If a tree falls in the forest…

Too often, marketers do an amazing job of creating a destination with rich, constantly-updating content that keeps in mind the interests and perspectives of the audience they seek to engage, only to discover no one is showing up.

They build their keyword list, and use keywords in headlines and copy appropriately. They use and properly formatted photography well. They incorporate video in all the right ways, and yet: no traffic.

Marketers deploying a content marketing strategy to get at better audience engagement, SEO and metrics like increases in conversions or lead generation often make a fatal assumption: if you build it, they will come. This assumption isn’t false, it’s just that it is only half true. Here’s the whole truth: If you build it, and meet them where they’re at, they will come.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Building a terrific Web destination, be it a microsite, website, Facebook page or mobile app, is step one. Ensuring that there’s constantly updated content that is geared toward your audience’s interests is step two. A critical third step is taking that content — or at least portions of it — to where your audience gathers already and inviting them back to your awesome destination.

To get the fullest SEO benefits from your content strategy, you need more than carefully chosen, authentically incorporated keywords. You need traffic. You need links. In short: you need an audience.

It’s so chicken-and-egg, right? Strong SEO brings in a strong audience, but in order to achieve strong SEO, you need an engaged audience. The way to do this is through an effective distribution strategy. And an effective distribution strategy means meeting people where their eyeballs are already engaged out on the Web.

Climb Every Mountain

You’ve likely got many of the channels for distributing your content already open. Newsletters, advertising, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter accounts and many others are great ways to preview or provide snippets of your best content. Use all of it. Your Web destination is your base camp, and each of your marketing channels is the way to get your audiences to it.

What’s important here, however, is understanding where it is your audience naturally gathers already. They still use email, a lot. They’re likely engaged on Facebook. Some use Twitter in one form or another. Many are engaged on LinkedIn. They likely regularly read blogs or visit news websites. Understanding where your audience gathers is key.

For clues about how the busiest Web destinations drive audience to their content, simply engage and then watch what happens. From NYTimes.com to Mashable to Eventbrite to Apple.com, you’ll discover these folks use segmented newsletters, mobile alerts, Facebook news feeds, PPC ads, retargeting, and more to highlight content that captures the eye, then seizes the imagination, and finally drives a click-through to the destination site. Copy all these strategies! Some work better for B2C marketers while others work best for B2B marketers. Find the ones that will work best for you.

Measure for Measure

Make lots of bets initially when promoting your content. But be sure you’re measuring everything. Once you’ve figured out which channels are producing not only the best traffic, but the best engagement, double-down on those and optimize them through improved targeting, segmentation and tailored content. You should look for increased links, newsletter sign-ups, conversion rates and social sharing — all this indicates an engaged audience and delivers on SEO, virality and site traffic metrics, not to mention bottom-line business benefits.

A marketing content strategy will only succeed if you also have a good distribution strategy. While I’ve offered only high-level tips here, there’s many others I’ve left out for space reasons — offer any tips you may have in the comments below.