Content Has Revolutionized Advertising: 13 Pros Explore the Irony
(Originally posted on Epic Presence Blog: https://epicpresence.com/online-advertising/)
We have spent a good deal of time recently exploring how content marketing elevates other aspects of digital marketing, including SEO, social media andpublic relations. We even made the case for content marketing as a major driver of sales.
Now, let’s synthesize that information and make a case for a relationship that functions at a bigger-picture level: The relationship between content marketing and advertising.
Many people still think of content marketing and advertising as separate activities. Think push marketing vs. pull marketing. In reality, however, advertising and content can blend together to close some of the loops in a business’s sales funnel.
Below are intelligent insights from 13 marketing professionals that illustrate how the content-advertising relationship has evolved rapidly in recent years.
We are about to touch on some of the densest discussions in this content marketing series, but understanding the evolving relationship between content marketing and advertising will be hugely valuable to you.
PPC and Display Ads Can Point Back to a Piece of Content
The keywords you bid on each reflect a certain intention on the user’s part. As you perform your keyword research, this will become apparent. When you get an idea of what the user’s intent is behind a keyword search, you have a good idea of where that person would fall within your sales funnel or on the scale ofmarket awareness.
Melissa Mackey at Beyond the Paid has put together an excellent series on how content marketing and PPC work together, and stresses the importance of aligning content to where the user is in his/her buyer journey.
Searches that indicate low awareness or vague needs can be an invitation to educate through content. Searches that indicate the user is at a later stage might be invitations to provide a buyer’s guide or a product review.
“Think about someone who is buying a house, for example,” Mackey writes. “Someone who is at the beginning of the journey may just search for ‘houses for sale in Chicago,’ for example. They may not even include the location in the query and just search for ‘houses for sale.’ As they move through their decision process, searches will get more long-tail: “3 bedroom 2 story in Lincoln Park,” for example.”
If the keywords you bid on suggest that the user is right at the top of the funnel, this might also be a good opportunity to use your premium content to convert prospects into leads. Gate the best content, and exchange it for an email address, Copyblogger’s Demian Farnworth tells Unbounce.
“Holding something back identifies those who are more serious,” he says. “The blog post draws in a crowd and builds trust — the download indicates someone wants more information. If it’s a valuable download, more trust is accumulated.”
A PPC Campaign Can Help You Evaluate Your Content
Mackey says that the data a PPC campaign turns up about any given piece of content is “the secret sauces that will help you take your content marketing to the next level.”
Understand that any ad network will track engagement metrics on each user you drive to a landing page or piece of content. This will let you know how long each user stayed on the page, what percentage of them clicked through, etc.
If you are sending users to a piece of content, this data will tell you how well it performs. If you are sending different users to different pieces of content (or simply split-testing), you will be able to compare and contrast what works well.
“If you don’t have a CMS that can track content performance for you, you could try using the utm_content parameter in Google Analytics for content ID,” Mackey writes. “As long as it’s used the same way across channels, you could get asset performance this way. …
“It’s also important to learn what types of content perform best. Are white papers your top lead generators, or do videos perform best? Track performance by asset type, either by including it in the content ID parameter, or by tracking it manually. One of our clients tracks link clicks on asset titles in their web analytics, using consistent link naming across all channels. The asset title always includes the asset type, so we can roll up the results fairly easily.”
If you find yourself underwhelmed by your content’s performance, copywriter Marc Aarons offers a nice checklist for strengthening the copy on your page. His post, written for Unbounce, addresses landing pages, but the same formula works for pure content, too.
Simply ask yourself four questions about your content, he says:
- Is it useful for your visitor? Be honest with yourself here.
- Is it unique?
- Does it feature a sense of urgency, something that compels the user to act now?
- Is it ultra-specific, with actual facts and figures?
If you don’t say “yes” three times, it’s time to make some improvements, Aarons suggests.
For top-of-the-funnel content, focus more on being useful, unique (or at least obviously superior to content from others) and specific. In the early stages of the buyer journey, the sense of urgency isn’t yet important when you are simply informing a prospect.
