You hit Publish on your latest blog post and find yourself stuck in a familiar cycle: tons of views, few new subscribers. The post is a hit with your existing customers, but you’re struggling to reach fresh readers.
Creating high-quality content your target audience loves is one thing; ensuring it keeps fueling your sales funnel is another. The good news? Growing the reach of your existing content isn’t a game of luck—it’s a core part of your marketing strategy known as content amplification.
Here’s what content amplification means, why it matters, and how to amplify your content so it contributes to real business growth.
What is content amplification?
Content amplification is the process of promoting your existing content—such as blog posts, white papers, videos, podcasts, photos, infographics, and more—across various channels to reach a wider audience. These channels typically fall into three categories:
- Owned media. Owned media consists of the internal channels you control, such as your website, email newsletter, or social media accounts.
- Paid media. Paid media includes the channels or strategies that require money for promotion, such as ads on social media, press releases, or sponsored content.
- Earned media. Earned media involves the external channels you don’t have control over and don’t pay to use, such as press coverage or user-generated content (UGC).
Content amplification is a form of content distribution. However, while distribution refers to sharing content with any audience, amplification specifically focuses on sharing content with new audiences.
Why does content amplification matter?
Whether you’re hoping to increase brand recognition or grow top-of-funnel leads, content amplification diversifies the ways in which people can discover and engage with your brand. Without a content amplification strategy, even your best content risks entering a digital void.
Simply hitting Publish on a blog post means it’s likely to join the roughly 97% of web pages with zero organic traffic from Google. The right amplification efforts can turn a single piece of content into a flywheel, driving sustained website traffic and reaching new audiences long after publishing.
Amplifying your content can also help keep your brand top-of-mind without annoying your target audience. While most consumers need to encounter a brand multiple times before acting, 76% of consumers say seeing the same targeted ads too often makes them like a brand less. Instead of fatiguing potential customers, content amplification allows you to reach targeted users in fresh ways across multiple channels.
Channels for content amplification
There’s no single best channel to amplify your content. While most brands use multiple platforms, you might want to experiment with amplification efforts on one channel to start and expand from there. Here are four common channels for content amplification to help you identify the right ones for your business objectives, target audience, and budget:
Email marketing
Email is one of the most used content amplification tools, as it offers a way to deliver relevant content to specific groups within your target audience at a relatively low cost. Once you build an email list, you can understand your existing and potential customers’ needs by tracking metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, demographics, and purchasing behavior. Then amplify relevant content by personalizing the emails specific audience segments receive.
Shopify’s segmentation feature allows you to build targeted customer segments based on custom attributes like email open behavior, location, or those who bought a specific product, so you can target just the customers who have never opened an email, or those left a specific item in their cart.
For example, the parenting platform Good Inside used email content marketing to amplify content around the launch of its children’s book, That’s My Truck! The email included a free downloadable guide and an online Q&A. They encouraged existing customers to forward the email to a friend, expanding the reach of the guide and Q&A by personalizing emails to an already engaged audience.
Social media
Social media platforms can amplify your content in various engaging, digestible formats. The cost of leveraging social media marketing can vary depending on your balance of organic and paid amplification efforts. Here’s how they differ:
Organic amplification
Organic amplification strategies include using relevant hashtags or asking followers to share posts on their own social media accounts, so your posts reach a wider audience without having to pay for ads. You can also amplify your content by cross-posting in niche communities on social media forums or threads—such as Reddit subs, Facebook groups, or Quora Q&As.
Paid amplification
You might consider putting some budget behind your social media strategy. Compared to organic posts, algorithms tend to favor paid social media posts. Paid promotion boosts your ability to amplify content to specific audience segments based on demographics, user behavior, or location.
For example, when shoe brand Allbirds launched a four-part video series called “Cards on the Table” hosted by Stanley Tucci, the brand amplified it across its social media channels. While the series premiered on Rolling Stone’s YouTube channel, it was also posted across Allbirds’ social channels like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and more.
News aggregators
News aggregators are tools that curate content from multiple sources in one place based on certain topics, keywords, recency, or popularity. For example, tools like Google News, Apple News, Flipboard, or really simple syndication (RSS) feeds crawl online magazines, blogs, news outlets, press release distribution services, and more to produce a feed of relevant content. These tools are specifically helpful for amplifying your content to journalists, niche communities, or potential investors who follow trade, business, and retail news.
For example, the infant formula brand Bobbie announces major news—such as a content campaign with dad and Queer Eye host Tan France—by distributing press releases on a service like Businesswire. From there, the content gets picked up by news aggregators and third-party media outlets. This leads to organic press coverage and boosts its search engine rankings through backlinks. Press release distribution services offer various options, with costs ranging from less than $100 to a few thousand dollars.
Paid media
Paid media includes any marketing where you spend money to distribute content. Paid promotion efforts can happen via:
- Marketing channels like email (sponsoring newsletters or placing ads in other newsletters)
- Social media ads
- Google Ads
- TV and radio commercials
- Direct mail
- Print ads (magazines and newspapers)
- Branded content
For example, the direct-to-consumer (DTC) bedding and bath brand Brooklinen’s paid media campaigns include sponsoring content in lifestyle magazines. Here they paid for sponsored content on the popular blog Cup of Jo.
