What Is Content Seeding & How Does It Work? [Quick Guide]
Have you ever wondered why some of your content goes viral on all social media platforms and some disappear into the digital void?
If yes, then Content Seeding can be a potent strategy to increase your social media visibility and engage a wider audience by optimizing your content.
As Bill Gates said, “Content is king”. Let’s make your social media content top-notch.
What is Content Seeding ?
Content Seeding is a marketing strategy a brand uses to distribute its content across various channels.
The content shared by the brand gets endorsed by shares and interactions which in turn helps the brand to get approval in the market.
A brand uses this effective marketing tactic to share its content on the Internet which enhances the process of brand visibility.
For example, a new sports shoe brand launches a new pair of running shoes on the market on their website. And then that product is endorsed by a famous sportsperson ( or a celebrity or influencer) which helps in the approval of the brand in the market.
The goals of content seeding are as follows:
- Increases brand awareness
- Encouraging the audience to visit your main website
- Reaching to target audience
- Gives exposure and distribution
Content seeding aids in doubling the advertising value of a brand. But for it, the brand must make creative, relevant, and specific content for each social media platform.
For example: For example, if you have launched a new hair care product brand then you need to post long video tutorials on YouTube and catchy snapshot videos on Instagram reels using trending audio.
Hence through content seeding, you can distribute your content to the target audience via an omnichannel journey, instead of making them pass through multiple hoops.
What is Influencer Seeding?
Influencer seeding is a casual approach to the traditional seeding that involves contracts and payments.
It’s a strategy wherein brands often send their free products to influencers in the hope that they will organically share their experiences with them.
Compared to paid partnerships it is a cost effective option.
This also helps in organically increasing the brand reach due to industry leaders promoting your products to their audiences.
But this also doesn’t mean that you need to approach big influencers for this. Even micro influencers with 10000 – 50000 followers have the potential to promote your brand, as even they have a loyal fanbase.
Micro influencers can be an authentic advantage for your brand when you’re looking for a niche target audience.
Types of Content Seeding
There are 2 types of content seeding depending on the distribution channel. They are as follows:
Simple Seeding:
Simple seeding is a former type of seeding that is fossil-like and outdated. It involves writing blogs on a brand’s website or social media platforms.
This type of seeding is quite cheap, but the content you deliver must be of high quality, to be fruitful. Hence, ensure to come up with an optimized content strategy.
If needed AI blog writers or tools to ensure that there are no spelling or grammatical mistakes.
But to make your brand viral, this seeding won’t be very effective. To get viral you need to use advanced seeding techniques.
Advanced Seeding:
Advanced seeding is the current form of seeding wherein a brand creates a lot of content and distributes it across various platforms.
The content can be in the form of text, images, infographics, blogs, videos, articles, etc. and then it can distributed to multiple places over the internet through:
- Social media groups
- Forums
- Websites
- Organizations
- Influencers
Therefore, advanced seeding is more expensive and the brand needs to put more effort into creating content.
But, the more content is shared, the more chances to increase brand visibility and engage an audience.
The Benefits Of Content Seeding
Increasing Website Traffic
When you work on content seeding, you spend a good amount of time and effort to create something.
Thus, it aids in generating more traffic to your website because you’ve taken the time to promote your content to relevant target audiences.
For example, if you’re a fashion brand, then your content would revolve around the latest fashion, dressing sense, etc. If you post your content on fashion-related groups on Facebook, you can acquire web traffic through one roof.
Social media platforms are the ones that are most used by people on the internet. In today’s generation a lot of users use social media to explore new brands.
People scroll through, see your brand page, and visit your site. Moreover, they can be classified into organic traffic for your brand website.
Social media engagement is just one part of a content-seeding strategy to generate website traffic. Promotion of online business directories also enhances website traffic and increases SEO optimization.
Enhancing Brand Reputation
Content seeding enhances brand visibility and shareability. People tend to share content with their followers only when they find it engaging and relevant.
Therefore, if your brand consistently produces high-quality content and makes the audience understand that your content is reliable, then you will reach an authoritative position in the industry.
