As brands increasingly flood social and digital
properties with new content, even the best pieces are
struggling to be discovered. When audiences encounter
roughly 285 pieces of content daily, how can you ensure that
yours is rising through the clutter?
2. Introduction
As digital marketers, we understand the value content offers
brands to connect with audiences and move them to action.
We know more than half of B2B buyers rely more on content to research
and inform their purchasing decisions than they did a year ago. And as a
result, marketers are focused on ramping up efforts to develop significantly
more content than in years past - 70% of B2B marketers report that they
expect to create more content in 2017 than in 2016.
However, as brands increasingly flood social and digital properties
with new content, even the best pieces are struggling to be discovered.
When audiences encounter roughly 285 pieces of content daily, how can
you ensure that yours is rising through the clutter?
3. Paid Promotion Helps
B E SEE N BY THE R I G HT PEO PLE AT THE
R I G HT TI ME WHE R E YOU R AU D IEN CE LIVES
4. Maintain an Audience-Centric Focus
as You Prepare, Launch, Measure, and
Optimize Campaigns to:
ENGAGEATTRACT RETAIN
5. Know Your Audience
Unlike baseball fields, content does not adhere to the, “if you build it, they will come” principle.
It works best when you tailor it to address your audience’s interests, needs, and wants.
IDENTITY
Who are you
attempting to
connect with?
INTERESTS
What kind of content
are they consuming,
creating, or sharing
with their networks?
ENVIRONMENT
Where do they go to
discover content?
PAIN POINTS
What are the
main pain points
experienced by your
audience at a
given time?
OBSTACLES
What is preventing
your audience from
achieving their goals?
VERNACULAR
How do they talk
about relevant topics?
6. Identify Where Your Audience is
in Their Buying Journey
ENGAGEEXPLORE
EVALUA-
TION
INTEREST
PURCHASE
INTENTAWARENESS
CONSIDER-
ATION
7. Think About Your Objectives
Don’t fall into the trap of creating content for the sake of doing so – create and promote assets that
drive the measurable marketing objectives most impactful for your business.
ACQUISITION CONVERSIONAWARENESS ENGAGEMENT
8. Consider What Your
Objectives are Worth
Digital advertisers spend (on average) $250 - $300 a day per channel,
but are these investment levels right for your campaign objective?
• If you’re lacking historical data, launch your campaigns with a modest
introductory test spend. You can roughly estimate your test spend by
checking the average channel CPC and multiplying that cost by the
number of actions you desire.
• Evaluate the performance of your test campaigns following a
2-3-week flight and optimization period.
• With that information, you can then calculate your ROAS (return on ad
spend) and scale campaign spending to maximize ad performance and
business returns.
9. Review Your Content Library and
Identify Which Pieces Resonate Most
with Your Audience
10. Promote Content on
Audience-Preferred Channels
SOCIAL NATIVE SYNDICATEDARC
SEARCH AND
DISPLAY
Search
Network
Display
Network
Industry
Influencer
Social and Blogger
Collective
Analysts
PAID
INFLUENCERS
11. Make a Great
Creative First Impression
Your ad creatives will be your audience’s first touch point with the destination you’re attempting
to drive them to, and the primary factor for whether they engage or not.
Account for 47% of
Engagement Probability vs.
11% for Targeting
Increase Purchase Intent
by 93%
12. Target Your Audience
Launching a paid ad campaign to reach your target audience is only effective if you can
actually reach the right people.
While many platforms differ in their approach and options for targeting, consider how you
can build out targeting for some of these general parameters:
• Interest, industry, and competitors
• Demographics and professional title
• Behaviors
• Historical data drawn from email and social lists
As you build your targeting, remember to be mindful of maintaining an
audience size that is realistic for your campaign spend. While “the more
the merrier” sounds great in theory, you may lose out if your spend
is significantly less than what would be necessary to reach your
potential audience.
13. Bring People Where
They Expect to Go
Successfully driving your audience to a desired piece of content
or digital location is great, but the work isn’t done yet!
You must engage audiences on priority digital destinations by
greeting them with:
• The content they expect to see (no bait-and-switches!)
• A clean and easy to navigate user experience
• An identical user experience on mobile and desktop
• Additional recommended related content
14. Take Your Tracking Further
Digital platforms offer marketers an impressive array of
ad performance metrics; however, you shouldn’t stop there!
Always pair individual ads with unique tracking codes that you can generate
via your CRM in order to gain a more detailed understanding of your
audience’s behavior after clicking an ad.
15. Measure Success with the
Metrics from Your Objectives
Sort through the abundance of digital marketing metrics and select only those that are
most relevant to your objectives to measure success.
AWARENESS ACQUISITIONENGAGEMENT CONVERSION
Impressions
Follows
Reads / Views
Likes
Shares
Comments
Clickthrough Rate
Other Clicks
Cost-Per-Click
URL Clicks
Site Visits
CPA Site Visit
Visits Duration
Bounce Rate
Signups / Leads
CPA Signups
Bounce Rates
16. We Can Help
Understanding the strength of your current content arsenal is mission critical
to planning your next content marketing campaign.
Get started with our Content Health Check! It’s a comprehensive, diagnostic
content audit of your digital and print assets that provides actionable insights
and an easy-to-follow roadmap to improve your content marketing efforts.
Get in touch with us today to learn what it can do for you!
DBL@hotwirepr.com