Paid, Earned Or Owned – Content Distribution When Marketing To The Water Industry

“Content is king, but distribution is queen … and she wears the pants”

Jonah Peretti, CEO Buzzfeed

Paid

Nothing, and I mean nothing, will market itself to the engineers and operators in the water and wastewater market without help.

Paid search?  Nah, I’ve heard too many horror stories from companies trying to use paid search as a vehicle to market content and it has failed them miserably in our market. Please, forget it. It’s too expensive to try to reach as niche an audience as ours, and will, more times than not, deliver people who have the wrong need or mindset for your content.

Paid options should be limited to those that offer a couple of things.  First, they need to offer tracking so that you can measure the success of your content.  You should know how many times it has been viewed, read, downloaded and shared.  Second, paid options should let you know WHO interacted with your content.  The right paid driver will produce a comprehensive view of those professionals, operators and engineers that have chosen to spend their time interacting with you, your brand and your content.

Earned

Earned media is the hardest to achieve because it relies on the author’s credibility and the inherent quality of the article to gain meaningful reach.

Earned media can take several forms:

Social Sharing from Individual Employee Accounts and Corporate Pages

Your best bets are LinkedIn and Twitter.  Don’t get mixed up with Facebook, Pinterest or Tumblr whose main focus tends to be more personal than business. As far as efficacy, the response to a properly executed social sharing plan can vary from a low-level passive interest all the way to so much traffic that your homepage is flooded (no pun intended) and your sales funnel is overflowing.

Bloggers and Other Influencers Writing About Your Content

Bloggers aren’t reserved to traditional media but rather individual contributors who chose to write about your content. The relationship between these writers and traditional media has become increasingly blurry and that is actually a good thing.  They are both working towards the same end.

Always remember: Earned media is the most important media and whenever you produce a new piece of content, this is a must have in “your plan.”

Owned

Water and wastewater manufacturers should develop a plan to promote their content from the inside out using social media, blogs and e-mail lists.

You should link everything back to a trackable central location.  That could be a platform on a paid media partner or your own website.  The key here is to utilize all the assets you have acquired to maximize the potential of your Brand Publishing outreach plan.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve made something great doesn’t mean people will find out about it on their own. Developing a plan to promote your content across paid, earned, and owned media before you even create it is not just a best practice – it’s necessary to be an effective content marketer.