Leads to more conversions rates
Content seeding helps to increase conversion rates. Conversion rates mean that the visitor took the desired action to visit your website after seeing an Ad or post of your brand.
For example: If you post a tweet about new arrivals in your brand giving a website link, hence it encourages people to check your site. Thus who do, become your conversions?
Higher conversion rates help people to interact with your brand, and purchase more products, thus increasing your consumer network.
Content seeding helps you drive highly qualified leads to your website. This is done by focusing on 1 specific audience group.
Highly qualified leads are the ones who make the most purchases from your brand.
So, let’s assume if they don’t purchase from you now, you can still make them your future customers by attracting them through email marketing campaigns.
Boost in followers
Content seeding is very important for social media platforms. 27% are digital buyers and willfully purchase products from the internet if they have a good social media interaction with the brand.
Social media is one of the potent platforms to generate, for users to discover brands organically. Hence content seeding has a snowball effect on brand growth.
Present followers and influencer cooperation are just foundations of your brand.
With a content seeding strategy your regular followers share relevant and informative content with their followers and promote your brand via word of mouth as well as increase brand endorsement.
Getting Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links that connect one page to another on the Internet.
You get one backlink for every post that mentions your website. Backlinks work great for SEO optimization.
Content seeding just isn’t a strategy to generate target audiences. It is also a technical website booster.
Content seeding on blogs, websites, and social media posts generates loads of backlinks for you. These have 2 purposes.
First, it motivates users to check your website without a relevant Google search. Hence it boosts your organic website traffic.
Secondly, they improve your Google search engine ranking, telling Google that you’re useful to other platforms.
As a result, you may rank higher in the future search results and get benefits for your brand building.
Infographics:
Steps to a successful content seeding strategy:
| Step | Description |
| Define the right target audience | Identify your target audience and customise your content according to their interests and needs. |
| Do goal setting ahead | Set an objective with your content seeding campaign (e.g., brand awareness, lead gen, traffic.). |
| Opt for Influencer marketing | Identify and reach out to the right influencers who seem good fit for your brand and target audience. |
| Create and develop high-quality content | Develop high-quality content that adds value to your audience. |
| Add a clear CTA in your content | A clean and to-the-point clear call to action (CTA) in your content to encourage engagement. |
| Analyze the results and redefine your strategy | Track and analyse the performance of your content seeding campaign and adjust your strategy accordingly. |
Examples of Content Seeding
Content seeding means strategically distributing valuable content to reach a wider audience. Let’s look at a few examples.
Major Platforms for content Seeding
Traditionally content seeding was done for blogs and editorial pieces. But today social media platforms have become the hub for it.
Social Platforms where you need to work on content seeding are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Also, a seeding strategy is used in email marketing campaigns, paid promotion campaigns, or advertising as well.
You can even promote your content through other expert blogs by commenting on them but make sure your content is relevant as you shouldn’t get flagged as a spammer, by the blog owners.
6 Steps to do Content Seeding
The steps for content seeding are as follows:
1) Define Target Groups
The first step for content seeding is to identify target groups and produce engaging content that would hook your readers.
The target audience can be identified by asking 3 questions:
- Which demographic will benefit from purchasing my products or services?
- What issues do they face with these products or services now?
- How can I address these issues and provide appropriate solutions?
Once you’re done finding these answers you can create your audience persona. An audience persona is a fictional representation of your target audience.
It will serve as a guide as and when you create content.
2) Pre-set your goals
Determining your goals in advance is essential for content creation. Your goals help you determine the type of content you want to create.
Also, you will get a clear picture that using a content seeding strategy what do you want to achieve?
Like are you looking to boost Ad sales, increase brand awareness, boost website traffic, or broaden your visibility and engagement by reaching a wider set of audience?
Hence, it aids in planning a marketing strategy and helps in identifying the success rates of each marketing campaign to develop better strategies for attaining future goals for the brand.
3) Reaching Ideal Influencers
Identifying the correct influencers for your brand is very important. It’s because they kind of refer to opinion leaders whom your audience is likely to trust.
The persona profile that you create earlier will act as an instrument to find your ideal influencers.
You can also identify them by looking for trending and relevant hashtags for your brand, and the influencers who follow those topics.
