These days growing an online readership is harder than ever. With a lot of hard work brands can enjoy a consistently growing user base but sometimes it takes a little extra to get your pageviews from the 100s to the 1,000s or even 10,000s. To achieve enormous content promotion often the most credible solution is paid advertising.
This type of strategy allows brands to compound the efforts of their ordinary marketing with additional exposure across the web. These paid advertising strategies are not as easy as they might seem and there is more that goes into a sound paid content strategy than just setting a budget and watching the leads come in.
Here are some strategies to get the most out of your content with advertising.
Decide what a Customer is Worth
Before starting your advertising campaign your brand must first decide how you are going to gauge success or failure. It should go without saying that your ventures should seek to improve upon the initial investment of your ad budget.
In other words, don’t just start a campaign with no tangible measurements that you can use to tell the accounting department whether your advertising budget worked in your favor. In many industries, success is measured by cost-per-lead: ad spend / new orders = cost-per-lead (CPL). If your brand uses different key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success determine those from the beginning.
Choose the Appropriate Content
When using paid advertising to generate additional eyes on your content it makes sense to determine what content will work best for your cause. For example, let’s say that the purpose of the advertising campaign is to bring attention to a specific product. Your company can choose from a variety of content types to promote your product but all of them might not necessarily make sense or push a viewer to your call-to-action. For example, a blog might not generate the type of response as say a white paper. White papers are good content tools to promote because they ask that the readers provide their contact information in exchange for valuable content. This might work well for products that require more salesmanship than a push to a quick purchasing decision.
Other types of content that may merit advertising budgets include videos or infographics. These types of content tend to involve more work to produce so it makes sense to capitalize on their value by promoting them with advertising. Video and infographics are more likely to go viral than most types of content and often times paid advertising is all that is required to get the ball rolling.
No matter what content you choose to promote it must provide the end user some type of value. This can mean content that is educational, informational, engaging or entertaining. You never want the advertising to drive traffic to content that just plain doesn’t convert otherwise you are just throwing money out the door.
Place Equal Importance on Landing Pages
In addition to creating awesome content your landing pages must help convert customers to your call-to-action. This often overlooked piece of your advertising campaign should be designed to carry out your specific goal of one (or more) of the following:
- Sign-ups
- Subscriptions
- Phone calls
- Video views
- Check-outs
- Trials
- Sales!
Landing pages are the key to conversion and should have consistency from the initial ad. The message on your ad and landing page should be the same. If the visitor clicked through the ad with the intent of learning more about whatever it is you promoted stay true to your promise and provide the information you mentioned in the ad in your landing page. Most importantly, make it very clear what you want your visitor to do immediately; you have about three seconds of their time to engage them so make good on this time and guide them along your sales process.
Measure and Improve
It is vital to your advertising campaign that you spend time measuring how well you ads, content and landing pages convert. A good campaign will include at least two different ads, two different forms of content and at least two different landing pages. Use the same call-to-action on both campaigns to determine if one works better than the other.
Each of your marketing campaigns should also include other measurement indicators such as call-tracking numbers, Google Analytics goal tracking, or sales tracking. The more control you have over your marketing initiatives the more knowledge you will have of how effective your advertising campaigns are and if you are meeting your cost-per-lead goals you initially set up.
