I'm receiving more and more questions from clients about how best to leverage paid content distribution and paid social platforms (here referred to together as 'paid promotions'). There's a lot of reason for increased interest—as content production has ramped up in digital marketing, it has become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and reach the audience you want. Facebook shutting down companies' free lunch social distribution has only further pressed the issue—and sometimes you've simply maxed out on other paid channels!
But more than simply being an extra 'pay to play' option, paid promotion is a crucial part of any holistic digital marketing strategy. By using the range of paid online promotion and advertising tools available, we can take more comprehensive control in presenting the best user experience throughout the funnel—delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right person. There are three primary functions of paid promotions:
- Improve the breadth and depth of content distribution
- Use powerful targeting to drive more qualified traffic
- Capture, retain, and shepherd qualified users to ultimately produce conversions
How and why you might use paid promotions will of course vary quite a bit, but regardless of your end goal, there are two key tasks for anyone seeking to succeed in doing so. Do these two things right, and you will have laid a solid foundation for achieving your goals.
First...
1. Define and target a specific audience
Defining a target audience in digital advertising or paid promotions is a more exacting exercise than usual, because we're actually operationalizing a definition that can be precisely carried out by setting controls in a PPC-like interface. Think of it like programming a computer—you need to break down your definition in extremely concrete, exclusive terms that are interpretable by the tool you're using. Don't despair though—it's not hard to do, and if you've been a good marketer and developed some proper user personas you'll be ahead of the game!
Answer these questions to set a concrete definition of the people that should be targeted with a given campaign or content release. These are typically going to be the criteria you actually enter into an interface when starting a promotions campaign on a tool like Facebook or StumbleUpon.
Demographic Information - Our ideal target for this content is...
Age - Many platforms will offer simple age based targeting, usually in the form of your typical "18-24, 25 – 36" type brackets.
Gender - Again, this is a simple demographic setting and is often available. Think about setting up separate 'A/B' versions to separately address men and women when relevant!
Education Level/Status - Is your audience in school? Have they completed a degree? Facebook and LinkedIn will let you drill in on these parameters.
Geography - Be as specific as possible. Generally, the combination of a state/province and a metro area level is as granular as geotargeting options go.
There are a few more options you can find on places like Facebook -income level, marital status, employment status, and more can be particularly useful in B2C contexts.
Many platforms will also give you an opportunity to define your target audience by interests, so think about what relevant topics or subjects the target user might be particularly interested in or looking for while online! For example, likes for travel blogs, language learning sites, famous travel writers, country specific cuisine, etc all can be used to converge on a very specific type of person.
2. Choose promotion channels
Once your target audience has been defined and the above questions answered with the best data available, you must consider the channels or platforms that will best make use of it. There are three major factors:
- Which platforms have targeting capabilities and an audience that can best replicate the user profile using their targeting?
- Remember to weight the user's expected online behavior heavily in selecting platforms – while one might offer targeting to match the most targeting characteristics, if your audience does not actively use the platform's core service it is of little value as a promotional channel.
- Which platforms can best present the media to be promoted?
- It is important not to detract from the user's experience of the content, or place it in a channel that does not fit it's form. A long form video, for example, will not usually fare well in skippable preroll spots or on-site rollover placements.
- Remember also that use of different platforms can depend on device – and so might the usability of your content!
- What behavioral context is preferable to achieve your objectives for this piece?
I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to browse around as a user when making these decisions, in order to think less abstractly about the experience you aim to create. Choosing channels is often a case-by-case process, but for common objectives there are some simple, intuitive guidelines to keep in mind:
- If you want your content shared, promote it on channels that have built-in sharing capabilities (social media, StumbleUpon).
- If you want users to feel they've 'discovered' a piece, focus on content plug-ins (Outbrain, Zemanta, etc), discovery tools (StumbleUpon), and more niche placements (subreddits, subject blogs)—depending on the accessibility/simplicity.
