With so much content being published on the Internet daily, the big challenge is standing out and reaching your target audience. This can be achieved with the right content-seeding strategy. In this article, you’ll learn exactly what this involves and how to develop your design in 4 steps.
Every company can reach its target group with selected content via digital media. The aim is usually to raise awareness among potential customers and convince them of the product’s or service’s benefits. However, it is often difficult to reach the right target group. In the field of content marketing, this is referred to as successful content seeding. In this article, you will learn what this is all about.
Definition: Content Seeding
What is content seeding? In German, it means “sowing content.” What sounds like a far-fetched metaphor at first glance is not that far-fetched. After all, just like sowing plants, in online marketing, you should focus on something other than a single area or spread content indiscriminately. Instead, it’s a matter of strategically applying content in such a way that it generates the most excellent possible reach. Essential for an effective strategy is, on the one hand, the right platforms for distributing the content – such as own channels in social media or third-party media in which advertising is placed – and, on the other hand, effective multipliers. These include users and media that further distribute a company’s content.
Content Marketing With Seeding Creates A Boost.
Even the best content does not usually spread on the Internet by itself. For young companies, it is crucial to make themselves known to potential customers. However, this is not only possible by publishing a blog post on the company website. On the other hand, well-thought-out content seeding gives the content a boost and thus makes the company better known. There are many ways to seed content:
- Online PR
- Social media marketing
- Collaborations with influencers
- Search engine optimization (SEO) of one’s website and the associated content
Thus, content seeding has three functions:
- It increases the reach of your content.
- Your target group’s awareness of your company grows.
- You improve your SEO values through good backlinks.
Content Seeding In 4 Steps
1. Set Goals
First of all, you should have a clear idea of your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve with content seeding? Attract more traffic to your website? Higher sales of a particular product? Or get more positive reviews about your service? Of course, some goals can be combined, but first, you need to define them to know precisely what you’re working on.
2. Define Topics And Select Formats
You now know what you want to achieve. Now you go one step further and think about how and with which content you can reach your goals. For example, you can find topics with classic keyword analysis or talk to experts about potentially exciting content. Micro-surveys can also be an excellent way to get inspiration for topics. The advantage of this is that they don’t cost much from service providers and deliver results quite quickly.
Once the topic of your content has been decided, there is still the question of what format you want to use for it. Are blog or technical articles suitable, does an official press release help distribute the content, or are you better off preparing posts on social media with images, graphics, and videos? Again, your already-defined goals are crucial. Because to attract more potential customers, you must act differently than if you want to make your company better known.
3. Identifiying Multipliers And Establishing Contacts
Multipliers play an essential role in content seeding. With them, you spread your content and reach so many people who only regularly check the content on your website. Seeding can be done in marketing on the one hand through your channels on different media: the company page on Facebook, the company account on LinkedIn, or the profiles on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. On the other hand, there is the possibility of cooperating with influencers or so-called thought leaders – authority figures in a specialist field. They then promote your content and thus provide you with further publicity.
When choosing your influencers, look at their reputation (with media), reach (influencers & thought leaders), and performance (websites, blogs, and other online channels). Make a note of those that are eligible, and then prioritize your complete list. This will give you the order to follow for contacting them.
4. Measure Success
To see if your content seeding strategy has been successful, you need to measure certain factors that depend on your goals. For example, you can see the purpose of “more leads and conversions” through sales and download numbers. Or, if you want to increase the traffic on your website, this can be evaluated by analytics tools.
The most common mistakes in content seeding
No specification: Content seeding is done through an extensive, unspecific portfolio of blogs and websites. Instead, you should only use platforms and multipliers that attest to the quality and have target audience relevance.
Buy reach: For many, for example, it sounds tempting to buy Instagram followers and thus appear more reputable. But beware: this can damage your reputation if users recognize the purchased likes, but it also entails downgrades in relevance on the part of the platforms.
Just one media strategy: Successful content seeding is characterized by a healthy mix of your multipliers (owned media) as well as third-party multipliers through collaborations (shared media) and paid advertising (paid media). Don’t rely on just one, but combine the different channels.
Huge distribution lists: Send a newsletter to a distribution list with multiple email addresses. That’s a bad idea! With compelling content seeding in marketing, you use only relevant multipliers and, if possible, use the direct approach.
Conclusion On Content Seeding
In modern content marketing, a correct content seeding strategy is essential to distribute a wide variety of content as widely as possible. Serving multipliers in the right way also helps to increase your awareness and relevance. But to make it all work the way you want it to, you need careful planning and – as with the OKR method – the ability to measure the results concretely.
