8 Content Marketing Channels To Rock Your Distribution Strategy In 2022

With zero references to conventional television, content marketing channels are mediums you market your content on. After putting together a killer, attention-grabbing video, it’s bound to end up on your Instagram account to provide your followers with entertaining and meaningful content, and to fulfill your content marketing needs.

Fashion influencers, per se, have established Instagram as their go-to content marketing channel! With 42.2 thousand mentions, Zara was the brand most mentioned by English-speaking influencers on Instagram in July 2021.

Similarly, a traveling enthusiast utilizes the mass power of YouTube to market all their adventurous content!

Content marketing channels, however, are not simply mediums of media where your posts are meant to go. These channels can be sectioned into 3 main types:

1. Owned Channels: it’s all yours! Owned marketing channels take nothing from your wallet and are in your control at all times. If you occasionally photo-blog, for example, your Instagram or Flickr accounts are your owned channels.

Whatever you’re putting out on these channels without worrying about a marketing budget constitutes having an owned channel.

2. Earned Channels: The glory of a retweet or a Facebook share! Earned channels aren’t personally yours, but it’s all about you. An earned channel is where a third party markets your content on that platform for you- because it’s that’s good?

If someone thought you were funny (for once?) and decided to retweet your intentional word vomit, your content is successfully being marketed on an earned channel.

3. Paid Channels: Money talks (literally!). Paid channels are where marketers consider an advertising budget to pay for their content marketing needs. In recent light, sponsored social media content where influencers talk about their experiences with a certain product (could be yours) is a form of a paid channel.

The content marketing game does not pertain to professional marketers and advertisers anymore. In today’s day and age, everyone who is present on the internet is an established brand and our friends and followers are our consumers!

So, to market yourself and your content off to the inhabitants of the metaverse, you need to primarily think like a brand.

Content marketing channels are your content’s need more than they are your own. You invest dearly into crafting a creative, attention-grabbing post and the reward will only come once you broadcast it on the right channels in the right way.

Tell yourself, you need content marketing channels because:

1. PEOPLE WANT TO FOLLOW ME

More than one-third (36%) of the US Instagram users surveyed are on the platform with the expressed purpose of following brands

Stop putting yourself down with the thought that people may not want to know you. By being a brand and acting like one, your Instagram follower count is legitimate because people want to follow your content!

2. I NEED TO GROW

Content marketing through social media channels sees exponential growth every year. With rapidly changing internet trends, the introduction of new applications, and marketing methods, brands (companies and people alike) have multiple options to grow!

As of 2021, Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than 2.89 billion monthly active users.

With the statistics speaking for themselves, imagine the skyrocketing potential of your brand to grow through a content marketing channel like Facebook!

3. I NEED TO INNOVATE

The habit of staying creative and innovative on the internet is why you need content marketing channels. Entertainment for people keeps changing because social media mediums are providing that opportunity. With a constant tendency to change, social media demands new methods of content every now and then. You may have been feeding off of marketing your content with 7-second Vines, but platforms like TikTok are challenging you to do more now!

Sure, Vine is a cult classic but TikTok was used by 689 million individuals monthly as of 2021, and that’s a lot of people and a whole lot of potential marketing reach!

Now that we know we need content marketing channels, let’s round up the Top 8 that actually work!

1. YouTube

What was once an internet user’s go-to for new media and amateur video entertainment, YouTube’s growth as a video-sharing platform has enabled people to market themselves through a variety of video content.

Vlogs, DIYs, makeup tutorials, and beyond, the quality and quantity of knowledge and entertainment through videos present on YouTube remain a powerful content marketing tool for its users.

Major corporations also did not hold back!

As of March 2021, Coca-Cola had 3.28 billion uploaded video views on Youtube. Toymaker LEGO was ranked first with 10.04 billion views.

However, it’s more encouraging for the content marketer in you to know that Justin Bieber was discovered off of YouTube for sharing musical content. Creative, video-based ASMR therapies became a top hit on YouTube in the past year! YouTube icon: PewDiePie amassed a whopping 111 million subscribers by creating hilarious video games content.