- If your goal is a high level of direct exposure for content at a low price, content discovery plugins and display ad networks can deliver. Cost is relatively low and inventory is high, so it's easy to get eyeballs on your work.
- If conveying authority is important, officially sponsored or openly disclosed promotions on respected media platforms or with trusted individual publishers can be a good tool—though often more expensive.
It can be useful to combine these guidelines to plan for more complex goals. For example, if you want to convey a sense of 'discovery' but also encourage sharing, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery could fulfill both these needs—the sponsorship is subtle, the user is in 'discovery mode', and SU has a social sharing frame right on top of the page. If that audience isn't engaged enough, you might bring traffic to a piece via Reddit and retarget for sharing on Twitter.
Planning for promotion should not be an exclusively post hoc activity—the content itself should be created with intended placement and utility in mind. Engage early in the process as goals for the content are first set, so that creative development and objectives do not ultimately conflict with the feasibility of promotions. Simply being involved in the conversation to flag potential problems is often enough!
Think outside of yourself…
One of the most critical parts of this framework is leveling what you want to achieve with what users will accept and value in a given medium, so I want to take a moment to reinforce the importance of this.
In answering questions of targeting and placement in a performance-driven world, it can be dangerously easy to think egocentrically, only in terms of what YOU want your customer to do in a given context—or more insidiously, what you want them to want to do. Remember that as a marketer or advertiser you are necessarily carrying tremendous baggage, both in terms of product knowledge and expectations. It's tremendously important to step back from your own (or your company's) perspective and think as a user.
What you ultimately need to reach your goals isn't necessarily what individuals using one of these channels wants when doing so, or are ready to do. Take the time to understand your audience and reach out to them in a way will resonate with the journey they are on.
What considerations do you pay special attention to when promoting content? Are there areas of the discipline you'd love to learn more about? Hit me back in the comments!
Interesting timing Anthony.....Rand Fishkin and Larry Kim had a webinar about this last week. They shared a method of using paid promotions on social media, that I've also been having success with lately.
We've been having success promoting things on social media not by promoting to our target audience, instead promoting to people in that vertical who are very influential. Once these influential people share/repost your ad with their friends, your audience will grow exponentially (for free).
Using this method, you write an informative blog article on your website. You need to make sure that your article is awesome...not just a typical salesy article. It needs to be something special, if you want influential people to share it. Then use paid promotions on social media to promote your webpage, only targeting very influential people in your vertical. Since you are only targeting a very small, but highly targeted list, your budget can be small, but when one of these influential people shares your ad, it will be seen by 100k+ people (for free).
Yep, that's certainly a good way to go about it and very worth mentioning - I've used that angle myself plenty of times in the past!
Create a good & Impressive content that overture to your customers and you’ll profit. Builds Your Promotion Plan across Paid, Earned and Owned Media we can also use Press – release distribution services. Publish your content on online news channel
Good article. I will say that these steps are pretty much in line wi th other digital marketing strategies.
As well as the post is not bad, but my question google never likes paid submission website. I don't know what is the reasons of this news anyone tell me what is the main point the news.
None of these options constitute paid links - they're essentially ads built to present content rather than basic commercial messages. Google's completely unconcerned with advertising traffic when it comes to your rankings - in fact, they're more than happy to sell it to you :)
This traffic brings your content to the attention of the masses quickly, and once it's visible, those viewers may start linking to or sharing it organically of their own accord. Great way to get the ball rolling at any point, but there isn't any direct SEO impact.
Great post Anthony.
I agree that paid promotions are just part of the whole content marketing cycle nowadays (along with targeted outreach, social sharing, etc.). It is extremely hard to get your content in front of the right eyes and this just makes it that much easier. Definitely worth the cost in the long-run.
"If your audience does not actively use the platform's core service it is of little value as a promotional channel."
Yes. Too many people try to spread themselves too thin across a wide range of social media networks. It's a simple tip, but a good one to remember: Pick the channels that will be the best for you, and stick with them. There's no need to be on every single platform if your customers aren't there!