The above piece of sponsored content captures how paid media can amplify content—from brand photographs to guides—by placing it in publications readers already trust, boosting visibility and credibility.
Content amplification strategies
- Foreground user-generated content
- Tap into influencer marketing
- Engage in collaborations
- Repurpose existing content
- Optimize pages for search engines
- Aim for content syndication
Your strongest content often has the greatest potential to make waves in the amplification process. Before you amplify content, use tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics tools, and Shopify Email to identify your top-performing content. Using data to find content that clicks with your target audience will help your amplification efforts make a bigger impact.
Here’s how to then use various platforms to get more eyeballs on your content:
Foreground user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by real customers or community members that’s relevant to your brand. UGC can include a range of content types, such as outfit-of-the-day photos, customer reviews, unboxing videos, reactions to your existing content, or more. You can utilize UGC as a content amplification strategy by asking followers to share and tag you—organically growing exposure to your brand.
UGC is a powerful strategy, since seeing your brand in the context of real life can build trust with your target audience. While it doesn’t feel like an ad, nearly half of shoppers say user-generated content (UGC) is “extremely” or “very” important when making a purchase decision.
In 2018, the camera brand GoPro launched a UGC campaign called the “Million Dollar Challenge,” inviting customers to submit clips for a chance to win prize money. They created a highlight reel of the best clips, which is also shared widely by users. The UGC approach helped GoPro’s social platforms grow significantly—attracting more than 20.3 million followers on Instagram.
Tap into influencer marketing
Similar to user-generated content, influencer marketing refers to content made by people who are well-known or respected in certain online communities. Working with influencers amplifies your content as it reaches their networks and grows your exposure to new audiences.
Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular content amplification strategy, with influencer spending growing three times faster than social ad spending in 2024.
On an episode of Shopify Masters, Toral Patel, Kopari’s VP of marketing, shared how the beauty brand used influencer marketing to build an eight-figure business on a minimal budget. The key was investing in long-term relationships and running omnichannel campaigns with creators.
For example, it partnered with Ella Halikas, CEO of Confidence, to launch a brand campaign on body confidence. The content was promoted across social media, shared by followers, used as retail marketing signage, and covered in magazines like Forbes.
Engage in collaborations
Collaborations are partnerships with individuals or brands whose current followers align with your target audience. While influencer marketing is a form of collaboration, collaborations do not always require paid partnerships. Sometimes, the exposure to each other’s audiences is beneficial enough for both partners.
You can amplify content through a collaboration in a variety of ways. For example, you could pay someone for a single social media post about your content, or create a limited-edition content series with another brand.
For example, the intimate wellness brand Maude partnered with bedding and bath company Brooklinen on a content series about rituals for better sleep and connection. It was published in Maude’s online magazine, The Maudern, and promoted across both brands’ social media accounts to reach a wider audience.
Repurpose existing content
Repurposing content means adapting existing content for new formats, audience preferences, or channels. This strategy saves you time and resources by giving your brand more value out of a single content piece.
For example, the beauty brand Fluff makes the most of its small content marketing budget by reimagining content for multiple channels. Founder Erika Geraerts explained on a recent Shopify Masterspodcast, that the brand films all of its podcasts, so it can distribute them as Instagram Reels or TikTok videos, or repurpose the conversations into blog content.
Optimize pages for search engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy for increasing your content’s discoverability in search results and growing organic traffic over time. This starts with researching what your target audience is searching online. Then creating content using relevant keywords, internal links, titles tags, headings, and meta descriptions. On the technical SEO side, ensure your site map and load speed seamlessly allow search engines to discover, analyze, and index your webpages correctly.
An SEO-friendly blog can improve your blog’s search engine rankings and make it easier for consumers to find your content when researching similar products, topics, or services. For example, when oral care company Boka optimized its blog for SEO, it tripled monthly organic traffic and boosted organic revenue by 51%.
Aim for content syndication
Content syndication is the process of republishing your existing content on other sites, publications, or media outlets with permission, or allowing other brands to republish on your channels. Syndicated content should always credit the original creator or link back to where it originally appeared. Otherwise, it could hurt search engine rankings as search engine algorithms flag duplicate content.
With proper attribution or links, content syndication can benefit your content marketing efforts by:
- Expanding your reach
- Increasing brand awareness
- Driving website traffic
- Generating valuable backlinks that improve search engine rankings
Content amplification FAQ
What are the benefits of news aggregators?
News aggregators are a beneficial content amplification strategy, as they place your brand’s content alongside content from reputable publications. They also increase credibility, driving referral traffic, improving search engine optimization through backlinks, and extend the lifecycle of your content. Since aggregator feeds are often highly focused, it’s also a beneficial way to reach journalists, niche communities, or potential investors with a specific interest in your industry.
What is influencer amplification?
Influencer marketing refers to content made by creators with large audiences or industry notoriety. It’s an increasingly popular content amplification strategy, as influencers often have loyal online communities who engage with their work and trust their recommendations.
How do you utilize user-generated content?
Brands can incorporate user-generated content (UGC) into their content marketing strategies in a variety of ways. You can use UGC as an amplification strategy, asking followers to tag you and repost content, and you can also use it as a content creation strategy. UGC is an effective way to build trust with your target audience, as many people want to hear from other customers before making a purchase decision.
