ADMTips #1: Crafting a Content Distribution & Outreach System - Part 1

Building a system to track distribution channels, outreach, and associated strategy + tactics with Notion and SparkToro. High-level system overview and initial explanation.

Hi and welcome to the first edition of ADMTips, a series of posts for paid subscribers of ADMD. In these paid posts, I will focus on sharing practical tips and execution suggestions, with walkthrough examples and explanations. Sometimes (like in this post!) I will also include downloadable templates that we use internally with our clients.

Note: This post will cover the high-level overview of the entire system, the reason we built it, and detail the “Distribution Opportunities Database” template. I will be publishing guides to the other templates in this system over the next 2 weeks.

Problem: B2B Content Distribution

How do we find, evaluate, and keep track of distribution opportunities for our content?

Recently, our agency has started taking on projects that don’t involve any direct content creation. Instead, we are supporting clients with operations surrounding content, like:

• Auditing previous online presence

• Locating patterns, themes, and gaps in competitor content and industry publications

• Summarizing audience sentiment (combining social listening, forum and review mining, and direct interviews)

• Building out detailed and truly practical audience personas

• Listing out available marketing channels and influential online spaces

• Discovering untapped opportunities for content creation and distribution

• Improving outreach with creative, personalized, and relevant collaborations.

While we’ve been providing all of these services to our clients for a while, they were typically thrown in as an add-on here or there together with our typical writing offering. Because of that, we never created a proper system for recording our insights or presenting them to clients. Instead, we’d throw together some hodgepodge report or dump our notes on our poor point of contact and call it a day.

But now things have changed. We are signing contracts exclusively for audience research, content strategy, or distribution support – so our presentation of those deliverables has to be top-notch.

This week, I’ve finished designing a v1 system for content distribution, collaboration outreach, and associated strategy analysis and now I’ll walk you through it step-by-step.

NOTE: The templates are built out in Notion and rely heavily on SparkToro data. You can implement most of this process in your own tech stack, but I can’t advise you on any specific adjustments.

Solution Overview: Content Distribution & Outreach System with Notion and SparkToro

Screenshot of the overview page for the entire system. Don’t worry, I’ll share this link with you once we’re done publishing guides to all individual pages!