What is Content Seeding? A Step-by-Step Guide

September 28, 2023

Min

Jose Garcia

Business Development Manager at Insense

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Content is king.

Those were the words of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 20+ years ago. But it still rings true today.

Take the rise of influencer marketing, for example. Or the way content has become the foundation of high-converting marketing strategies.

One such strategy is content seeding.

But what is it? What are its benefits? And how can you implement it?

We'll answer all these questions below and give you some examples to model for your own content seeding strategy.

Let’s get the ball rolling!

What is Content Seeding?

Content seeding is a digital marketing strategy that content creators, bloggers, and businesses use to spread a brand’s content across different places.

And that involves planting content in places your target audience frequents.

There are two types of content seeding:

simple seeding, where content is distributed in your own audience and network and is generally smaller in scale.
advanced seeding which requires a brand to invest in higher quantities of content and wider distribution.

Either way, the goal is to generate awareness about a product or service and drive traffic to its website.

Whether it’s simple or advanced seeding, it’s important you ensure the content is:

Relevant to the needs and interests of your target audience.
Relevant to the interests of the influencer, thought leader, and their audience.
High quality.

What's the definition of high-quality content? And how do you go about creating it?

No worries!

We'll cover that later.

So, moving on…

What Are the Benefits of Content Seeding?

Why should you use content seeding?

We already covered some of the benefits earlier. Here are more:

Improves SEO ranking: seeding campaigns bring more website traffic and backlinks to your web page.

And since search engines use both factors to rank websites, this helps improve your rankings.

Builds brand awareness: content seeding puts your content in front of a wider audience.

This way, more people get to know about your brand.

Generates leads: when a person interacts with your content and possibly uses it to solve a challenge, they’re more likely to sign up.

They may also promote your brand to their friends and family (aka word- of-mouth marketing).

Helps ensure message relevancy: content seeding promotes your content to people who jibe with it (target audience).

This ensures the message is relevant to your audience's needs.

Increases engagement on your socials: sharing good, helpful content on your socials attracts new followers and gets you more likes and shares.

Also, followers of the influencers you collaborate with will probably look for you on search engines or social media.

Ways to Use Content Seeding

Currently, social platforms like TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, are the channels of choice for content seeding campaigns.

That's understandable.

Why?

Well, 60% of the world's population is on social media platforms.

Plus, many people spend an average of 144 minutes daily scrolling through their socials, replying to friends and families, or engaging with the content of influencers and digital creators they follow.

But…

You can explore other channels too, especially since organic reach across different social media platforms is dropping. Channels like:

Email newsletters
Podcasts
Industry publications
Co-hosted webinars
Online community forums on Reddit and Quora

How to Create an Influencer Seeding Strategy in 5 Steps

Are you now ready to set up your content seeding campaign?

Great!

Here are the steps:

Let's explore each step in more detail.

Step #1: Understand your audience and goals

Understanding your target audience helps you find influencers they follow and create content that's relevant to that audience’s current needs.

And having a goal helps you determine the best approach to use, and gives you an idea of what success should look like.

To understand your audience, ask yourself these questions:

What are their demographics?
What are their current pain points and interests in relation to your product or service?
Do they follow specific influencers or digital creators?
What platforms do they use?
Are there any specific types of content they love to engage with?

And to determine your goal, discover what your business needs most at the moment.

Is it more leads? Do you have a new product that needs more buzz? Or do you simply need more traffic to your website and socials?

For example, say you want to use content seeding to generate awareness (your goal) for a beauty product that just launched.

After research, you discover your target audience is aged 19-30 and is confused about which product to use for their skin type.

You also discover they visit a particular website whose articles receive massive traffic. Plus most of them follow influencer X who posts makeup tutorials.

You can pitch them a topic about how to choose the perfect makeup kits for their skin, feature a quote from influencer X, and slide in a mention of your product.

You can then encourage influencer X to mention it in their next makeup video coming up on their YouTube channel.

This way, you’ll reach your target audience on a platform they frequent and create awareness for your product.

Plus, since you gave a tip they found useful, the chances that they’ll buy your product are pretty high.

That leads us to the next point…

Step #2: Create high-quality content

Think for a moment:

Why did you share the last article you read or Instagram reel you watched?

Probably because it was great content, right?

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We’re talking about content that's:

Helpful: your goal should be to give the best solution to the problem your target audience is facing.

