If you’re focusing on creating great content on your website, you may be having trouble finding an audience.
SEO is a great way to drive traffic to your website, and that’s probably the main reason you’re putting out so much great content.
The problem is…not everyone can see your content organically.
There’s so much out there for people to consume. Your content might just be getting lost.
Enter content advertising, a branch of content marketing.
In this article, I’m going to discuss how you can start driving more leads through content marketing and what the end goal should be.
Step 1 – Create content that is the best it can be
There’s no doubt about it. You need to have GREAT content in order to stand out.
If you have no assets, you should start with a content audit to see what you need to create.
Part of this process is not only to fill the holes in your content marketing strategy, but also to find out the demand for content before you create it.
Why spend hours upon hours creating content that either mirrors a competitor or just doesn’t have any demand online?
If you find someone is already producing content about your main topic cluster, but you know there is demand, find out how your content can outperform theirs by better addressing the questions users are asking about this topic.
Make sure that your pillar pages and topic clusters work together to address all of the needs of your target persona.
Once you’ve created amazing pieces of content, it’s time to repurpose them into multiple formats.
Step 2 – Create multiple formats of that content
Content can take many forms, but in order to grab your audience’s attention, you need it to be unique.
There are a ton of formats your content can take. These include:
- Blogs
- Infographics
- eGuides
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
- How-Tos
- Podcasts
- Video Content
- And more
Since everyone consumes content in different ways, it’s important to be able to reach your target persona in a way that resonates the best.
In order to move on to step 3, you don’t necessarily need to create one of each of these types of content. It’s often better to start advertising sooner rather than later, so you have a better understanding of the demand.
It’s not uncommon for companies to start marketing while they’re continuing to build their content assets.
Just be sure you have enough to set a foundation for what will happen after users consume your content and opt into your funnel.
Step 3 – Promote your content through paid advertising
Now that you’ve made your content and repurposed it into multiple formats, it’s time to get the word out.
In order to get more people into your funnel via content marketing, you need to get your content in front of them. If you aren’t in a hurry, you can pump out content for years and hope to rank in search engines. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have that kind of time to wait.
Content marketing often requires years of patience since it doesn’t automatically translate to revenue for your company like more traditional direct response marketing. Even paid digital marketing translates into more of a 1:1 type of relationship with your bottom line.
Unfortunately, it’s hard for us to measure exactly how impactful content can be towards revenue. That being said, I always smile more when I hear a new customer say “Oh yea, I first heard about you from that blog your company wrote.” To me, there is nothing more satisfying.
How do you promote content marketing initiatives?
In an ideal world, thousands upon thousands of people would flock to your website, opt into your content, and make a purchase from you. Then, they’d be so impressed by your content you provide after the purchase that they buy from you again.
While that certainly is the goal, you often need to jumpstart this process. Since SEO takes 6 months just to get a foundation (but often much longer to rank without tons of backlinks) and Facebook organic has been dead for years, you need ads to help boost awareness of your brand.
What platforms should I advertise my content marketing on?
Traditional advertising is not your goal here. You most likely don’t want to create search ads for your top-of-the-funnel ebook. This might work for some industries if it’s cheap enough, but spending $25 per click for a chance someone will download your content is a huge risk. Especially if your expected revenue doesn’t justify this cost.
What we want to do is look for cheaper advertisements and get a lot of eyeballs on your brand. This means Google Display and Facebook are your best bets.
Other options could include Outbrain and Taboola. We’ve tried these networks here at Miles and they haven’t brought in the success that Google and Facebook have.
From our experience spending thousands of dollars on these networks, they didn’t bring in conversions for our content.
You might be thinking that the offer wasn’t great, but we’ve found plenty of success on Google and Facebook with the same offers.
Feel free to try out what works best for your business.
Make your content marketing unintrusive and minimally disruptive
The key to advertising your content is to make it as minimally disruptive as possible.
Here is an example of a Facebook lead generation ad that has brought in thousands of content marketing opt-ins.
The concept is simple. We know that a lot of content marketers are frustrated with spreadsheets and Google Docs to organize their content initiatives. We know because we’ve been there.
Getting into the mind of our persona, we put this front and center with the message “Looking for a way to organize your content marketing initiatives?”
If you’ve done your research on your buyer, you should also know the problems they’re looking to solve.
Whether they’re scrolling through Facebook or another website, they are still thinking of this problem. They might not be searching for it directly, but it’s always on their mind.
This is the perfect way to make your content offer that helps them solve that problem.
You want to get it in front of them as often as possible, while not being annoying. Generally, this is 2-5 times per day, but can be higher or lower depending on your industry and audience.
Your ad should be so good that they don’t feel like it’s an ad. Using words like “you” instead of “we” help make the ad about them and not your company.
Step 4 – Get back in front of this audience you’ve created
The overall goal of content advertising is to generate awareness of your brand. It’s better than display advertising or traditional advertising like billboards because the customer has let you know they want to hear more from you.
