Remarketing, Display and Social Ads Can Revolutionize Your Content Marketing
You’ve got an awesome piece of content and you’re ready to unleash it on the world. It could be an infographic. Or a video. Or a SlideShare. The important thing is that it’s smart, it’s saying something unique, and it resonates with you target audience.
But it could still fail.
In 2015, even the best content has to compete against a deluge of crap. With so many brands and marketing agencies pumping out empty and mass-produced drek, it’s getting harder and harder for truly fresh and original messages to make themselves heard.
How can smart marketers rise above the noise?
In 2014, this was the question that launched a thousand blog posts. Clearly, there’s no straightforward solution, and no single right answer. But many strategies rely at least partially on using paid media as a kind of booster rocket – providing that extra push to get content into orbit, where it can then circulate naturally under its own momentum. Today, we’ll focus on a few of the most powerful techniques for achieving this effect.
Remarketing and Retargeting
AdWords Remarketing, AdRoll retargeting
If you have an email list and a body of followers on social media, these should be the first groups you reach out to when releasing new content.
But what about the rest of your past website visitors? This audience is several orders of magnitude larger than your email list or social following. There are likely many individuals within this audience who are ready to take steps to deepen your relationship, but just need an extra push. Retargeting is your best channel for doing that.
AdWords Remarketing will let you reach this audience via the Google Display Network and Android apps, while Adroll opens up Facebook, Twitter, and still more websites and apps.
The end result is that your new content gets in front of a receptive audience – users who’ve already signalled interest in your brand.
Similar / Lookalike Audiences
AdWords Display ads, Facebook Ads
So you’re hitting your core audience with email, social, and retargeting – now what?
You want to reach users that share interests and demographic characteristics with your core fanbase. Google calls them Similar Audiences, while Facebook calls them Lookalike Audiences, but they both work off the same concept. You provide a large list of users to an internet data juggernaut (Google or Facebook), which uses its vast store of demographic and psychographic data to create an even larger list of users to target with ads.
This provides a good intermediate step, between retargeting and traditional, blanket-distribution advertising.
Social Ads
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
If you’ve historically relied on posts and updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you may have noticed that this approach isn’t as effective as it used to be. In 2015, your posts will be seen by fewer users and draw less engagement than they did in 2013.
The reasons behind this trend have been discussed at length, but the end result is that marketers looking to be heard on social platforms will need to rely on paid promotions to achieve the reach they used to have organically.
If you are hitting the limits of your promotional reach without getting the benefits you need, paid channels can be a simple and manageable way to drive great traffic to your content! Far from throwing good money after bad, these paid promotional channels can offer real value to your marketing funnel!
