Your article is written and uploaded to the company blog. Great. But that’s just the start.

Like a traditional salesperson, you have to knock on doors if you want to maximise reach. The key is understanding the most effective ways of using email, social media and media syndication to separate you from your competitors.

So let’s look at how you can speak to the widest possible audience.

1. Email distribution

Without diving in too deep, essentially two words are important here: impressions and click- throughs. If we’re talking about an email that has a link to an article you have written, impressions are simply the number of people who see the email. Click-throughs are those who view the whole article on your site.

Often we prioritise click-throughs at the expense of impressions. But even if your audience only sees your name, logo, and a summary of the article’s content, you have still made, if you’ll excuse the pun, an impression.

So, two key email strategy tips to keep in mind are:

•  Avoid email list stagnation. Hubspot estimates that each month your email list degrades by 2.1%. That’s one quarter of your email list out-of-date after one year. Keep the list up-to-date by timely digital ad campaigns and website pop-ups.
•  Stay consistent with send-outs. This depends on the amount of content you can create. But research shows that more emails = more click-throughs. Sending 1-2 emails per month gains a click-through rate of 3%, as opposed to 6.2% when sending 16-30 emails per month.

 2. Social media maximisation

In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2C Content Marketing report, 1,798 marketers were asked how they planned to distribute content. Coming out on top was social media (93%).

There is good reason why LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are such important tools for content distribution and building brand awareness. Not only do they facilitate fast and timely distribution, they also allow you to target the right people at the right time.

 Two important social media tips to keep in mind:

• Use targeting features. This is the ability to display adverts or specific posts to a pre-defined audience of your choosing. You can customise messages to more than just those you follow or who follow you – in fact, anybody who fits your target audience in terms of age, gender, location, keywords, etc. Twitter and Facebook even allow you to upload your own customer data. Facebook, for example, has a Facebook Audience Insights page which allows you to deep-dive into your current audience.
• Be a thought leader. Businesses are generally less trusted than individual people. The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 34,000+ respondents across 28 markets found that information from technical experts (68%), and a person like yourself (61%) was deemed most trustworthy. Social media offers the perfect platform for you or a colleague to establish themselves as a thought leader. LinkedIn with its LinkedIn Publishing Platform is a great place to start.

 3. Media syndication

In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2C Content Marketing report, 31% of those surveyed were distributing content via guest posts or articles in third-party publications.

Media syndication – where content is re-published by a third party site, newspaper or magazine – is becoming increasingly popular. It’s a simple and effective way of increasing your reach beyond a standard email list and ramping up your brand awareness. Any type of existing content can be syndicated – blogs, infographics, videos, and so on.

 Two media syndication tips to remember:

•  Create content that mainstream media needs. Your content should avoid direct promotion and must be up-to-date with current news, events and cutting edge research. Whether the media pays for your content or not, you may also benefit from it being syndicated to other sources as well. It’s a win-win.
• Be SEO savvy. Google discourages the use of duplicate content. But you can get around this if you’re clear that it’s syndicated. Use headings such as guest post and provide a canonical link so it’s clear which version is the original.

Finally, repurpose content to extend reach

Remember that your content is essentially an asset. Once published, it still retains value. That means you can republish an updated version at a later point; you can break content down into smaller pieces and publish it in different forms; you can even repurpose it – so you use the core of the content but tweak it to achieve a different marketing goal.

All three are great tactics that you can use to maximise your content whether distributing through email, social media or media syndication.