We will discuss in a later section how to target those users once more, this time with a renewed urgency.
Before that, we need to explore a few things a PPC campaign can teach you about your market.
Your PPC Data Can Reveal Surprising Insights Into Your Audience
Digital marketing agency Seer writes that it ran a remarketing campaign a while back in the bridal and wedding markets, and that data offered an interesting glimpse into the minds of brides-to-be.
For one thing, three weather websites were found in the top 20 domains, by impressions, of these users.
“Weather.com, wunderground.com, and accuweather.com were all in the top 20,” Seer writes.
“Okay, these are usually high up in the placement charts, but rarely are they all in the tops. It makes sense I suppose; there’s no bigger fear for a bride-to-be than a rainy wedding day. So, write a post or guide on how to deal with the weather! Perhaps a guide on how to brighten a cloudy wedding, or a post on keeping your hair, makeup, and dress perfect during a storm.”
Another key insight: These brides-to-be were doing some heavy searches on real estate and apartment websites. Makes sense when you think about it, right? This leads to a few opportunities, such as creating a 50-point checklist for newlyweds to make their move-ins as smooth as possible — and perhaps tying that into their gift registries.
These data can also inform the overall messaging of your campaign, as it offers real-time feedback from prospects and potential customers.
“If an ad titled ‘Solve Packaging Problems’ outperforms ‘Low-price Packaging’” you have data to support a messaging approach that emphasizes solution selling over price — proof that you can use to inform your content approach, or justify content decisions to get executive buy-in,” Brad Shorr writes at Content Marketing Institute. “Intuitively, content marketers may gravitate to solution selling anyway, but having supporting data always helps, especially when there’s internal resistance.”
The Power of Retargeting
Here is where we get into the real power of the content/digital advertising partnership. The practice known both as “retargeting” and “remarketing” allows businesses to recapture the leads that have leaked out of their funnels by jogging those users’ memories with a timely ad.
When an ad network knows that a user has visited a specific site, retargeting allows the operators of that site to deliver a potentially much more targeted message to the user down the line because he/she had already visited their site and has some familiarity with it.
Thus, if someone finds your content organically or through social media but gets distracted or otherwise disconnects from your site, you have a chance to reconnect with them.
Larry Kim, founder and CTO of Wordstream, put together a big content campaign in the fall of 2014 to sing the praises of retargeting. His piece for HubSpot, called “How to Design Content Remarketing Campaigns That Actually Work,” lays out the key benefits to this practice:
- It turns site visitors into leads.
- It helps users recall a brand.
- It boosts rates of repeat visits and, if done well, engagement.
- It enhances both SEO and content marketing efforts.
HubSpot’s Siobhán McGinty also points out that retargeting can be effective at all stages of a buyer’s journey.
“Imagine this; a person visits your a page on your website that’s about an industry topic, but the person doesn’t convert. These people are still very much at the top of the funnel. Why not set up retargeting ads on Facebook, Twitter and/or Google to drive these people to a blog post on that same topic?
“If they get there, but still don’t convert, try retargeting to them to drive them to a downloadable ebook on the same topic. If they don’t convert at this stage, drive them to a consultation or a free trial.”
Retargeting is working wonders is on Facebook, Rocco Alberto Baldassarre writes at Social Media Examiner. This is due to two important factors: Facebook is huge, and many users have already Liked enough businesses that retargeting on that network is often a case of turning customers into repeat customers.
‘When someone visits a page with your custom audience code (i.e., an offsite pixel), they’re added to your custom audience list in your Facebook Ads Manager,” Baldassarre says. “You can include those visitors (and the custom audience they’re part of) as a target audience in a Facebook ad retargeting campaign.”
And retargeting existing fans, he says, is just simply a matter of going after lower-hanging fruit for many businesses.
“Consider that acquiring sales from existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new leads (and many of your fans are probably customers). You can also upsell those existing customers with new or better products and services. Additionally, your fans may not be seeing all of your Facebook updates. If you retarget your most important content to them via a Facebook ad, they’re more likely to see it.”
