Businesses continue to invest in content marketing. In a 2018 report from CMI, 37 percent of organizations expected to increase their content marketing budget going forward.
However, as brands rush to create more and more content, organic reach via search engines is falling. To generate more traffic and leads, many brands are now paying to promote their content.
Paid content promotion is a great way to increase the visibility of your content online, but you need a clear strategy to guarantee a good return on your investment.
Most Popular Paid Content Promotion Platforms
1. Facebook Advertising
According to Social Media Examiner, Facebook is the most popular paid content promotion platform among marketers: 84% of B2B marketers use it to regularly drive traffic to their content. (Hardly surprising, right?)
Facebook also attracts both B2C and B2B audience, making it a viable promotion channel for practically any business. So regardless of whether you target customers or brands, you have a big chance of attracting them to your content.
Facebook offers many opportunities to promote content via its Advertising Platform, and Page Post Link ads can help you drive more traffic to your content. These ads typically show in the Newsfeed (also on mobile) and clicking on this ad takes a user directly to a website.
Page Post Link ads include a big image which makes it perfect to help catch your ADHD-prone audience’s attention. What’s more, Facebook allows you to A/B test all elements of the ad to come up with the most converting creative.
When setting up your ad, you can target users by:
- Demographics: i.e. their location, age, gender, and language
- Interests: specific interests important to them (Facebook determines interests by the Pages a person likes, their connections, and their behavior on the social network)
- Behavior: you can also select people based on what they do on the social network: their purchase behavior, intent, usage, etc.
- Connections: you can advertise to people who are (or aren’t) connected with your Pages or apps
You can also display your ad to current customers or subscribers by including them in a Custom Audience based on e-mails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs.
2. Google Ads
Google Ads is an ideal platform to attract new customers or leads, but not to promote content, right?
The aforementioned Social Media Examiner report states that 41% of social marketers use Google Ads to promote content regularly, making it the second most popular paid content promotion strategy.
And according to the latest Content Marketing Institute B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report, search engine marketing is the most popular paid content strategy among marketers.
Of the survey participants, 66% admitted to using the Google’s advertising platform to promote their content.
Google Ads targets keywords that people actually use to search for information. So when you choose words or phrases that are relevant to your content, your ads appear to those people.
On top of that, you can also target users by location, language, and device they’re using. Also, by using remarketing, you can target people who have visited your site before.
3. LinkedIn
Social Media Examiner reports that LinkedIn is the 3rd most popular paid content promotion strategy among marketers, with 18% of them effectively using it to distribute content.
And InsideView states that LinkedIn delivers more leads to B2B companies than any other social networking site or a company’s blog.
LinkedIn Offers 3 Options to Promote Your Content
1. Sponsored Updates – a native advertising model in which you display content as a sponsored update in a person’s news feed.
2. Text and Image Ads – allows you to place ads in prominent places across LinkedIn’s website.
3. Sponsored InMail – lets you use LinkedIn InMail to message targeted audience segments about your content.
The power of LinkedIn ads lies in their ability to target people not just by their demographics (age, gender, location, etc.), but also by such factors as a job title, employer, industry, company name, company size, skills, LinkedIn Groups they’re members of, and even interests.
LinkedIn recommends a minimum audience size of about 300,000 for sponsored content. For text ads, they recommend between 60,000 to 400,000. For sponsored InMail, they recommend an audience size of under 100,000.
Here are all the different targeting options you’ve got with LinkedIn:
- Location. Location is based on the location entered by LinkedIn members on their profile, or their IP address.
- Company name. Company name refers to the company that’s listed on a member’s profile. If this is unclear for any particular member, LinkedIn will automatically infer which company the member is a part of based on their internal data.
- Company industry. Members also have the option to enter the industry in which they work on their profile.
- Company size. Using this filter, you can target startups, mid-sized companies, or big corporations.
- Job title. LinkedIn members enter industry-standard job titles on their profile, so you can use this filter to specifically target decision-makers with your ad.
- Job seniority. LinkedIn also categorizes members with different levels of seniority, like entry-level, associate-level, VP-level, etc.
- Skills. LinkedIn members can also include skills specific to their industry on their profile. You can incorporate this into your targeting as well by using skills that are specific to the decision-makers you want to target.
- Schools and degrees. You can also filter your audience by the college they went to and the degrees they hold.
- Fields of study. This is gathered from data that members enter on their profiles.
- Groups. If you know of a particular group that has members specific to your niche on LinkedIn, you can target them through your ads.
- Gender. LinkedIn infers members’ genders through their first name.
- Age. LinkedIn infers members’ ages based on their graduation year.
4. Twitter
After all, you already use it to promote your content for free (by sharing every article you write on this platform), and you probably use software like CoSchedule or Buffer to tweet about archived content.
You might even reach out to influencers to help you spread the word on your posts.
Consider this:
- More than 65% of US companies use Twitter for business purposes.
- And 74% of customers follow brands on Twitter specifically to get their updates.