It’s assumed these days that if a customer gives their email then a company is going to contact them. Don’t mistake this tiny gesture for the customer letting you spam them for all eternity.
This window doesn’t last forever. There are so many brands out there that are also offering content and you need to stand out.
If your content is actionable, it will help solidify your brand in their memory. Once they’ve had a chance to engage with your content and take action on it, you’ll want to reach out to help them take the next step in their journey.
The end goal: Turning MQLs into SQLs
Do you use Hubspot? If so, you should utilize lifecycle stages to maximize the platform’s potential. Two of the most important are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
You can use lead scoring to gauge the general interest of your prospects in order to assign them to one of these two stages.
Generally, MQLs are people who have interacted with your content offers and visited your website a few times.
SQLs are MQLs who have gone even further. They may have downloaded multiple content assets of similar themes.
For us, we organize our content marketing structure into three themes: IT, Software, and Marketing. Each of these has a separate Score within HubSpot.
We often have prospects who cross-pollinate and download assets across themes. While this is great, we want to concentrate our efforts on the general theme that the prospect is interested in.
Your CRM should help you to understand where each user is in their journey with your company by utilizing these two stages. When someone becomes an SQL, you should have a salesperson reach out via email and phone in a more direct manner.
How do you follow up with people who show interest?
When someone has opted into your content, you need to make sure that you provide the content they requested right away.
The thank you page is a great place to have the content easily found. Make sure that it’s no-indexed so people can’t find this page organically, bypassing the email opt-in.
The issue with only providing the downloadable resources on the thank you page is that not everyone will see it. Especially if you’ve followed our advice and focused on lead gen ads right on Facebook and LinkedIn. Both of these networks provide a way for users to click through and go to your thank you page, but that doesn’t mean they will.
Even if they do, they might close out of the thank you page. This means there’s a low chance they will ever find it without opting in again.
The best way to ensure your prospects have their content download is by sending a follow-up email automatically through a CRM like Hubspot.
Emails sent from within your CRM
Facebook and Hubspot are very well integrated. People can opt into your content from a lead gen ad and all of their information will be instantly found in Hubspot.
We like to ask for their email (so we can send their download) their name (so we can personalize our emails) and their phone number (so we can reach out to them to provide more consultation).
Facebook also gives you the option of work email, which is a nice way to bypass Gmail addresses if you’re looking for more business-oriented emails.
Emails you send can come from a more generic email address like “hello@yourbusiness.com”
You can have them come from someone specific, but you haven’t introduced your brand yet so it may be too early.
Remarketing
Hubspot also makes it easy to create lists of people who have downloaded your content and push these lists back into Google and Facebook. This way, you’ll have a very specific list of people that continually pushes back into your advertising networks.
No need to manually upload lists anymore.
By remarketing, you can get back in front of your audience.
We’re not talking general “buy from us because you visited our website once” remarketing. We’re talking about more specific advertising that relates to the audience and the content they downloaded.
For example, if you have a content calendar as your download (we do) then you’ll want to run remarketing ads that drive this audience to your blogs or other content downloads (we also do).
You can also try to show more consultative ads to your audience. These won’t convert as well, but it’s always worth doing. Make sure that your goal is to book a consultation and not drive a sale.
Direct emails from a salesperson to schedule a consultation.
While your initial email workflows can come from a more generic email address, you can also pepper in emails from your salespeople to introduce them.
Following the inbound ideology, you’ll want your salespeople to reach out when the time is right. Through proper lead scoring to gauge your prospect’s activity, you will know when that perfect time is.
Someone who has clicked multiple remarketing ads, downloaded more than one inbound asset, and visited multiple blogs is probably doing a ton of research. This means that this is the perfect person to have your salespeople reach out to.
It’s more helpful when they call if their name has already been seen by the prospect and if they’ve received multiple emails from the brand. This way, it’s more familiar.
People like seeing things they’re familiar with. If your salespeople call them and they remember the name, they are more likely to be receptive and know who you are.
How are you going to reach your ultimate goal?
The ultimate goal of any marketing is to generate revenue and awareness of your brand.
Big companies don’t need to track revenue down to the dollar in order to know they’re being effective. Smaller businesses do.
This means that small companies might not be able to justify the expense of generating top-level interest in content downloads, despite tons of studies showing that this type of marketing is super effective.
Most small businesses put money into direct advertising because there is more of a call and response type of outcome. You put money into Google Ads, you see conversions, and these conversions lead to income.
With Facebook and display advertising, you put money in and you see top-of-the-funnel conversions, but you don’t always see the income right away.
It’s hard to measure that someone downloaded a piece of your content, read your ebook, told their friends about it, their friend told their boss, and their boss bought a big-ticket item from your business.
These types of scenarios happen every day, but they’re almost impossible to measure.
The best advice we can give is to get yourself out there with honest content and educational material. Let the world know who you are and what you’re about and the rest will fall into place.
Let us know how you plan to implement some of these strategies into your content marketing and content advertising initiatives.
