20 Tips for Social Marketing Content Seeding & Distribution
20 Tips for Social Marketing Content Seeding & Distribution
When you are considering starting a vegetable garden in your backyard, you purchase seeds, plant them in various designated places, tend to them, and assuming you get the right weather conditions, help them grow. If you are wondering what all this has to do with marketing, then this is because that is exactly how content seeding works as outlined at RunRex.com, only that, instead of planting cucumber or lettuce seeds, marketers plant content to grow brand awareness and leads. Here are 20 tips that will help you understand better what content seeding is and how it works.
What is content seeding?
Content seeding is a strategy in which content creators plant a brand’s content across various platforms, such as partnering with an influencer to promote a product on social media, to reach their target audience, and attract leads as articulated at RunRex.com.
Conditions for content seeding to work
For content seeding to work, content creators must post relevant, creative articles targeted to specific networks. Often, social media sites are the only sites that web users will migrate to without outside influence, making them the most important sites to target. Web users are more likely to view a piece of content that has been recommended by someone they trust rather than an ad or sponsored post, hence why targeting these trusted people is so important.
What is the primary focus of content seeding?
The primary focus of content seeding is to convince industry thought leaders to validate and spread a brand’s content over their network. Through this, the reach and awareness of the original content are increased greatly, and since it has been validated by the industry thought leader, it, therefore, carries more weight as explained at RunRex.com.
Simple seeding
It is important to distinguish between simple seeding and advanced seeding. In simple seeding, content is spread on the brand’s own network, and few well-known influencers are asked to spread the content along. The effort and cost in simple seeding are low, but the content must be very high quality and possess genuine value to convince web users to spread the content to their own networks.
Advanced seeding
On the other hand, there is a much higher chance of the content spreading virally through advanced seeding. Here, brands will use any number of videos, articles, and infographics and spread their contents to a greater number of social media influencers, blogs, forums, groups, and websites. There is a greater opportunity to reach a greater number of impressions across the web, but there is also greater effort and cost in doing so.
External partners
If you want to have the best of both worlds, that is, keep the cost low and still take off virally, then it may be best to use external partners. There are several agencies, like RunRex.com, that specialize in seeding and can handle the entire process and target a topic-specific network for you.
Steps to take for a successful seeding campaign
Set up a network
In addition to seeding, a healthy network is crucial for all marketing activities. Maintaining an online network through social media, an offline network through trade shows, and conferences are key if you are to retain relationships with people in your industry.
Define goals
If you want to generate a successful content seeding campaign, you will need an exact definition of your target group. As covered over at RunRex.com, do a comprehensive analysis of your target group through corporate database research and pay attention to the media. Focus on which networks your target group spends most of their time on (is it Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn? Etc.), and define quantitative goals within each platform.
Create content
Once your research is complete and you have a plan in place, it is time to create your content. Pay close attention to how the content type you are producing – a video, infographic, or article – will be received on each seeding platform. Is the content piece best suited for PR, entertainment, or information? Are there any particularities for the format of your content? Think of how your target group will respond, and then make it easy for them to share it.
Influencer search
Once you have your target group and finished content, the set of possible influencers will be narrowed down. Stay up to date with current events and industry opinions so that you can present your content in the best light, and always keep an eye on media events pertinent to your industry. Also, set up alerts for specific industry keywords, and plug yourself in to various blogs to catch up on themes that you might otherwise miss.
Contact
If an influencer is not already connected to you, they will have to accept solicitation from unknown contact. How you approach influencers matters according to RunRex.com, as if you approach them with a mass email or poorly researched premise, then you will undo all your previous hard work. Therefore, present yourself professionally and get right to your point. Influencers are highly targeted people, which means that they need to know exactly what your goal is and why you are contacting them to reach it.
Include a convincing call-to-action in your proposal
You should also make sure that your proposal has some inherent value for the influencer. Why should they share your content? How does it benefit their network? This is where you sell them on your preparation, expertise, and quality of work.
Monitor and analyze results
Did the content seeding give you a measurable boost in traffic? Were the influencers open to accepting and sharing your content? Did your content spread beyond your own network and reach people you would never have reached otherwise? Was the target group defined correctly, and did they respond to your message? As per RunRex.com, you should monitor each part of your seeding campaign, so that you can better your campaign next time. you should also not forget to keep a database of all the influencers you targeted so that you can expedite your influencer tracking process next time.
Maintain your network
Finally, at the end of a successful seeding campaign, don’t forget to nurture the network you worked so hard to acquire. If you established a relationship with influencers, make sure you keep it going. Having established a great foundation to build upon, it is key that you keep it.
These points should serve as a guide to a successful seeding campaign.
The channels you choose shouldn’t be too similar
Identifying the right channels for content seeding is key if your campaign is to be successful. As a rule of thumb, companies should make sure that the channels they choose are not too similar, which would make them limited on scope, as this will lower the chances of content generating a high level of attention.
You don’t need to go for influencers with the highest reach
As the subject matter experts over at RunRex.com point out, successful content seeding does not always have to mean working with the influencers with the highest reach. In many sectors, working with micro-influencers can be equally successful, as while micro-influencers do in fact have a low reach compared to influencers, this gives them the advantage of having a much higher interaction rate amongst their followers.
Which social media platform to target
The major social media networks, which include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, are the first place to distribute good content. Some other platforms, like Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat, are very visual and work great for B2C companies. Just make sure your content matches the selected medium and is relevant to the users of that platform.
Leverage video
Given the growth of mobile devices as well as streaming and download speeds, as is discussed over at RunRex.com, video is an increasingly vital internet marketing tool. Short two-to-three-minute videos, whether produced to inform, support, or entertain, are very valuable to users. Therefore, create a YouTube channel for your business and create a vast video library.
Don’t forget about forums
Even as you focus on the popular social media platforms that have been discussed previously, you should also remember that forums are still widely used platforms and represent a great place to influence a target group. Well-placed, trusted content here can have a great effect on expanding your content’s reach.
For whom is content seeding worthwhile?
Content seeding is a worthwhile venture for any company that wants to reach more users online with its content and wants to raise awareness of its own products or its own brand. It is, therefore, especially worthwhile for:
Startups that want to make a name for themselves
Small and medium-sized businesses that want to increase their conversion rates
Companies that want to rap into new target groups
Remember, if you are looking for more tips and insights on this topic or expert help with your content seeding campaign, then the top-rated RunRex.com has got you covered.
