To acquire the contents on the internet like text, video, graphics, and download, if you are paying then those contents are said to be paid content. Paid contents are usually copyrighted.
When discussing paid contents, there are many advertising platforms that assist you in the promotion of your content. They promote it to a vast audience and grab in quality traffic. By this manner, your customer number can be enhanced.
Why Paid Content?
To establish a deep relationship with your customers, content marketing is the right choice as they launch you as an industry expert and also elevate sales. When contents are considered, they can be anything from podcasts, newsletters, blog posts etc. Contents should be informative, enhanced in quality and results driven ones. Contents should be ones that solve the issues prevailing amongst clients.
Once the right content is developed, the challenge would be to get them before the right people. In content creation, when you have quality content and no people around, then you would never gain customers. When you have created impressive work and your content is to be viewed, paid content is necessary.
About Different Paid Content Promotion Platforms:
Paid content promotion is that your content is promoted and published before a specific audience. These advertising platforms assist you in grabbing quality traffic and in this manner, your customer list grows. There are many paid promotion platforms and lets glimpse through a few of them.
1. Advertisement by means of Facebook:
The most famed paid content platform according to social media examiner is Facebook. Approximately 84% of B2B marketers utilize Facebook to grab in vast traffic for their content. Adweek also mentions that social networking takes up about 28% of the time. The true fact is that B2B and B2C audience are also lured by Facebook. This is because Facebook is considered as a viable promotion channel for any category of business. There is hence a huge chance to grab in more customers for your content.
Contents are promoted on Facebook by means of page post link ads, and advertising platforms. These help to drive in more traffic for your content. The newsfeed is the place where these ads can be seen. By clicking on the news feed, it takes the user to the website directly. With page post link ads, the audience attention is gained as big images are included.
- Based on the user’s demographics such as gender, age, location as well as language, users can be targeted.
- Based on the behavior of the people on the social network, people can be picked. For example, you can look for their intent, behavior on the purchase, usage etc.
- There are many interests that can be focused based on the pages the user likes, their behavior and connections too.
- Advertisements can also be made to who are linked to your pages.
When the cost factor is considered, Facebook advertising is said to be a platform that you can check out for. Here you can bid for the different campaigns. Bidding can be done based on cost per like, cost per click, cost per action, impressions etc.
2. Advertising by means of twitter:
Paid promotion can also be achieved with Twitter as 65% of US companies make use of Twitter for business purposes. To obtain updates, brand’s information, Twitter is followed by 74% of people. There are offers made by twitter ads where promoted tweets can be published. These are tweets in the form of disguised ads that can be found in the timeline of an individual.
There are advanced targeted options when twitter is considered. By this way, the content reaches a quality audience. Users can be followed based on accounts they follow, their interest and user behavior.
Being an auction-based system; twitter cannot bid keywords but can bid particular actions to be accomplished. Actions such as engagement, clicks, leads, getting new followers, app install etc. can be picked.
3. Google Adwords:
Social media examiner mentions that about 41% of social marketers utilize Adwords for the promotion of content. Hence this makes Adwords the second most famed content promotion technique. It is also said that search engine marketing is a very familiar paid content procedure as per B2B content marketing reports. It was also found that 66% makes use of advertising platforms for promotion of content.
Adwords is simple as well as a versatile platform that can be utilized. Ad creation just takes a few minutes and is displayed to anyone hunting for keywords.
Also, this platform provides a number of research tools which mainly focuses on your content to get directed to the quality audience. Also, audience targeting is improved with the help of data collected in Adwords.
Google Adwords mainly concentrates on the keywords that the users look for. As words and phrases appropriate to your content are picked, ads will be presented. Users can also be targeted by means of device they use, location and language. Remarketing is another option being used to find people who visited the website.
Cost:
When cost factors are considered, it is an auction-based system. Here you can mention your desire to pay every click on your ad.
4. Outbrain:
The behavior is focused on the service called outbrain and they help the promotion of content in other posts too. By this way, readers from other websites are attracted. There is a widget present below each post possessing a list of recommended articles.
Outbrain calculates on cost per click as in other paid content platforms. This means that the payment is only for ones who get to the page for promotion. There are many other platforms similar to outbrain such as LinkWithin, Taboola, nRelate etc.
5. LinkedIn Ads:
The next familiar paid content strategy as per social media examiner’s choice is LinkedIn Ads. Distribution of contents in LinkedIn is achieved by nearly 18% of people. It is also mentioned by the inside view that enhanced leads are received by B2B from LinkedIn.
