19+ Free Ways to Boost Your Content Distribution

No marketer has ever said their content distribution budget is too big.

That’s why brands of all sizes eagerly consider free and low-cost ideas.

So, what are the best no- or small-budget tips that will work in 2024 and beyond?

We asked the experts presenting at Content Marketing World, and their responses offer a plethora of opportunities to grow your content’s reach and engagement without depleting your budget.

Turn to social influencers

Pushing something valuable via social. For example, you sell dog toys. You can put together a downloadable white paper titled Social Influencer’s Top 20 Products Needed for Your New Puppy. Interview five dog influencers and have them provide their top 20 favorite products. Make sure they have credit in the document and have them mention the product sheet to their followers. — Michael Bonfils, global managing director, Digital International Group

Ask the rank and file

When employees share your brand’s content, that is as close to free as it gets. Unfortunately, many brands don’t understand the value of employee content sharing, and the same is true of many employees. Equipping employees with training and tools to enable content sharing is a worthwhile investment. This has been true for many years, especially on LinkedIn for B2B brands. — Bernie Borges, vice president, global content marketing, iQor

Welcome upper management

One of the most overlooked free channels is your executive leadership team. Publishing a post on your organic social channel will generate some traction, but having your executives publish personalized versions of the said post will generate a conversation. It will give credibility and provide customers and prospects with a feedback loop. — Royna Sharifi, senior marketing campaign manager, Amazon Web Services

Create custom shares

Social employee advocacy for the win. Your employees’ network is a powerful distribution channel that many marketers forget about. Sure, there are tools you can use to help do company-wide social advocacy programs. But I found a simple share link in Slack when you do a launch post can help a ton.

Wanna get a great impact? Think about who at your company has the largest social influence with your audience. Then, create custom shares for them that include images and trackable codes (hello UTMs!). I did this once for our large state-of report, where we created custom shares for our executives to promote the report. In the first week alone, their shares produced 20% of overall views, both paid and organic, for the report. Talk about a great free distribution plan. — Amy Higgins, director, content strategy, Cloudflare

Wear a public relations hat

Using a PR approach to get more out of your content is a cost-effective way to wring more value from it.

Look at the content you’re creating. Are there pieces that would make a great fit for a trade publication, for example? Maybe a customer success story or case study or a piece of original research?

Trade publications help you get in front of your ideal target audience, and often, the editors are looking for content to help fulfill their needs. If you can package up the written piece with some visuals (high-resolution photos and video, if you have it) and send it to the editor, chances are they might publish it. This helps you get more visibility for content that otherwise might have just been collecting dust on your blog. Then, you can share that earned media coverage on social media, too.

If you don’t have an in-house PR resource to help with this, consider hiring a consultant on a project basis to give it a try . — Michelle Garrett, consultant and writer, Garrett Public Relations

Help an audience discover your brand

Content syndication is one of the most effective channels for expanding reach and reducing the strain on your email database.

If you don’t have someone in your CRM, marketing automation platform, or on your website, it’s impossible to reach them until they find you. Content syndication puts you in control, allowing you to proactively meet buyers where they are already engaging.

Buyers engaging through content syndication may not be immediately ready to purchase, but they are ready to learn and understand more about the topics you cover. They have questions and needs, and you can provide them.

Then, after capturing these leads, you can nurture them like any other and guide them through your funnel.   — Josh Baez, senior manager, demand generation, NetLine  

Go to where your audience lives

User-generated content and platforms! Look through forums related to your industry and share your articles there because the users clearly care about this topic already, and it can be an easy way to get more people to learn about how knowledgeable your company is about this topic. — Zack Kadish, senior SEO strategy director, Conductor

Start from the beginning of creation

Create for humans, not for algorithms. Search intent-driven efforts have been and will continue to be the most effective communication approach for content marketers. — Mariah Obiedzinski Tang, assistant vice president of content marketing, Stamats

