Every way companies use to disseminate content today is because a previous one failed to be effective. For example, banner ads were easily overlooked so publishers introduced targeting. Afterwards, the public felt targeted ads were invasive which led to auctions being implemented. Then, auctions started becoming too competitive and noisy, so advertisers created native ad formats that don’t resemble ads directly. Let your top content be seen by many individuals by acting on it the same way the advertising sector does; as a series of reactions to the public being uninterested, rather than a singular approach that is reused endlessly.
Most businesses have a few assets that outperform everything else they create but they don’t use these assets to the fullest. They publish them once, note the peak in traffic is typically after 48 hours, then move on to next week’s publication. This is not how a good asset should be treated. Here are seven strategies to pump extra life into content that has already demonstrated its value. Each of these suggestions corresponds to a trend in the history of advertising that forced the content sector to build something new.
Before the seven strategies: audit, don’t guess
Before you spend a dollar or an hour on distribution, figure out what actually deserves it. Pull your analytics and sort by engagement depth, conversion rate, and traffic quality, not raw pageviews. A post that got 50,000 visits but a 12-second average session isn’t a high performer. A guide that got 4,000 visits, a five-minute average read, and a 9% email signup rate is.
This matters because early digital advertising ran on exactly the wrong metric. The 1994 AT&T banner on Wired.com – the first paid ad ever served on the web – was sold and judged almost entirely on impressions. Advertisers paid for eyeballs, not outcomes, and that habit stuck around far longer than it should have. Don’t repeat it with your own content. Rank your assets by what they actually produced, then pick your top two or three for the distribution push described below.
Repurpose before you spend anything
After you’ve identified your best-performing content, you shouldn’t just share the same original blog post across all platforms. Instead, you need to adapt it to create specific pieces of content that are suitable for each platform, such as a short video for social media, a slide deck for LinkedIn, an infographic highlighting interesting statistics, or even a podcast segment. Unfortunately, many marketing teams skip this step because they believe it is too time-consuming, and they want to immediately start sharing the content.
However, the reality is that repurposing your content is the most important step. For example, a text-heavy blog post shared as a link on a visual platform will be overlooked, just as an image with too much text is less likely to capture attention on Facebook. The key is to always adjust the type of content to fit the platform it will be shared on, and then focus on how you will push it out to the audience.
Blend into the feed instead of interrupting it
Advertising history demonstrates this most clearly. Standard display banners have been losing effectiveness for twenty years – primarily due to banner blindness. It’s the behavior in which users’ eyes automatically scroll past anything that looks like an ad unit. Ad blocker adoption exacerbated the issue, with most of your target audience utilizing software that actively removes traditional banners from pages before they can register a view.
Native advertising was specifically developed to counter this precise problem. Rather than disrupting the editorial, a native placement is designed to match the surrounding editorial content in terms of appearance, language, and visual style. This means users are more likely to think of the ad as a genuine piece of content, rather than something to be ignored. The pay-per-result math is often more favorable here as well, since native units are routinely interacted with, rather than dismissed. The 62% native share of U.S. digital display advertising expenditure in 2020 (published by eMarketer) clearly reflects this change in the market – demonstrating where native budgets have already shifted.
If you’re just starting to test out native placements, you’ll likely see the best results by working with a platform designed specifically for the format, rather than tacking native units on to a one-size-fits-all display network. When you’re looking at vendors, Galaksion is a good example of the best native ad platform for this kind of asset amplification. The platform delivers your repurposed assets directly into the feeds of top publishers where they appear as relevant editorial content, rather than units immediately read by the audience as ads. That’s the whole point of native: the audience doesn’t feel sold to, so they actually engage.
Build lookalike audiences from your best converters
In the year 2000, Google AdWords introduced the auction-based, pay-per-click model and suddenly advertisers were paying for intent rather than exposure. That steady march toward precision continued and eventually begat the lookalike audience tools we have today on most social platforms and PPC channels.
The concept is easy enough to understand: you take the list of people who engaged deeply with your asset or converted from it, and you feed that list into the ad platform, which then goes out and finds new prospects who statistically resemble that group. It’s a big step up from the “spray it across a broad demographic and hope” method that dominated paid social for so long. You’re not searching around in the dark for who might care. You’re talking to people who are statistically likely to care because people who look a lot like them already do.
Run this alongside your native placements rather than as a full replacement. Native is for serving in top-flight feeds where people already trust the source. Lookalike targeting on social is for serving ads to people far more likely than most to be ready to click. Get them working in concert and you are covered on both ends of the social funnel.
Exhaust owned channels before you pay for reach
The first lever to pull to boost your asset’s performance should be organic (and free). Ensure the asset is featured on your website’s homepage, you send it out in your next email newsletter, and you’ve linked to it in every relevant past post you’ve already published. Email newsletters and owned channels should never be last-minute adds only after spend has been considered – that’s just wasting money you don’t have to.
Borrow credibility through influencer amplification
Automated ad buying didn’t generate the trust needed to make marketing effective. Nowadays we need our ads to feel like content rather than ads. One of the most effective ways to do that used to be called “influencer marketing,” but is now called “influencer amplification.”
If sponsored placements benefit reach, influencer amplification benefits trust. Put simply, the easier it is to buy your audiences’ attention in your space, the less that attention is worth. Automated ad sales allowed companies to buy at a scale never previously possible, but the ads themselves were so clearly ads that they didn’t tend to perform well.
Influencer amplification is the opposite: rather than paying to place an ad in someone else’s content stream by reaching their audience and hoping the implicit endorsement that comes with that doesn’t undermine your message, you send your content directly to an influencer and hope they decide it’s worthy of sharing with their audience.
Layer retargeting onto every paid push
Many people who come across your content probably won’t take action right away. But that’s no reason to feel discouraged; this is a common occurrence. Retargeting helps by displaying a series of ads to users who interacted with your content but didn’t move further down the funnel.
You can easily put together a sequence for this: the first ad reminds users about the asset they just consumed, the second ad introduces a related offer, and the third ad directly calls for action. This strategy works whether the initial contact was through your native ad, your lookalike campaign, or an influencer’s post. The important thing is to remember that one good exposure to content might not be enough to convert a reader into a lead. Follow-up exposure in a sequence is often required for that.
Track everything or you’re just guessing
None of the above matters if you can’t tell which channel actually drove the result. Tag every single distribution channel with UTM parameters before you throw anything into the world. Do not compromise on this point. Then compare cost-per-engagement and conversion rate across native, social, email, and influencer channels on a single dashboard.
Kill the underperformers after two to three weeks of clean data. Double down on whichever channel is producing the cheapest qualified engagement, and shift budget there. This measurement step is what separates a genuine distribution strategy from a scattershot content push that happens to include several channels. Advertising has moved, generation after generation, toward more precise attribution – from impression counts in 1994 to click tracking in the AdWords era to full-funnel attribution today. Your own content distribution should move with it.
The pattern behind all seven
Each of these strategies was developed because a previous, more rudimentary form of it became ineffective. Banners were replaced by native placement. Wide targeting was replaced by lookalike audiences. Approximations were replaced by UTM-tracked attribution. Advertising hasn’t become more intricate just for the sake of it – it has become more accurate because people have become very good at ignoring anything that appears to disrupt their experience.
So take your most successful content, and apply the same principle. Audit it objectively, rework it for each placement, position it where it blends in contextually rather than stands out as an ad, target the individuals likely to be interested, retarget those who weren’t ready to convert, and measure each campaign to find out why it succeeded or failed. Do that religiously and your top performers will no longer be flashes in the pan. They’ll be the pieces you build your entire stable of content around.