at that and

understand, okay, here's what we created. Here's how much

stuff we got out of it. Here was the Roi of us creating

that. What were the outcomes? So when we

created x webinar, what were the outcomes? Of this. When we created

this series of blog posts over the last quarter, what

happened? What was the traffic? Where did the traffic come from? Look at

the channels. Look at all the things that go into essentially

marketing your content. What did you do to actively market that piece of

content? And once you have those baselines, that will allow you to actually go

forward and say, all right, you know what? When we released

this blog post, we really didn't do a lot. Within the first week,

we posted something on LinkedIn and then we added

it to our monthly email and that was it. It just allows

you to open up your eyes and really see what's going on with your distribution

process and know how you can evolve from there. Number two

is planning. So actually developing

a distribution plan before you end

up creating your content. I talk about this all the time. You have to develop

a distribution plan before you create your

content, not after. You can do it after. You can go back

into the assess phase and see what happens and see what we did and what

did we create. But if you can build a plan to

actually distribute your pieces of content before you even

create them, it's going to make the actual content that you create

even better. And I have seen this time and time again with the

clients and the different folks that I've worked with. When you start to understand how

you're going to distribute this piece of content and what you want to get out

into the world, it forces you to think about what that piece of

content is actually going to be and what makes it interesting to

begin with. So for an example, if you're creating a

podcast episode or a blog post, and

you write it all out and you publish it, and you pat yourself

on the back, and then you go to publish it out onto LinkedIn or

Twitter or send it to your email list and you start reading through it and

you're like, there just is not much going on here. There's not much for me

to be able to actually get out back into the world. Like, I thought this

was a good post. I thought this was a good podcast episode. I thought this

was a good webinar. And it just turns out it's

not because the content, while may be interesting

for a particular point in time, is not actually interesting to the

audience on those individual channels. And it's really, really hard to cut that

up and create native content for those things. So by

understanding, hey, we need to be able to get LinkedIn posts out of this. We

need to be able to get an email out of this, it changes your mindset

when you're actually creating that content. So plan ahead to know what you want to

do. All right? And this leads in directly into number three,

which is integrate. So then after you've assessed what's going on, you've

started to build out this plan. You're going to integrate that plan,

integrate distribution details into your content roadmap. So

almost everybody that I talk to has some sort of roadmap, some sort of content

plan. Even if it's a Google sheet or a word doc

or something, they have a plan. They have an idea of what they want to

create. Now what you want to do is integrate distribution details.

There are specific things you can add and integrate into your roadmap

and we'll get into some of those. You want to add those into your

planning. You want to integrate that stuff back into your planning. So what are

the things that I'm talking about as far as adding it? You need to add

in things like the actual channels. Where

are you distributing this? It sounds so simple, but do you know where you're going

to distribute this piece of content? You need to be able to add things in

like formats. What are the other types of formats we're creating this in?

What are the other types of pieces that we can create around this? You need

to add in things like what is the actual demand

driver for this? Is this a demand creation type piece or is this a

demand capture type piece? All of those things will help

determine what type of distribution plan you actually have for

that type of piece of content. At the most base level you can

imagine a mainly SEO driven piece, right? You're

creating this and you know SEO is the main driver. Great. So you will have

categories like Google as the main distribution channel

or YouTube as the main distribution channel. It's going to be a demand

capture piece. It's going to be in these formats. This is how people

are actively searching for it. This is how we are going to measure that.

These are the KPIs around it, things like keywords, impressions, search terms,

organic visits, all that type of stuff. You want all of those pieces around for

each given piece because let's say you have a research report that comes out

and nobody's searching for that topic. What are you going to do? Okay,

you have to build out that plan. You have to integrate that plan. You have

to understand how these distribution. Okay, how are we distributing this? How often

are we going to distribute this? Where are we going to distribute this? We are

creating demand around this topic. That means we might have to put even more effort

into this to be able to create demand around this idea, because people need to

see this seven, 8910, eleven times to be able to get the value

out of that piece of content. All right, the next one, number four,

is one of my favorites. It's something that very, very few

content teams that I have ever interacted with actually do

this or do it consistently, but it can completely change the game

as far as your distribution and repurposing process goes. And that is

ranking your content. So ranking every

piece of content when you're creating something, whether it's a YouTube video to

release a product announcement or a YouTube video

to share a bit of thought leadership, or a blog or a press

release, all these things that we create as content

teams, as marketing teams, they're not all created equal. And we have to understand

that there are different distribution methods, different levels of

distribution impact that we want to have as we're creating those things. You

don't want to put the same distribution stamp on a

giant original research report that you paid

tens of thousands of dollars to get created and then all these assets, you don't

want to put that same amount of effort into a press release and you don't

want to assume that your audience cares about those things on the same

levels as well. So we'll get more into ranking content

this year. That's one of my goals, is to be able to share more on

how I do this framework and how this works. But the four main

categories that you want to look at are relevance, quality,

originality and impact. And then you can span that across however

many tiers you want at a very basic level,

ABC one, two, three, however you want to frame those up, and then you

and your team can come up with the ideas of what is a tier one

piece of content from a relevant score, what is a tier

three piece of content from the amount of impact that it's going to have. And

then you actually have to do the hard work of figuring out how that is.

