Put Some Money Behind Your Content to Increase Visibility
First things first, There is ALWAYS money (budget) that supports your content and if you’re taking content marketing seriously, you should be putting a significant portion of your online marketing budget towards content creation, publication, and promotion. You need to invest in creating and building your content platforms (website, blog, email newsletter, etc.) and the production of the content itself (paying writers), which doesn’t come cheap. However that’s not the topic of this post. Instead, let’s focus on adding money to a content marketing strategy above and beyond its initial creation and publication in the form of paid content placement.
Content marketing is often considered an inbound marketing strategy. You create great content that discuss topics in your area of expertise and people that are searching for information will find it on their own via search, social, links, etc. Even though you’re paying for the great content this isn’t considered a form of paid marketing/advertising because you aren’t directly paying for placement anywhere. This is why inbound marketing typically has such high ROI.
Yet, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for paid content opportunities, which would be considered outbound marketing. The online content marketplace today is fierce. Nearly everyone is getting involved which has increasingly made it harder to stand out. One way to increase your visibility is to be willing to invest some of your content marketing budget in paid content placement.
Now, not every piece of content that you publish needs to have “extra” money behind it. But what we recommend is to keep an eye on your best performing content and consider adding some money to give it a little bit of a boost. Two ways to do this are through sponsored content opportunities and social media promotion.
Sponsored content appears on industry websites and blogs when the publisher agrees to pay a fee for that placement. It’s basically advertising, but the “ad” is the article. It’s a way to get your content (and knowledge) in front of target audience members that might not have found it otherwise. This can work very well as a branding tool and as a way to drive traffic to a website within certain industries. Because this is a paid placement (and paid link) it’s important to be up front with readers and the search engines by stating this within the content and no following any link that appears.
Social media is becoming more “pay to play” for businesses every day. Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean that they’ll see your posts. If this seems unfair, well – too bad! If you want to increase the engagement rate of your social media posts (links to content), you’ll need to pay to boost and sponsor the posts. If you notice that a post that you’ve published is getting a higher than average response organically, this is a signal that you might want to invest some money here to keep that momentum going.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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