What is a Distribution Strategy in Marketing? – Everything You Need to Know, FAQs & More
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As a brand, you must define how you intend to distribute the message of your product or service to your target customers.
When you choose an effective distribution channel for your brand messaging, you’ll start to see an increase in sales.
This is because your brand message is being displayed to individuals that are most likely interested in the product or service you have to offer.
Quick Summary
In this post, we will shed light upon what a marketing distribution strategy is, why it’s important for a brand and how you can compose one for yourself.
So without further ado, let’s get into it.
What is a Distribution Strategy in Terms of Marketing?
When it comes to a distribution strategy in marketing, it’s the channels that you choose to distribute your brand’s message. It also dictates the approach and methods you will use as part of your marketing campaigns and what goals they are meant to achieve.
Please note that a distribution strategy in marketing differs from a regular distribution strategy. The former deals with distributing a brand’s message while the latter deals with distributing the actual product or service to the target customer.
For the purposes of this post, we are discussing the former.
The purpose of a marketing distribution strategy is to first identify the best channels for the distribution of brand content. Next, it must determine what type of content should be posted on those channels and how the audience is meant to interact with it.
Want to know what is channel marketing strategy? CLICK HERE.
How to Develop a Marketing Distribution Strategy (Step-by-Step Guide)
The process to develop a marketing distribution strategy is fairly the same for most brands and products.
In this section, we’ll provide actionable steps that you can take to develop a successful marketing distribution strategy for your brand.
These steps are:
Step 1: Conduct Audience Research
As we briefly mentioned earlier, the ideal distribution channels for your brand will depend on who your target audience is.
Naturally, you will want to choose distribution channels that your target audience frequents the most. That’s where they can easily come across your content and if they’re interested, they will pause and interact with it.
For example, if you have a product that appeals to middle-aged individuals and the elderly, then distribution channels such as print ads and TV ads would be the way to go.
On the other hand, if you have a product that appeals to individuals in Gen Z, then distribution channels like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram would be much more effective.
Hence, you must first identify who the target audience of your product or service is and then identify which platforms they are most likely to frequent. You want to maximize the chance of an individual from your target segment to come across your brand’s content.
As part of your audience research, we highly recommend that you develop a set of buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the ideal customer for your brand.
You can define them by describing different traits and characteristics for them. This includes:
- Age
- Gender
- Marital status
- Job
- Income
- Geographical location
And much more.
Check out the various components of marketing strategy, HERE.
Step 2: Conduct Competitor Research
Once you have identified the ideal customers for your brand, you have to gauge the competition.
Competitor analysis is important for a number of different reasons but when it comes to the distribution strategy, it can really come in handy. When you study your competitors, it can provide you with clues on what you can do to gain an edge over them.
Since your competitors are also in the same niche and are selling similar products or services, there’s a high chance that your target audience will also be the same. Hence, this can provide you with great insight into what works and what doesn’t.
If you have no idea which distribution channels are ideal for your type of brand, you can look at your competitors and see what channels they use.
Additionally, you can combine the findings of step 1 with step 2 to find a distribution channel that has not been fully utilized yet.
For example, let’s say that as a part of your audience research, you found that a high number of your target customers frequent Instagram.
However, when you conduct competitor research, you find that most of them are using Facebook and Twitter as their primary distribution channels.
Thus, you can capitalize on this by setting up your social media page on Instagram and sharing your content there.
Since you’ll have little to no competition on that particular distribution channel, you can capture a significant share of the market with ease.
Step 3: Choose the Ideal Distribution Channels
After you conduct audience and competitor research, you will have unique insight into which distribution channels could work best for your brand.
Once you find these channels, it’s time to decide which ones you want to start out with. One big mistake that many new brands make is that they try to conquer multiple distribution channels at once.
This rarely ever works out since you need a large team and a large budget to carry out something like that successfully. As a new brand, we definitely recommend that you stick to one or two distribution channels.
Then, once you start to gain traction on those channels and your brand starts to bring in sizable revenue, you can expand into other distribution channels.
A good distribution strategy takes into account all the different factors that may affect how well you can market your product or service on a specific channel.
For example, let’s say that you conducted thorough audience and competitor research and found that Youtube and WordPress are the two best channels for your brand.
As you may know, these are two wildly different platforms when it comes to the type of content that is typically present on them.
At this point, you must consider what is the expertise of your content creation team. Are they good at creating long-form video content? Or are they mainly good at writing long-form text content?
Naturally, you will go with the platform that primarily hosts the type of content that your content creation team is good at.
Step 4: Create Your Content
Next up is content creation. Naturally, the platform that you choose will depend on the type of content that you will create for your brand.
In any case, you must ensure that the content you create for your brand is easily digestible and relatable to your target audience. Since you’ve conducted extensive audience research, you’ll be aware of what their core values and beliefs are.
Hence, it’s a good idea to create content that is personalized to that target audience because it will resonate with them. As a result, they’ll be much more likely to interact with your content.
If it’s text content, it’s important for it to be bite-sized and easily scannable. Avoid big blocks of text and ensure that you use headings and subheadings.
You can also use your distribution channel to drive traffic to your brand website or online store. All you have to do is include a link to it within your social media posts or bios.
Find out how to select the best marketing strategy for your business HERE.
Ensure that you use a link shortener to shorten the links so that your post remains concise and to the point. One such example is Pixelfy.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account and log in.
Step 1: After logging in, you’ll be at the dashboard page for Pixelfy.
From here, you can see the fast shortener box at the top of the page.
Step 2: Copy the link that you want to add to your distribution channel and paste it into the fast shortener box. You’ll automatically be taken to the next page.
If you are not, click on the Shorten button.
Step 3: On the next page, you’ll get the shortened URL that you can copy and paste into your posts.
Wrapping Things Up…
That’s how a distribution marketing strategy works and why a company’s distribution strategy is important for its longevity.
Just make sure that you start with only one or two channels as a new business. Then, once the business starts booming, you can start to have multiple channels.
If you have further questions, please let us know in the comments section below. Check out more content like this on our blog.
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