Facebook & Twitter are still in business?!?
Great. I've just been hearing about Twitter campaigns and hoping for some tips. Thank you.
Working daily with paid traffic and it works quite well in certain sectors , but not all . Anyone else happens ?
Estoy de acuerdo, tienes razón. Una, buena podría ser una buena promoción para tu web o negocio y la segunda es el "precio", si no sabes hacerlo bien, te puede salir caro. Para obtener muy buenos resultados tienes que contar con gente profesional, que sepa hacerlo bien. Pero nada sale barato .....;)
thanks for the great article. I will start to advertise with paid promotions
Your "if you want X, then you promote with Y" is a really good template. I wish more blog authors would use it so we could highlight actionable tips very quickly. I agree we need to speak to where the customer/client is in the buying journey - which requires so many different types of content.
I think a lot of your article actually doesn't matter if the promotion is paid or not - distribution channels are the same, "free" channels are the same. Even things like SEO need to be approached in a "if you discover it here, this is what you'll do" type of way.
I see that there is great similarity with the management of the customer relationship. The choice of channel, the right time, the audience ... all there!
Thank you for this excellent work.
There is not much relevant information on this topic on the internet, thanks for sharing some knowledge and very well explained.
cool information and believe twitter or Facebook is a good place.
Its all about testing your conversion from different channels, what I usually do is I test all of my channels for one month and then invest more on the channels with better response than others
Good article. These days many business owners are looking for paid traffic as it brings huge amount of traffic to the website and chance to grow the sales. Nice information you have shared.
Excellent stuff! I really like what you brought up about helping users feel like they have discovered a piece of content by pushing to those specific platforms and molding the content to fit the kind of promotion that you have in store. I know personally- it is when I find awesome content that I feel others have not seen before, that is when I feel motivated to share it. Bravo Sir.
Right Anthony Coraggio,
Nowadays, everyone must should have started with Paid promotions, as a lot of updates from search engine giant Google. For improving keyword ranking; it takes much time this days with white hate SEO techniques.
Beautiful post. Pointed out clearly each and every line. Hope i can utilize my personal career following this article. Thanks Anthony. [link removed]
I have had my fair share of success in paid promotions on Facebook.It's not like what you read in those big banner ads but yes,I did earn a couple of dollars on paid promotions. You post has given me some extra idea and it's time to implement them now.
Basically it all depends in your knowledge about how much a user (or a conversion) is worth for you!.
I think that the paid traffic isnt't good at the big G eyes. It's only my perception, by this type of traffic normally is asociated to CPA/CPL/CPI techniques.
Thanks for sharing Anthony!
Anthony, thank you once again come up with a great topic 'paid promotion'. But what about the present market scenario; Pay more and get more?? big players are there in the segment paying billion and getting more than... eg. amazon, zapos,expedia etc.. But as we are a very small business owner I have some quick questions:
how much we should spend, what's the best trick to drive potential leads thru paid channels, which channels is the best and how to define these??
Hi. Great article. The paids promotions are a useful tool to get traffic to your web site and get a greatful user experiencie. The worst, the price, but all good tools are not cheap.
I'm agree with you. A good promotion could be the perfect kick start to your web or business. The "problem" is the price, and I mean the price when you choose the wrong expert to carry out. Is very important do it with the right people to have great results.
Totally agree with you because it's difficult to find good experts. If you find good experts the results could be spectacular. It's a complement for SEO practises and more quickly!
in my perspective paid promotions are only helpful for an emerging brand but driving traffic constantly through promotions is just drain of money
Paid promotion is an excellent method to get your unnoticed masterpiece blog posts in front of the right audience, but the number one way to get your posts in front of the right audience is through on page optimization for the right keywords. We optimize all of our blog posts for our money keywords and these blog posts all bring leads. Getting organic traffic on your blog is the best way to go, but when combining that strategy with using paid advertising to show off your posts, on like Facebook, well your blog will kick ass!