With a category and niche for everybody, YouTube hosts in it one of the biggest success channels for content marketers!

2. Instagram

With its undeniable power to revolutionize content creation, Instagram is a key marketing channel (that works!) for a multitude of reasons.

With a diverse user demographic, Instagram is one of the most used social media channels today. By the end of 2020, Instagram surpassed the 1 billion global user mark, establishing its popularity amongst social media applications.

Apart from advertising tools like Instagram ads, the application also works as a staple content marketing channel because of how it merged influencer marketing into its usage.

Sponsored posts have helped identify other brands being marketed into the same post (read: paid channel) and people engage in a vicious cycle of content discovery!

3. Podcasts

What is a considerably new entry into the multiverse of content marketing, podcasts are a refreshing new take on advertising and content distribution? Without being visually consuming, podcasts for content marketers have paved the way for a larger audience reach and a new form of consumer loyalty.

Not only are now people visually enjoying your content, but they are also expressing interest towards only listening about it as well!

4. TikTok

TikTok may not make sense to everybody, but it will for content marketers because of these statistics alone:

a) As of September 2021, there are 14.43 million daily active users using the TikTok Android App and the average user spends 12.3 hours per month using it.

b) TikTok users on Android now spend more time watching content on the app than they do on YouTube.

c) Within TikTok’s first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users

With a brand new content marketing channel that’s doing its fair share of upholding ‘viral’ culture, sharing content on TikTok is now a must-have policy for marketers to adapt to up their marketing game!

5. Facebook

A cult classic, Facebook, as a pioneer in social media, still remains a beneficial content marketing channel that does give back! Being the most commonly used social media platform, Facebook is a functioning booster shot for content marketing!

With a potential reach of 1.9 billion, there were about 8 million active advertisers on Facebook in the first quarter of 2020! With numbers like these, there’s a reason Facebook maintains its undeniable place in the list of fool-proof content marketing channels.

6. Websites

A virtual space that truly is entirely your own, websites are a content marketing channel that will not fail you. Personalized websites loaded with your content are the conventional but necessary platforms you need to market yourself without any third-party limitations.

Much like podcasts, users get to consume your content on a more personal and loyal level based on how they can connect to the customization of your website, the way you introduce technical and design elements onto your page, and how you add tools to help them engage with you through a web page!

7. Emails

It’s very convenient to engage with your audiences on platforms like Instagram and YouTube because you are so easily notified about the activity and the options to get back.

A pro content marketer, however, knows that emails establish very different kinds of brand loyalty.

Email campaigns are a content marketing channel that establishes a wholesome relationship between the brand and the consumer, and it works because it provides multiple content sharing mediums within it as well.

Send out newsletters, curated reports, invites, etc. within your emails to help your consumer feel individually recognized.

8. Twitter

With the surge of the pandemic, the dynamics of social media have also changed. Spending time indoors meant people had time to play video games- and tweet about it! In 2020, there were a total of 2 billion Tweets about gaming, which probably did the unimaginable for the gaming industry!

In terms of content marketing, Twitter is the right amount of characters-per-tweet to shape your advertising effort into something entertaining. The interface and usage of the application are the perfect amount friendly enough to allow marketers to engage in content distribution strategies to their consumers, and beyond, more closely.

All it takes is a retweet or a reply!

To conclude, advertising trends will always shift their dynamics, and content marketing will progress with the introduction of newer platforms and content mediums.

These 8 content marketing channels are dominating advertising strategies today and tomorrow- until someone comes up with something more viral than TikTok!

The Unspoken Rule of Content Marketing Channels

Regardless of whatever channels you choose for your content marketing purposes, there is one unspoken rule that applies to all mediums:

Set Your Growth Objectives

Each content marketing channel functions differently, and a successful advertising strategy involves defining your content marketing objectives for each channel with regard to growth.

Growing on Facebook could mean amounting to 50 page likes a day.

Becoming big on the Gram may demand an average of 10k Reels views per video.

A successful YouTube channel mandates generating 50 new subscribers every day.

The principle is growth, whatever content marketing channel it may be.