With the content creation process growing longer and longer, it’s crucial for brands to prioritize distribution and promotion during the early stages. To establish a successful media distribution and promotion strategy, businesses should consider the earned media potential of content throughout the entire content development lifecycle, including research, planning, production, promotion and measurement. 
Content creation often overshadows content distribution and promotion, but don’t let your content distribution and promotion strategy take a back seat. Brands that wait for the right people to discover their content will lose critical momentum and find that organic content discovery isn’t happening as quickly or reliably as it once did.
Follow these three pieces of advice to prioritize distribution and promotion throughout the entire content development lifecycle.
Once a general content topic is identified, begin developing your ideal media list. The list can be updated as the content evolves, and it will serve as an excellent resource throughout the content development cycle. Using the target media list in addition to your full media distribution plan, you can guide the development of content that will meet the needs of journalists and bloggers at your target media outlets.
Often, brands only consider earned media efforts as an afterthought; but identifying target media outlets as early as possible is a crucial step in any content strategy.
Armed with your target media list, you can knowledgeably weigh in on content development throughout research, planning, and production to ensure it is something worthy of earned media coverage.
When you prioritize media distribution and promotion, you add an additional audience to the mix. Now you’re not only creating content for your customers but for journalists and bloggers, too. Shift into the mindset of creating and distributing content that serves the journalists and readers of your target media outlets.
While they may align very closely, the target audiences of a business and a media outlet’s reader base will never be identical. Learn the differences and understand what kind of information readers seek when they read your target media outlet.
Use research to discover the current media trends around your brand and broader content topic. Through an analysis of existing content and news coverage, you can identify the current coverage trends and also forecast what will be relevant in the coming months.
In the early stages of content development, seek media feedback. Select some of your most desirable media placements and invite feedback from a few media contacts.
Use this opportunity to deepen your relationships with several key media contacts and also get a better understand of what types of content they feel will resonate best with their readers. By inviting input from a very niche group of media or influencers you will also nurture relationships for future earned media opportunities. This is also a helpful process to identify a few influencers who could contribute ideas to the final content.
These three steps can put you in front of the right outlets and the right audiences at the right time. For help with developing your content distribution and promotion strategy download this Content Distribution and Promotion Cheat Sheet.
