📝 What is Content Seeding?
Content seeding and learning to leverage influencers and multipliers
They say “content is king” but content may not be of much use if it does not reach its intended targets. Creating good content is undoubtedly important if we are to drive traffic to our content and platforms. However, great content only works if it is reaching its intended audience. Bloggers need to use different strategies to ensure our content gets to the intended audience.
Content seeding is one of the digital marketing strategies that target increasing brand awareness by using content that is pushed across the internet. Content creators use it to spread their content on different platforms and locations intending a large audience to consume it. Relevant influencers or journalists are typically used, in the hope that they will use their own platform to circulate the content.
What is content seeding?
Content Seeding is the distribution of content through diverse channels, such as your own website, Facebook, or in strategic guest blog post. Content seeding is performed with the goal of reaching the largest possible target audience.
Content seeding is a lot like planting seeds. While your content seeding won’t grow plants, it will produce interest in your brand and potentially get you new customers.
Content seeding allows brands to highlight their content in places target audiences will see and engage with it. Influencers are a prime choice for content seeding because they usually have large audiences. These audiences have been proven to trust influencers more than their friends.
For content seeding to work as a digital marketing strategy, these strategic “planting” locations should guarantee that the content will be seen, read, and further spread to more potential customers.
For content seeding to work, content creators must post relevant, creative articles targeted to specific networks. Often, social media sites are the only sites that web users will migrate to without an outside influence, so these are the most important sites to target. Web users are more likely to view a piece of content that’s been recommended by someone they trust rather than an ad or sponsored post. This is why targeting these trusted people is so vital.
How does it work?
In simple seeding, content is spread on the brand’s own network, and a few well-known influencers are asked to spread the content along. The effort and cost in this effort is low, but the content must be very high quality and possess genuine value to convince web users to spread the content to their own networks.
The chance for content to spread virally is much higher through advanced seeding. Brands will use any number of videos, articles and infographics and spread their contents to a greater number of social media influencers, blogs, forums, groups and websites. There’s a greater opportunity to reach greater numbers of impressions across the web, but there’s also greater effort and cost in doing so.
Some specific strategies include:
Create a network: Content seeding alone will not work; you need to build a strong network. Maintaining online and offline networks is important if you are going to create and maintain a healthy relationship with those in your industry.
Comment on blogs: Another way to seed content is by commenting on other people’s blogs with a link to your own content. While commenting is effective, it’s also a popular technique amongst spammers. To avoid having your comment come across as spam, be sure to identify yourself in your comment and explain how your content is relevant to the post you’re responding to.
Email Marketing: Email is not dead. In fact, it’s the best marketing channel. Unlike social media, email doesn’t have an algorithm that impacts whether or not the user sees an email. Studies have also shown that consumers prefer email.
Creating High Quality Content: The best and most effective form of content seeding is by creating content that will attract inbound links and traffic. In other words, by creating a high-quality piece of thought-leadership content, you’ll naturally attract others who want to link to it as a reference. You can prime the pump, if you will, by reaching out to authors, bloggers and reports inquiring if they’ll link back to your content in theirs. Backlinks from other popular pieces of content generated from content seeding do well do well to boost your search engine rankings position and establish your brand as a credible source for industry information.
Influencers: By having influencers indirectly or directly mentioning your product or brand, you instantly raise the awareness of your product’s existence in potential customers’ minds and begin building brand presence among them. When customers see their influencers using your product, they know they can easily trust your brand and start to learn about your product quickly.
Monitoring/analysis of campaign: Having identified influencers and agreed on terms, you need to monitor and analyze the results of your campaign. You need to establish whether the endeavor is giving a measurable boost in traffic, whether the influencer is doing actually what you wanted, whether the content has spread and reached those whom you intended. The whole point of monitoring and analyzing the results of your campaign is to help you know the extent to which this is working and to make improvements on future campaigns.
Once a seeding campaign ends, you need to nurture your audience; you have worked hard and likely spent time and money to acquire it. If you have established a relationship, be it with influencers or audience, cultivate this relationship, and build a strong foundation for future campaigns.
What are the benefits of content seeding?
Content seeding will give your business a larger audience than most traditional marketing strategies.
It increases the chances of reaching your target audience.
It helps you boost your SEO and rank better in search engine results.
It will help you generate sales leads, boost conversions, and ultimately identify better potential customers.
Content seeding is an enormously important element in online marketing. If you don’t want to rely solely on traffic from Google, you should take action and sow your content on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, but also on a blog, video, or in forums. In order to achieve optimal distribution and possibly even create viral campaigns, the best marketing expert also needs the help of opinion leaders and multipliers. Through clever networking and a good content strategy, the sensible use of social media, and other means of publication, a seed can easily increase the traffic, the number of interested parties, and also the conversion.
—Casey