But again, do this ahead of time, do this in the planning phases for

this piece of content. And honestly, we'll talk about it as

we go down at a different step and a different level. But

those are the conversations that really help a team understand

the overall impact or the potential impact of a piece of content that gets

requested, even from somebody outside of your content team and things like

that, unless you have a more intelligent conversation around that piece of

content. All right, number five is all about building

momentum. So you've built out your plan, you understand what this

piece is, you kind of even maybe understand how you want to be able to

distribute this. But now it's all about building momentum. And I have

a whole map, a whole framework that I use for, actually, I

call it a momentum map. And this is something I've built out and used with

clients and essentially lays out

for any given piece of content, typically a larger piece of content. Think a

cornerstone or even a bigger core piece of content, something you really want

to be able to get more out of. Maybe it's a core idea that you

have, and what it does is it forces you to write out the

answers, write out what is it that you want to

actually distribute, and then how do we plan

those things out for the rest of the quarter or the rest of the year?

Or maybe we're not going to be able to do all these things in this

quarter. But hey, if we did four of the things that we came up with

off of this original piece of content sent, and then span those off across

the year, that just gives us excuses to keep coming back to the same idea

and the same idea. Think about your content marketing.

Like an author thinks about marketing their book, if

you come up with a really good piece of content, it deserves to get

marketed for a good amount of time. So think about any

given author. They release a new book, every podcast they're on,

every YouTube video they're doing, every presentation. It's all built around the same

book. So think about your content marketing in that same way, and

think about the impact that you can have if you actually do that

consistently. You build momentum around your ideas, you build momentum

around this content. How many more people, if you did that consistently, would know

about your core ideas, your core content, what you're doing, what you're offering in

the next two quarters than if you just hit it once or twice and kept

trying to constantly create that new stuff? So build momentum.

Step five, you have to build momentum with these pieces of content. And again, not

every piece of content. I might do a momentum map for tier one content

only, but you really think through those things and how to build that up

so you're not constantly running on the content hamster wheel. All right, number

six is all about focus. Knowing which

distribution channels to focus on, what to avoid. Knowing

which types of formats to focus on, which to avoid.

There's so many shiny objects out there trying to get us

to pull into many different ways. So if you can come up

with a very base level plan, this is not rocket science.

What two channels do we post on every single week? What

formats do we create every single week. What formats do we want to

try more of in the future? And which channels do we want to try on

more on in the future? These are the very basic questions and then

takes all the pressure off you to say, I need to be doing a podcast

and I need to be doing carousels and I need to be doing cool graphics

and I need to be doing shorts and I need to be doing just focus

on a couple, just focus on a couple. Do them really well. Get your

audience to know, okay, when I see this in my feed, when this email comes

in my inbox, I know what to expect. You want to create consistency and

expectation from the audience. When you create this piece of

content, you know what to do on your end, but then your audience knows what

to expect from it as well, which is super underrated

from a marketing perspective. Just in terms of consistency makes sense

from a creation standpoint of like, okay, I know what I'm doing every single week,

but it's so underrated from an audience perspective of the

companies and the creators who do things so consistently. You just come to

know what they're going to talk about. You come to know what types of formats

are going to be in, and they might experience and expand and grow and

try different things as they go, but overall, those things stay the

same. So I think that having that laser focus in terms of what you're

going to create, how you're going to create it, and then be able to do

that every single week really leads into number

seven, which is launching. So when you launch a piece of

content, sort of like building momentum, but I would think of launch as more of

like that consistency. So think about this as your core level

content, the content that's

driving your engine. When you think about those things, how are you going to

launch? So at a most basic level, when you

launch podcast episode every week, what

does that look like? What is your standard operating procedure?

Template, distribution template for a podcast?

I've talked about mine before, and I'm sure I'll do a little bit more deep

dive on how I'm evolving that for 2024. But at a base

level, it's release. The podcast. Podcast email goes out on

Tuesdays after newsletter goes out on Saturdays.

Based on that podcast episode, different clips get cut up into

social pieces. So you're creating the very basic plan

for how that goes to be able to launch. And again, so it's not to

say this is the end all, be all, this is the perfect plan, but just

to give you a baseline to start with, that hey, when we launch a blog

post on Tuesday, what happens when we launch a podcast?