Promotion of content in LinkedIn is achieved by three ways
- By means of image and text ads, where such ads are placed in familiar places on the LinkedIn website.
- A sponsored update option where content is presented as a sponsored update in an individual’s news feed.
- A sponsor in the mail is another way where a LinkedIn in the mail is made use of. The contents are messaged to the audience.
To concentrate on a large group of audience LinkedIn not only utilizes demographic but also utilizes other factors such as company name, job title, employer, company size, industry, LinkedIn groups etc. For sponsored content, LinkedIn looks for 3,00,000 which is a minimum size of the audience. 60,000 to 4,00,000 would be the limit for text ads. An audience of 1,00,000 is good enough for sponsored in the mail.
Paid Content Promotion Options depending on cost factor:
When the cost factor is considered, there are two main options, they are
- CPC or cost per click
- CPM.
Apart from content promotion, you also need to take a deep view of the content distribution plans. Though content marketing is cherished, it is just a program that brings about positive action. But you always need a good distribution plan, which pushes your content to your audience. In order to achieve proper distribution plan, the following aspects are to be followed.
Get to know your audience:
Remember that contents are to be distributed to where your audiences reside and also where they need to get associated with the brand. Before the content is distributed, it is important to get to know about the audience, to whom they actually interacted with and the way by which they got linked to the company. In that manner, social media platform as mentioned above is a great platform as they get into deep demographic details and focus on a specific audience.
Your Litmus test should be organic distribution:
It is never a good plan to spend tons on the promotion of each content piece. This kind of approach would drain your savings and is also not effective. The idea to be followed here is, to distribute the content in an organic manner first. Once this is done, the performance is to be monitored and look for some good performing contents. Once your content is read by the audiences, make a plan about the action to be presented by the people. Post contents that can trigger people to take action.
In the same way, social media must be monitored to know about organic performance. Look for elevated engagement rates post and pay for it. There are reward engagements too in Facebook and hence, posts that are performing well organically can be promoted. By this way, money is saved and content also reaches more audience.
Promotion of content:
You develop a truly exceptional content by making use of all available resources. For your audience as well as business, this content would be valuable as these would develop links and pave way for more contents. By this way, the content gains more value. This is actually termed as the cornerstone piece of content. A 2000 word blog posts are considered as corner piece content and it is all about the industry happenings.
You may have developed a functional asset. Early transactions can be achieved in this way and also organic distribution is also boosted. Hence when there is a good performance by cornerstone piece, the other contents associated with it will also gain a performance boost.
Apart from traditional channels:
Apart from Ad words and social media, you can also pay a specific site in order to host any particular content. You can also opt for demand generation services. This is a perfect promotion that was tried and worked well. When content is hosted by any publication for a certain time period on any site, they send potential leads list on ones who downloaded. Content hosting services are offered by a number of publications online. Hence it is good to get to know the publications visited by major audiences.
For detailed targeting criteria, it is best to work along with demand generation service. The criteria are mainly utilized by the services so that corner piece contents are promoted for new audiences. This is done by means of outbound demand generation.
Promotion across channels:
There are many things to be considered for promotion across channels. For a perfect marketing mix, you need to find the influencers in your niche, look for famed keywords, and find out customer issues, your competition level, company news and more. These aspects make your content highlighted and most wanted, as they are published across channels. Immediate results can be obtained with paid media, once the ads are run.
There are many benefits with paid media as the chances to reach an audience can be extended. This can be done across trusted channels. Personalization can be combined as paid media focuses prospects by means of the sales funnel. The main aspect is that the content, as well as the ads, should be ones targeting the audience.
Conclusion:
There are new contents being published each day, and getting your content highlighted is a difficult task. Paid content is a perfect solution that helps you get your desired audience and your content is noticed. As mentioned above there are many paid promotions that can be utilized so that your content is highlighted. You just have to run through the various platforms available. You can also note down the advantages and disadvantages of paid platforms and decide accordingly.
There are many sources that give a detailed idea about paid contents and the way contents are distributed. Users can run through these sources and plan for a better idea. By this way, your contents would definitely be highlighted. Once your content or brand is highlighted you can be sure that you’re moving ahead in your business. Hence plan, pen down ideas and move forward for paid contents to drive in more traffic from audiences.