The Skinny on Content Distribution to Engineers

Your great content needs help to find its target engineering audience

Ryan Skinner of Forrester rightly pointed out in Great Content is not Enough that, “Marketers and agencies have invested large sums to create quality content, but – in many cases – it’s not getting discovered. Audiences are neither finding nor sharing it. It’s not going viral. It’s not going anywhere.”

This is doubly disappointing, because as Lee Odden points out on his Top Rank blog, there is long-term value in gaining search ranking from good content.  Sadly, the search engines can’t tell how good a piece of content is.  They can only tell how popular it is.  And without distribution your target audience can’t engage with it.  It’s the engagement that garners the likes, comments and shares your content deserves.

This led Jonathan Perelman to say in Forbes that “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.  It’s not nearly enough to create a good piece of content.” Engineering marketers agree.  In an ENGINEERING.com marketing webinar last month, 91% of marketers said they would allocate more budget to content distribution to engineers in 2014 than in 2013.

So how do you put some pants on your content?
Here are a few distribution techniques that work for us:

• Blogs work due to the nature of RSS feeds and also because the ecosystem of blogging lets you trade audience with other bloggers.
• Email is a commonly used distribution method for bottom of funnel content like webinars and white papers, but many companies use it successfully for top of funnel content too.  This blog is a good (I hope) example.
• Paid amplification can really amp up the caffeine level of your content distribution arsenal.  Trade pubs can write the stories as well, which helps if you are short of content.
• Social distribution is proving to be increasingly valuable, particularly on LinkedIn and Facebook (for the younger engineering audience).

However you distribute your content, we find it really useful to use tracking links so you know what works and what doesn’t. Like many of you, we’re all about the metrics and we’ve certainly seen successes and flops when distributing content to engineers. Maybe I should write more in-depth about the metrics for content distribution in a future post?  Let me know if you think that’s worthwhile.

And if you’re interested in more on that webinar I referenced above related to engineering marketers plans for 2014, it’s available here: 

All the best for getting your content seen,

John