What happens when we do a webinar? What happens? So build a launch

plan for distribution to understand how this content is actually going to get out in

front of your audience. And number eight, one of my

favorites, number eight, can't live without it.

Remixing, repurposing how do you take your best

ideas and create, quote unquote new content

off of those throughout the year? So whether you are

going top down and you're taking that content and

repurposing it throughout the year, in terms of taking a blog post and

cutting up into a social piece of content, that's a very basic one, or a

video and cutting it up into clips, are you even doing that? Or

how can you take several of those things and

remix them into something even bigger? But you could take a

series of blog posts that you've done and turn that into course

material. You could take a series of podcasts that you've done and turn that

into an ultimate guide with expert interviews. There are these ways

that you can take smaller pieces and remix them into larger ones

going forward. So think about how you're going to be able to remix

the stuff, remix the ideas again, when you think about building

momentum, that all goes into that, whether it's a launch, whether it's building momentum,

whether it's ranking, all this stuff ties together to be able to build a cohesive

plan to where you are marketing the content that you create,

where you're not just creating it and hoping people hit your website, but you are

being proactive. You are actively getting in front of the audience with the

content, with the message, with the ideas that you want in their face

every single day. And you are actually building a plan

for that. You're not letting that just happen by chance. Because part

of the reality that we have to understand with remixing as well is that not

everyone wants to watch, listen or read

your original piece of content. There are lots of creators

that create YouTube content and also have a

podcast, and I'm never going to listen to the podcast, but I'll watch their YouTube

video. Or there are lots of great folks

with great content on social that have newsletters, but I'm not interested in following their

newsletter. I've got enough newsletters, but I like their stuff on social. That's great.

If you think that you only need to do one, you're missing out

on a whole opportunity of other touch points, other

impressions, other places where these people who may

actually fully enjoy your content could be customers, could be potential

clients. But because you don't distribute that content

and cut it up and remix it in those different ways, you're completely missing out

on them. So don't fall for the trap that a lot of folks

fall into, which is, well, I'm doing a newsletter

and the people who really want that content, they'll see it in my

newsletter, or I already posted that on social, why would I write a longer

newsletter about it? Well, that's just not true. There are people, I see it

across my stuff all the time. There are people who enjoy LinkedIn content, there are

people who enjoy podcast content, and there are people who enjoy the newsletter,

and there's crossover there. That's great. If you're following all these

things, let me know. Leave a review,

say you read every newsletter

and check out LinkedIn and listen to the podcast, that'd be amazing.

But I know full well there are people who do one or

two, and that's great. That's great. If you just follow on one place

and not another, that's no problem because I am going to actively get that content

out in those places every single week. Number nine, this is

more of a bonus, but I couldn't skip it. It's

not something I necessarily have to worry about right now. But

working with teams and working on teams,

you cannot skip number nine, which is collaborate.

Collaboration is one of the hardest things when it comes to distribution,

because a lot of times there's just not a lot of insight into how these

things work. There's a lot of complexity with distribution,

depending on platform, depending on format, depending on what you're

creating, you might not be the one creating the content, but in charge of

distributing the content. I've been there.

Product team creates something and says, hey, we want to

share this with our audience, share it out, you will consume the

content. This isn't very good. So it's hard. It's hard

to understand those things. And so I think just being aware of how

you're going to collaborate, make distribution a collaborative effort. Understand

it's not going to be an overnight switch. It's definitely not going to be an

overnight switch. It's probably more realistically going to be months and years

of fine tuning and adjusting. Because everything within

this I can tell you from working with dozens of

companies, every single company is different.

How they create content is different. How they create

briefs and frameworks and structure projects, it's all

different. So understand, there's no perfect framework.

Even if you followed these nine steps to an absolute t

and you said I hit every single one. I rank my content. I'm building momentum.

I'm launching. I'm following your exact templates. I

can guarantee you following the exact templates and following the format,

it will still look different for your company than it will for somebody else's, than

it will for mine. Because just how you create that content, how you can

successfully amplify that and talk about that amongst your company, it's going to be

totally, totally different. The key is not to have some perfect plan,

it's to just do it. The key is to just do it. To

have the internal awareness of what we're creating, of how we're getting that in front

of the audience, and why it matters to begin with. And just having

those things is going to be a baseline for success. So I really hope you

enjoyed this episode. It's been a super fun one for me to do, to walk

through. Like I said, I've never gone through these steps in public like this,

to go through each of the nine, but these are the areas that you have

to focus on this year in particular. If you want to get more

roi out of the content that you're creating, and if you want more help with

that, if you want some hands on help, feel free to reach out. It's something

I work with teams all the time and actually help them build a

consistent momentum for the content that they're creating. And that would be something

I'd be more than happy to help you out with. So until next week, we

will chat again, but thanks for listening to distribution first and I'll see you all

next time.