How to Reach a Local Audience With Automated Content Distribution

Creating excellent content that captures your voice and differentiates your products is only the first step in your journey toward social media success. Your content needs to generate brand awareness, boost sales, lead to conversions — in short, it needs to provide significant ROI.

For your brand’s content to earn its keep, it has to be seen. And to be seen, it needs to be in front of the right audience at the right time. Automated content distribution helps you achieve just this. Using your brand’s social media channels as well as those belonging to your retailers, you’ll get the most mileage out of your content and reach audiences in local markets.

What Is Automated Content Distribution?

Automated content distribution is a form of marketing automation that — you guessed it — automatically delivers content to voracious audiences across multiple channels, including blogs, emails, and social media. With the demand for valuable content overpowering manual efforts to supply it, automated content distribution is a must-have resource in any marketing arsenal. It’s an especially important tool for the always-on, hyper-competitive world of social media, where brands have to post daily content, if not more, to keep audiences engaged. 

What Are the Benefits of Automated Content Distribution?

In addition to boosting the overall efficiency of your team, automating the distribution of your brand’s social media content comes with some serious advantages, including:

How to Reach a Local Audience With Automated Content Distribution
  • Localization As a brand, you can create unique content to target local markets and distribute it through your retailers’ social media pages. You can expand your brand’s Reach without expending your team’s effort.
  • Organization – While local targeting sounds great in theory, many brands that manually manage the assets for it struggle to stay organized. The right automated content distribution tool won’t only handle distribution, it will house your brand’s assets and ensure it’s shared correctly with retailers.  
  • Scalability – Growth is another great but daunting prospect for social media teams handling content distribution manually. Automation makes adding new retailers to campaigns and increasing local marketing efforts a seamless process.
  • Consistency – Brands have to maintain consistent posting appearances and cadences in order to garner Engagement. Factor in different time zones and picky algorithms, and you’ve got quite the challenge. Automated content distribution ensures your content is posted regularly and at the best times for your audience.

How Does Automated Content Distribution Allow For Local Reach?

Social media enables brands to connect directly with consumers. Automated content distribution enables that at an even more granular level. Because it facilitates a wider Reach for your content, you’ll gain more insight into its performance and how Followers respond to it.

Meet Your Followers Where They’re At Online, and When

Facebook may be the biggest social media platform with the highest number of active monthly users, but that doesn’t mean your brand’s target audience uses it. 

How to Reach a Local Audience With Automated Content Distribution

Avoid assumptions about your target audience’s social media habits. Research which social media platforms are most popular among your local markets. For example, maybe your American customers favor Instagram, while your international Followers use Twitter and TikTok more often. Within the U.S., rural residents exhibit different behavior on Facebook than urban residents. You will want to be mindful of time zones, too.

You might start by surveying your existing customers to see which platform they use most or by commissioning your own demographic research. If you don’t understand your audience’s preferences, you won’t be able to reap the benefits of automated content distribution.

Share Unique Content Tailored to A Specific Area

Once you’ve analyzed your audiences and found where they hang out online, you can adjust your content to fit their preferences.

To locally tailor your content, ask yourself questions such as:

  • When is your audience most active on social media? During the week or on the weekend? Morning, afternoon, or nighttime?
  • Are there any region-specific terms or phrases your local target uses to describe your product or service that you can incorporate in content?
  • Which local retailers does your audience prefer?
  • What are the most popular keywords used in your target area?
  • What kind of content performs best with this audience?

Each local market requires uniquely tailored content to get the best results. Use automated content distribution to ensure your locally tailored assets end up in the right place (read: your local retailers’ social channels) at the right time. 

Repurpose and Reuse Content

Rather than constantly creating new content for each audience, savvy marketers will adjust and customize existing content so it’s digestible on social media and relevant for different audiences. This can help you maximize top-performing content.

Here’s a hypothetical example of repurposing content to reach a local audience: A national jewelry brand’s blog highlighting six ways to wear layering necklaces at the beach generates solid traffic and has even contributed to a few purchases. It’s doing particularly well in several coastal cities. The brand’s social media team, seeing an opportunity to repurpose this blog for social, creates an Instagram post for the brand’s page summarizing the blog. To target the specific areas where the initial blog performed really well, the team quickly tweaks the brand’s post to add relevant local spins. These assets then get automatically distributed and posted to local retailers’ social pages, connecting brand and consumer at the local level. 

Automated content distribution makes it easy for brands to quickly adjust existing assets and deliver newly repurposed content to audiences via local retailers’ social pages. 

How To Automate Your Content Distribution with Thumbstopper

Let’s recap how you can reach local audiences on social media:

  • You must analyze your consumers and pinpoint where they spend time online to know where to distribute content.
  • You should know a local audience’s needs, social media habits, language differences, and buying preferences.
  • You need to tailor the content — whether it’s new or repurposed — that’s distributed to local audiences via your retailers’ pages.

That’s it! ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager™ handles the rest. Brand Manager™ is a turnkey solution that allows brands like yours to automatically post content at the local level. Once your content is created and adjusted for specific audiences, local retailers subscribe — which lightens their workload, too — and your high-quality content goes straight into their social media feeds. Now your team can focus its energy on more pressing marketing initiatives. Ready to see what Brand Manager™ can do for you? Get started now.

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
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[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
How Effective Is Your Social Media Strategy
[/et_pb_section][/et_pb_column]
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[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
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