Paid search isn’t all about redirecting prospects to landing pages and products. You can also use it to increase the visibility of your website content, ideal for businesses who often update their blog but don’t have a big enough SEO presence to reach their audience.
Paid search will always win over SEO in getting people to consume your content, as it gives you results straightaway and puts you in the driver’s seat, whereas SEO can take months and you have no control over who consumes it.
Thinking about combining PPC with your content marketing strategy? Follow this checklist before you pay to promote any content.
Figure out the objective of your content
When spending money to promote anything, you need to ask yourself why you’re doing it. Are you creating content to generate more leads and sales, or are you doing it to aid branding and provide value to prospects?
Before you decide to promote your content, ask yourself what you hope to achieve with it. This will help when you decide what type of content to create later.
Which content works best?
What type of content does your audience respond to? Teenagers prefer video and images whereas adults are open to a more varied array of content. Your industry will also have a big impact on the type of content that gains the most engagement.
I like using BuzzSumo, a content marketing search tool that locates trending content around keywords and ranks them in order of total shares. Let’s assume you’re Realtor and want to provide your prospects with value surrounding mortgage advice.
By typing the keyword mortgage into the search I am provided with several articles that gained a lot of attention on social media:
I like using BuzzSumo as it shows you the total amount of shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Promoting content works best with social media (discussed later), seeing where the most engagement comes can help you pick the right platform to promote and topics to write about.
Creating your content
Content is not just blog posts and articles. Content can be anything from a white paper, video, infographic, tutorial and even an eBook. The content should ultimately align with the objective of promoting your content (step #1).
For example, if your objective is to better brand your business, providing a high quality article (how to, step-by-step, etc) that is full of advice and knowledge will place your business in a higher regard with prospects.
If your goal is to generate more leads, then placing an opt-in form at the bottom of an article to collect emails, or offering an eBook in exchange for an email is a wiser strategy than a ‘how to’ article.
Digital Marketer places an image that redirects to a specific landing page on every single one of their blog posts. Their blog is mainly used to generate leads:
While Derek Halpern uses a simple opt-in form to capture his leads:
Content marketing is best suited to capture leads providing your content is of high value.
Pro-tip: if you’re too busy to create your own content, join sites like Upwork to find content writers for your business.
Why you should only promote content marketing on social media
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (for B2B) work best for combining paid ads and content marketing. When people are looking for content on search engines, most skip the ads (or at least I do) and see who’s ranking number #1.
People are more tech savvy now and know whoever’s sitting on the first page of Google usually has quality content. Search engines ads also don’t supply enough characters or allow images with their ads to make a big enough impact to get clicks on your content.
Facebook and Twitter on the other hand have formatted their status updates to automatically populate article pictures and descriptions by simply pasting the URL link into the update feed. Their ad features are more advanced to promote content than search engines.
Serve content to your fans first
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend setting up a custom audience on Facebook if you plan to regularly promote your content using PPC. On average, only 20% of total traffic return to your site meaning not everybody who would be interest in your content is going to see it if you don’t pay to promote it.
Test the waters by serving new content to your custom audience and gauge their reaction via engagement (likes, shares, blog comments, relevance score etc). If you received good engagement then branch out your targeting to prospects who haven’t interacted with your business.
Use custom audiences as your focus group, if they respond poorly to your content, there’s a good chance that others will too. In these cases, stop the ad and figure out where you’re going wrong.
If your custom audience provides positive comments, then there’s a better chance that others will value and like your content, and you should consider scaling it to serve new prospects.
Summary
Content marketers will scream from the rooftops that content is king, while I agree with them, it can be very difficult to get your content out to the masses using SEO. If you continually create content but feel it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves, why don’t you run a few paid ads to get more eyes on your best content?
Nick Bridges
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1 Comment
Corey Zeimen
July 6, 2016Your content has to be really really good to get a good ROI ppc’ing blog content that has no established and proven monetization strategy behind it. If the content is good however, you can make that content go viral with paid ads, I have done it before several times and can be worth it.