Show up in inboxes

Channeling my inner Joe Pulizzi here: Create the No. 1 email newsletter in your industry. You’ll be able to use that for content distribution at some point, but focus first on insight distribution. — Dennis Shiao, founder, Attention Retention

Look into the camera

Learn how to make and edit videos. Video content is where you’ll get the most attention and the biggest ROI, especially on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. You don’t need expensive programs like Adobe Premiere to make effective video content (although they do help!), but you do need to make sure your videos look good, sound good, and represent your company in a way that makes you proud to share them with the world. But don’t make them flawless: Today’s audience loves a shaky cam or jump-cut moment. — Beth Elderkin, content marketing manager, Informa Connect

Make more from one asset

Consider repurposing long-form content into bite-sized YouTube Shorts using Opus Clip. Additionally, use Vocal Videos to create concise, engaging testimonials or share valuable and relevant tips, further increasing your content’s accessibility and reach across multiple platforms. — Pam Didner, vice president of marketing, Relentless Pursuit LLC

Get an AI assist

Start with an authentic and valuable piece of content focused on a specific audience. Then, use generative AI (the free version of ChatGPT 4o works great) to help you repurpose that content for other channels. Have it help craft social posts, newsletters, video scripts, and podcast ideas and then come up with a workflow to easily post those or leverage those on the other channels. — Brian Piper, director of content strategy and assessment, University of Rochester

Think about offline opportunities

It may not be free, but print can be a very effective and cost-effective way to break through the digital noise, especially for an audience that is highly targeted and hard to reach. With print-on-demand, you can create and distribute premium, personalized content for a relatively low cost.

A handwritten (or at least hand-signed) note to a valued customer or influencer is much more likely to be opened and remembered than an email or ad. And it costs only your time and creativity (plus the price of a first-class stamp). — Carmen Hill, principal strategist and writer, Chill Content LLC

Contemplate these many options

Encourage your audience to share your content or create user-generated content. Experiment with new channels on a small budget: TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Invest in social SEO, especially for the younger generation. Combine different channels that can reinforce each other, such as online and offline communication. — Pauline Lannoo, head of digital strategy, The Fat Lady

Promote inside your content

1. Distribute your email newsletter (or a version of it) on LinkedIn. [Check out mine, The Content Chat Bulletin.] This gets your content in front of people who don’t want something else cluttering up their email inboxes.

2. Don’t be one-and-done with your content promotion. Always share content more than once on all relevant social channels, and be sure to cross-link between your new and existing web content. To ensure this always happens, when we create content briefs for clients, we always ask, “What content will you update and link to this post?” and “What internal content will you link to from this post?” — Erika Heald, founder and chief content officer, Erika Heald Marketing Consulting

Stack up the outreach

1. Do double down on email marketing. This tried-and-true method is basically free or very inexpensive and is yet the most powerful, owned distribution you have.

When building out your campaign tree, incorporate it more throughout and in balance with organic social and other methods. Using it as a checkpoint helps reassess audiences.

2. Embrace content distribution stacking (CDS). A short video serves as the trailer that drives interest to the full experience video on another platform that has a deeper dive behind a downloadable or email sequence. CDS is still the best way to drive interest from all distribution channels to the same place, quantifying each step and learning what best connects with these subgroups. — Troy Sandidge, founder, Strategy Hackers

Try many options

Encouraging social sharing via employees, networking consistently to grow and retain an engaged audience, cross-publishing on other networks or platforms with a clear link back to your original content, and experimenting with paid social campaigns with small budgets to see what yields the best results so that you know where to allocate funds in the future. (RIP Google Search). — Jenn VandeZande, editor-in-chief, SAP CX + Industries

Act on free for positive returns

You won’t max out the budget with all those great content distribution ideas, but you likely will max out your team’s energy if you try to do them all now. Instead, pick one or two of the tips that could work best for your organization. Try them first and see what works before you move onto the next idea.

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