Twitter Ads offers an option to publish Promoted Tweets that are nothing but ads disguised as tweets that appear in a person’s timeline. In most cases, the only difference between normal and promoted tweets is a little “Promoted” label in the bottom left corner.
Twitter offers advanced targeting options to ensure that your content reaches a highly-qualified audience. For example: on Twitter, you can target users based on their interests, accounts they follow or keywords and user behavior.
5. BuySellAds
But if you’ve published a report, long-form guide, e-book or other lead magnet, banners might be a way to attract a new audience to them. BuySellAds is a platform that connects publishers with publishers and allows them to buy and place banner ads on the sites.
On BuySellAds, you can purchase banner ad space, publish sponsored content, and buy individual ad spaces on thousands of sites.
The Benefits of Paid Content Promotion
There are various organic routes to content promotion, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and influencer marketing. But these are long-term, slow-burn strategies, and require significant commitment.
Promoted content is a faster way to grow your audience and see a financial return.
This is because when you publish new content, you’re often only reaching your existing audience. When you actively promote new content, you’re able to reach a wider audience and therefore bring in new leads.
Paid content promotion is also more targeted. Because it is displayed on pages that consumers are already interested in, your content is more likely to be trusted.
There’s another bonus: promoting content has an impact on search engine rankings. As more people will see, share, and link to your promoted content, your organic rankings will naturally increase. And this, in turn, will raise the profile of your content in organic search listings.
Paid Content Promotion Strategies
Following is an overview of various paid content promotion opportunities marketers should consider.
While search engine and social media ads are popular choices, there are other routes you can take. The platforms you choose will depend on your industry, marketing goals, and a particular audience.
Native Advertising
This technique allows brands to display their content on relevant third-party sites.
There are various forms of native advertising, but it typically appears on news sites or social media platforms, blending into the other site content. They appear in-line with other articles or below posts, and are usually labeled “promoted” or “sponsored.”
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Google all display promoted content, with various promotional options to choose from.
For example, you could boost a single piece of content on one particular platform, or segment campaigns across a network of third-party sites and social channels. They all offer excellent targeting capabilities, so your content has more potential to reach more qualified prospects.
On all of these platforms, you pay a fee – either on a pay-per-click (PPC) or a cost-per-impression (PPM) basis – to boost the reach of your content. You set the budget and targeting details.
Recommended content is similar to an in-feed ad that you would see on social media channels, but it’s presented slightly differently. Usually, these content recommendations are based on the reader’s preferences or the topic they’re currently reading.
Content syndication is when your content appears on third-party sites, either as a full article, a snippet, or a link. The following content distribution platforms all help connect marketers to their target audience through content recommendations and syndicated content:
- Outbrain: recommends your content on other websites and media properties such as CNN, People, and ESPN.
- Taboola: promotes your content on MSN, NBC, USA Today, Tribune, and more.
- SimpleReach: promotes your content on Forbes, TIME, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and more.
- StumbleUpon: allows you to promote your content on the StumbleUpon content discovery platform to different audience segments.
Paid Search Advertisements
We’ve already talked about Google’s display ads, which promote your content on other websites and apps, including Gmail. But one of the most common ways marketers promote their content is with Google’s search ads, formerly known as AdWords.
This strategy – often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) – allows marketers to promote their content alongside organic search results. Similar tools are available on Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Google Ads appear at the top of search engine results pages, are based on search terms you bid on, and run on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Because the ads that appear are based on search queries from Google users, it’s a great way to get your content in front of the right audience.
And with around 75 percent of users never scrolling past the first page of results pages, it can dramatically increase the visibility of your content.
Paying to Promote Your Content
In 2016, spending on native digital display advertising in the United States amounted to 16.7 billion dollars and this figure is expected to reach 41.1 billion by the end of 2019.
As this statistic shows, an increasing number of businesses are using promoted content as part of their content marketing strategy.
But this doesn’t mean that it will always work. Using paid methods to generate leads will only work if your content is valuable and you plan your promotion strategies carefully.
How can you make sure you’re not wasting money? The best approach is to start small and scale up as you learn. Remember that the ultimate goal is to drive people to your website or landing page, where they can learn more about your business and move closer to a conversion.
To increase the chances of this happening, use these tips:
- Start by promoting website content that already performs well organically.
- Wait until you have something of real value to offer, whether that is outstanding content or a great new product or service.
- Promote your content on the platforms that you know your potential customers are using.
- Know exactly what you want readers to do after reading your content. Include a clear call-to-action within the content that encourages readers to take a specific action.
- Optimize your landing pages for conversions.
- Have analytics tools ready, so you can measure the impact of your paid content over time.
- Make sure you have the time to fine-tune your ads and overall strategy.
- Don’t spend more than you can afford to lose.
It could take weeks or months before your paid campaigns become profitable, so you need to be prepared to lose money initially. If you’re simply spending money and hoping for the best, you may never see a positive ROI.
Most importantly, make sure your content is relevant, engaging, useful, and shareable.