You should try to answer the what, why, and – most importantly – how questions relevant to the content's topic.

Easy to consume: no one has the time to spend an extra hour understanding your message.

For text-based content creation, keep it short and to the point. Break it up with engaging visuals – images, videos, gifs, and infographics and use spellcheckers to remove any grammatical errors.

If you're using videos, keep it brief, ensure the audio is clear, and stick to high resolution.

Same goes for images.

Original: provide new ideas and solutions. It's better than copying from other people's content.

This way, readers will view your brand as a trusted source of information. This increases the chances of them buying from you since people buy from brands they trust.

Always remember:

Good content starts with understanding your target audience’s needs, challenges, and interests.

So, know your target audience like the back of your hand before you create any content for your seeding campaign.

Step #3: Choose the right platforms

Content seeding is only effective when the people seeing it belong to your target audience.

So, you must place your content in places they frequent.

To find those places, ask your current customers or attend industry meetups.

This will also help you to find the influencers your target audience follows.

Also, don't limit yourself to social media channels alone.

Explore other channels your target audience uses to get information and interact with people like them.

Think email newsletters, online forums and niche communities, podcasts, and so on.

Step #4: Measure the outcome

How do you know if your content seeding is working?

How can you discover if there's a need to improve your campaign to generate better results?

By measuring and keeping track of performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). That's it.

The metrics or KPIs you'll measure all depend on your business goals.

For example, if you want to generate awareness, traffic is a great metric to measure.

But if your goal is conversions, then you'll need to track the new customers you’re bringing in, using promo codes or affiliate links you placed in each piece of content.

Other metrics you can track include:

Reach
Leads
Engagement (likes, shares, comments, and reposts)

If you're using social media channels for your content seeding campaign, you can rely on each channel's inbuilt analytics dashboards.

Or you could use social media analytics and influencer marketing tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Buffer.

But if you're using other channels, try using digital analytics tools like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, and Ahrefs.

Step #5: Leverage influencers and partnerships

Influencers, thought leaders, and digital creators with the right audience have a large group of dedicated followers, willing to click, read, and share any content they recommend, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

But…

Any influencer you recommend must be relevant to your brand identity and, most importantly, your target audience.

To find relevant influencers and thought leaders, you can:

Run a search on social platforms like Instagram, using hashtags like #sponsored, #fashion, #DIY, and others trending in your industry.
Follow industry publications and pay attention to the people who consistently share leading thoughts.
Take a look at the influencers that businesses in industries similar to yours, are using.

For example, if you're a makeup brand, you can find influencers to use for your seeding campaign by looking at fashion brands.

Use influencer platforms like Insense.

If you want to escape the rigors of scrolling through social media and hopping from one platform to another to find the perfect micro-influencers and digital creators, we’d advise you to use Insense.

It's so easy:

First, describe the influencer you’re looking for, crafting a creative brief.

You can use criteria like their niche, age range, ethnicity, location, and so on, taking into account your business type and goal…

…and voila! We’ll match you to any of our 20k+ influencers and digital creators relevant to your business and goals.

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Book a free demo now, to see how it works in real time. 😉

But the work doesn't stop after you find the influencer.

You still have to convince them to take part in your marketing campaign.

To do so, focus on what they'll gain by collaborating with you and prove it using numbers from your past campaigns.

But keep it short and snappy.

3 Content Seeding Examples to Inspire You

This article wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t give you some great examples of successful content seeding campaigns to model.

So, here are they:

Example #1: Unilever

Unilever sells a whole lot of stuff, some of which are hair products.

So, they set up a YouTube channel known as All Things Hair, to promote their hair care products to customers.

Now, here's where it gets interesting…

Instead of simply stacking the channel with branded videos, they collaborate with beauty influencers across the USA to create social media content, like this hair-care tutorial by Rukiya Sherman…

…which helped them reach 83k+ people globally and convince new customers to try out their products…

Example #2: Masterclass

Materclass is a digital learning platform with several courses across different topics.

A major allure of the platform is its collaborations with influencers, subject-matter experts, and thought leaders, who serve as course instructors.

You can learn fitness and wellness from classes taught by expert trainer, Joe Holder…

…or the power of personal branding from Kris Jenner.

These partnerships are a win-win for Masterclass and the influencers.

It lends credibility to the influencers’ position as industry experts and helps Masterclass generate traffic and revenue from the influencers’ loyal fans.