Spread the love

It goes without saying that content marketing has become standard practice for companies in today’s digital age. When it works, it’s an incredibly powerful way to build relationships and exchange knowledge without overtly pitching your services or products. We know it works, we know its many benefits. Yet what many marketers don’t know and struggle with perpetually is how to execute a successful content marketing plan that takes into account the bigger picture: the content marketing lifecycle.

While producing great, engaging content is critical, skimping on distribution will render your efforts useless. As you learned previously, you need to promote your content to get it in front of the audience it was intended for. In the words of Brian Sutter, Director of Marketing at System ID Barcode Solutions, “Brands need to think big picture. Instead of asking, ‘How can I make more sales?’ ask, ‘What does my audience need?’ Audience growth and influencer reach will naturally follow.”

As we’ve mentioned before, there are 6 phases of the content marketing lifecycle:

Maximizing your efforts at every phase is critical to content marketing success, but it’s near impossible to do effectively without the proper tools. Now that you know the most efficient tools for producing better content, it’s time to figure out which tools fit your needs best for promoting your content. To do this, we’ve compiled this handy list of content distribution tools you need to add to your marketing arsenal in 2016:

The best content marketing tools for promoting your content

Now that you’ve got the content production part of content marketing out of the way, it’s time to get down to the content marketing part of content marketing. Because all wishful thinking aside: your content isn’t going to promote itself. In other words, just because you built it doesn’t mean they’re going to come. This is the real world, unfortunately, and not a fairytale.

Use an email service provider to handle basic newsletter functions:

Email marketing is an essential content promotion tactic. It is the most direct way to reach audiences, delivers unbeatable ROI, and with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be too arduous or time consuming. Unfortunately, only a third of content marketers are using this tactic, which poses a great opportunity for you to get ahead of the game. If you aren’t currently doing any email marketing, now is the time to get started.

MailChimp (or any other email service provider): Beyond having an adorable monkey-mailman as their logo, this is a great, easy to use email marketing software that allows users to easily personalize and automate email newsletters. We use it to send out our own email newsletters!

Reach out to influencers in your niche or industry:

Ninja Outreach: One of the most powerful ways to get more exposure for your content is to tell influencers about it – the right influencers. This paid online tool speeds that process way up. It also works for finding bloggers who might be interested in writing about your product.

ContentMarketer.io: this is a highly effective tool and easy to use platform that allows you and your team to promote content and build relationships. The tool helps you refine your list before you start outreach. And, since it integrates with Google Apps, Gmail and Twitter, you can send emails and tweets to your list all in one place.

Advertise:

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere, consider spending even a little bit of cash to promote your best content. Just $5 of strategic advertising on Facebook can help.

To promote your content on other sites:

Zemanta: These strategically-placed display, “in-stream” and text ads can get your content out in front of new audiences.

Outbrain: Outbrain is a powerful tool for promoting your content and getting it in front of a broader audience. Considered a “content discovery platform”, it puts a small ad for your piece of content on prominent, respected media sites and specific content pages where readers might be interested in it. It’s a great tool that enables you to reach and engage new audiences.

Use content sharing cooperatives, aka “cross-promotion”:

Just Retweet: Just Retweet offers credits for when you share other users’ content. If you buy credits, you can get your content shared, too – for just pennies a share. Also check out

CoPromote: Known as “The largest cross-promotion network for creators”, this is a great co-marketing tool that helps marketers and content creators reach more people by using the concept of share and share alike.

Viral Content Buzz: This is a web-based platform that utilizes a crowd-sourcing model to facilitate the generation of real, social buzz on quality content. It allows you to Facebook likes and tweets from established social media accounts that may be outside of your typical social media channels. It’s unique because it keeps the sharing organic and gives your content real social signals.

Leverage tools that automate content distribution to re-share posts multiple times across your social channels

While it may seem obvious, re-sharing posts multiple times is an effective way to increase visibility and maximize your content reach, yet over 65% of marketers don’t re-share their posts on a regular basis. Re-sharing content manually can get complicated: it takes time to schedule across different social channels, and additional effort to dig through your existing content to identify which successful pieces you want to promote again. You also run the risk of over-doing it creating audience fatigue. That’s why you need to invest in a software that can help automate your distribution:

Scoop.it Content Director: This is a great tool to maximize your content reach. With the Promote feature, you can re-schedule a week’s worth of content across as many of your social channels as you want however many times you want in just minutes. The tool also helps you to identify older, evergreen or successful content to re-share for maximum visibility.

Over to you

Once you have the knowledge for how to become a successful content marketer, you need to implement it. Effective marketers know how to utilize available tools to keep their work at a consistently high quality while also saving themselves valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Hopefully this list of tools provides you with helpful information you can use when deciding on the best software to select to help save you time and maximize the efficiency of your content creation process.

As always, we’d love to hear from you. So don’t be shy! Feel free to give us feedback or let us know about your own favorite tools you’ve used in the comments below.

For the next edition, we’ll be reviewing the best tools for measuring and analyzing your content.

Want to create better content in less time? Get more results from your existing content? Find out how artificial intelligence is changing the content marketing game by providing marketers with actionable predictive insights to help them create better content that generates more traffic and leads!

Find out how to use the new Scoop.it Content Director to help you become a smarter marketer!