Later you can contact them through the process of Influencer Outreach, meaning sending them an official email with all your brand details and what products and services you offer.
4) Create Classic Content
Always create content that remains timeless and evergreen.
The content you produce should always stay relevant and the audience should find it interesting for a long period.
Classic content seeding campaigns always generate maximum traffic.
Types of content you should explore:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Articles
- Infographics
- Social media updates
As you create your content, ensure it’s relevant to the influencer’s profile and your audience.
For example, if you run a wellness center, share your content with health and well-being influencers or the audience who are health conscious.
5) CTA is crucial in influencer pitch and content
Once you’re done preparing your content, start sending your email pitches to influencers.
Keep in mind that every influencer receives several pitches every day so you need to ensure that your brand stands out.
To make that work clear and concise when you share your pitch.
To the point, emails make you more approachable and relatable.
Also, explain through your message what value your brand will bring for that influencer and his audience and how they will get benefits by collaborating with you.
Now if they say yes to the collaboration, send them the materials as soon as possible. Include a CTA for your target audience in your content.
Give them a lucrative offer that they can’t deny.
People only take action when they’re asked to. So tell them what you expect from them in your message.
Effective CTAs for content seeding could be “ talk to our expert for free”, “contact us for more details”, “reach out now”, etc.
6) Analyze the results
Ensure that you’re interpreting the results and check your progress once you’re done with content seeding.
You can check your engagement metrics, how many likes, comments, and shares are received in your content.
You may also use web analytics tools as well to check how much time each visitor spends on your website.
Measuring results will give you clarity on whether you achieved your goals or not
Choosing the right content seeding strategy
There are 3 steps to follow that could be beneficial for all brands:
1. Cooperation with Influencers
Influencer content seeding gives a positive outlook for new brands to establish their presence in the industry.
How does it work?
You need to send your product to influencers and ask for their reviews. Now if they share a favorable review of your product with the target audience, then it will give your brand authenticity in the market.
For example: You would plan your content by seeding tips of makeup who is a beauty influencer. But the same strategy won’t work if the influencer is a gamer.
Also, it’s not necessary to find macro-level influencers for your work. You can also communicate with micro-influencers for your work.
2. Social Media Engagement
For B2C ( Business to Consumers ) brands social media engagement is very important. Typically 1-6 % of social media engagement is considered great.
This is because consumers check the brand’s social media profiles before purchasing the products.
To attain good social media metrics, you need to ensure a few things:
Post relevant topics: Content seeding is not just advertising, you should also post about general topics and current trends and events of your brand.
Regular Posts: Post consistently, so that your page comes to notice of your target audience.
Encourage Participation: Engage your audience by putting appropriate CTAs. Also ask for likes, shares, and comments on the post.
Use relevant hashtags: Use trending and relevant hashtags for your brand, to enhance visibility.
Communicate with other users: Social media isn’t a side platform, Interact with other people, comment on their posts, share stories, retweet good tweets, etc.
These tips would help every brand to build a strong seeding strategy including all platforms.
3. Email and Newsletter Marketing
Emails and newsletters aren’t outdated. Gmail doesn’t have a rigid algorithm. Messages stand in temporal order and it’s hard to miss them.
Also, the goal of email marketing is that you’re bringing your brand content to the user and not in the hope that they will visit your page.
Publishing newsletters weekly or monthly keeps your users updated about the events and trends of your brand.
Therefore email and newsletter marketing aids to enhance the brand recall value of your consumers.
Well, Locobuzz makes it easier for you with its powerful social media management capabilities that can help you with every step of your content seeding strategy. Let’s take a sneak peek at:
Identify Your Target Audience: With the social listening capabilities of Locobuzz CX suite, you understand your target audience’s interests and pain points, which further allows you to create content that resonates with them.
Identify Relevant Influencers: The CX Suite, Locobuzz helps to identify relevant influencers in your industry who can amplify your content reach.
Measure and Analyze Results: The platform provides comprehensive analytics that enable you to track the performance of your content seeding campaigns and measure the ROI.
By leveraging Locobuzz’s advanced AI-enabled features, you can develop a data-driven content seeding strategy that delivers real results for your brand.