What’s more, Facebook allows marketers to really segment audiences based on what they drive or where they buy their groceries, Adam Kreitman writes at Crazy Egg. He puts everything we’ve discussed in this post so far — content upgrades, retargeting, all of it — into one nice example:
“I may run Facebook ads promoting a high-value blog post or video I recently did that has no opt-in required, just high-value content,” Kreitman says. “So, I’m bringing high quality traffic to my site, knowing that when they leave they will be served up an ad that says ‘Get my Free Facebook Checklist,’ and when they click on that ad they get taken to a squeeze page where they must opt-in to get the free checklist and video series.
“This person is thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I just watched a great video on his blog yesterday. I’ll opt into this and check it out.’”
This allows you to target warmer prospects, build rapport quickly and get more people into your sales funnel faster, Kreitman says.
But don’t go overboard with retargeting. Remember that this is a practice that requires you to collect another person’s data and follow them around the Web. It’s a thin line between being helpful and relevant, and simply being annoying.
Ilana Bercovitz suggests at the ReTargerter blog that marketers cap the number of times a retargeting ad gets show to a prospect. She also suggests that they drop a burn-code pixel to turn off the retargeting campaign after a person reaches some conversion threshold such as making a purchase. The latter can be done on the purchase confirmation page, for example, and that burn code can be found on whichever retargeting platform you decide to use.
By the way, Bercovitz — who is now at Sinch — wrote the book on retargeting, so perhaps take her advice to heart. You’ll want to stay on the ethical side of these activities, especially as we get into this last topic.
Native Advertising
Nothing gets hands wringing quite like native advertising. Despite being an age-old practice (David Ogilvy, et al, would have called them “advertorials” in their day), the act of piggybacking an advertising message onto a piece of content rubs some people the wrong way.
Nevertheless, native advertising is expected to see $4.3 billion (with a “b”) in spending this year, and that’s projected to double by 2018, according to AdWeek.
Those look like huge numbers, and they are, but that AdWeek piece notes that native advertising only accounts for about 5% of marketers’ spending plans, largely because people don’t know/remember what native advertising is. Also, the transparency necessary to execute a good native ad presents a barrier to entry for some people.
For content marketers who can successfully wade into these waters, though, there should be abundant opportunities in the short term.
In early February, Mathew Ingram at Gigaom reported that content giant Upworthy was surprised at its own success with native ads. One example was a campaign the site helped put together along with the promoters of the movieUnbroken.
“We created a strategic bundle of content — some that we provided, and some that Upworthy curated — that centered around perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity, which is the core of [main character Louis Zamperini’s] story,” Upworthy marketing executive Doug Neil told Ingram.
“We also asked people to tell their own stories as part of the #IAmUnbroken movement. The campaign exceeded expectations by generating over 60,000 social interactions in just a few short weeks leading up to the film’s release.”
Native advertising is also doing very well in the B2B space, Lisa Fugere from Radius writes at Kapost. A 2014 ad campaign for Radius — a B2B marketing intelligence platform — turned up some interesting results. Display ads on LinkedIn accounted for exactly 0% of all inbound leads, but sponsored posts on LinkedIn accounted for 59% of all inbound leads.
Those promoted posts on LinkedIn were far and away the most successful method of attracting leads. Remarketing ads, by the way, came in at No. 2. with 23% of leads.
If there is any one thing to take away from this discussion, it’s that neither advertising nor content are inherently superior. Rather, some mix of the two will allow you to get a much more relevant message out to your prospects, leads and customers.
The work is complicated because there are a lot of moving parts, but in the end you can get the right message to the right prospect where he/she hangs out.
The flipside is we as an industry run the risk of abusing our sophisticated technology and bombarding people with untargeted messages.
“Untargeted messages ruin native advertising for everyone,” Fugere writes on the Radius blog. “The future of native advertising hinges on marketers’ ability to reach audiences with relevant messages, rather than unsolicited sales pitches.”
images by:
Nicolai Berntsen / Unsplash
Catt Liu / Unsplash
Hans Splinter / Flickr
Duncan Hull / Flickr
(Originally posted on Epic Presence Blog: https://epicpresence.com/online-advertising/)