How can you have your article on leading outlets? The answer is Native Discovery

Today, I'm going to talk about native discovery and content amplification or syndication. I'm talking about this, because I was texted by a good friend of mine, Mark Cameron, who's a social media expert, and he warned me that I may be posting too much content on Facebook, and that may hurt me. I didn't realize it, but it seems as though if you are posting too much on social media, you can have your your account downgraded in some way. I guess it's a bit like manners at the dining table, if you're doing all the talking and eventually someone asks you to stop talking. It got me to thinking about strategies that we can use that are off the main path of using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

In public relations, we have earned media or what people think of as traditional public relations, which is where you ring up the journalist and pitch your story. If they like it, they ask for more, they may do an interview, they may take the press release, they may take a case study. The second kind of PR that we have is owned media where we own the channel, so it's our own social media accounts, and we can put whatever we like on it. The third is shared media, which are the social media two-way streets where someone has taken my content and then is amplifying it themselves. You could even look at things like TripAdvisor or Trustpilot, where people are starting to share reviews about us and our companies, whether we like it or not. The fourth group of media is paid media. In the past, traditionally, paid media was what we used to call "above the line advertising" as opposed to "below the line" or what then became "through the line." It used to be below the line with direct marketing, and through the line became sort of paid-for insertions into publications. 

Paid media now, with the way that companies like Outbrain and Taboola are defining it, is what they call native discovery. I've used this myself actually for some clients some years ago and even for my own content. When you look at the bottom of a website, you're going to see articles that aren't really articles contributed by the journalists themselves, but they look like proper articles. They don't have a PR headline or an advertising headline. What they have is a headline that could just be an article. It could be long-form content provided by a publisher or by a company that has paid to send out long-form articles, as opposed to adverts, or it could be a video, and it's the equivalent of what we used to call advertorial supplements. So, paid content is now distribution and exposure that we've paid for, and it can include search, social media campaigns, display ads, and so on.

With Outbrain, I use that with really good effect. The reason this is working is because, in the recent years, content marketing has exploded with 89% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing, apparently, according to a Nielsen research. That's because editorial, informational, and entertaining content works best for viewers now as we're looking at screens, and we're able to control what's on the screen, surfing and moving on if we don't like it. It means that advertising and the old banner ad networks that we used to have in the late 1990s-early 2000s are largely gone, because people like Safari and Google put ad blockers. We used to have a little banner, or even a sidebar on the browser, but now, those are gone, because the browser owners realized that that was their revenue, and they weren't going to give that away to ad networks. 

The way to get in front of people is sometimes through giving them great articles that they will run. What we can also do is to share content through what we call these content syndication platforms. The people at Outbrain call it native discovery, because content goes into content that is being already read or watched by the viewer. In the same way that advertising has become targeted according to search or what we've seen already, through native discovery, it's basically saying that if someone's reading about mortgages or about pensions and so on, we can send them long-form content that's relevant to that particular area of interest. Now, it can carry some search engine optimization or SEO risks, because if you have repetitive content going across lots and lots of channels, we can actually be penalized apparently by people like Google, but fresh content syndicated across multiple platforms is good for SEO. My view is you can use the same content two or three times, maybe not all on the same day, but over a period of a month, and there be no risk whatsoever.

There are platforms like Medium, where we can post our own content, and these really are, if you like, shared content in my view. It's like a group blog where everybody is participating, and it becomes sort of like a self-publishing platform. There's another one called Scoop.it, which also collates content from around the web and automatically compiles it for us. I think those are not really content syndication in the definition that that I like to use, which is taking content from one place and sending it across multiple platforms, a bit like what we're doing with Repurpose, which takes our videos and creates audiograms from Buzzsprout that are automatically sent through to our YouTube and Facebook accounts. 

There's also SlideShare, which was founded in 2006 and is free to use. I'm always amazed that more clients don't use SlideShare, especially for B2B. To give you an idea of the potential of SlideShare, there's a recent report by Ogilvy on Social Media Trends in 2020, and it has over 620,000 views. I imagine if you're any agency, to have half a million people look at your PowerPoint presentation normally reserved for clients and staff, that's pretty amazing, by any advertising standards. 

Eighty million people use SlideShare every year, apparently, to learn about topics quickly from subject matter experts, and you can even categorize them. I have been using it for quite a long time myself. I put company presentations and pictures on there where we created content that clients or companies decided not to use. We don't put anything proprietary to them, of course. SlideShare was acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn, and although the integration isn't one where you log into LinkedIn and you automatically go to SlideShare, you still have to log in and out, there are some 18 million uploads in 40 content categories, and it's one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. So, for any B2B client that I have, I always recommend getting product brochures and any marketing materials at all and knowledge into SlideShare.

Outbrain is another site that I've been using. I post content on there, for example, a long-form article that might be a white paper written by a client, and then I can choose, quite specifically, on a cost-per-thousand basis. In the past, I've spent $50 to $100, and we've got even 20,000-30,000 impressions, and 2-3% click throughs back to the website of our client. That's the key difference with Outbrain compared to having an article on a website published with just editorial. With Outbrain, if someone clicks to read the article, it's taken back to the host website. In other words, if I have a client's white paper, and I've got it on their website, I can then buy traffic, I can buy readers by geography, by publication type, by price, by duration, and also by budget. I can bid basically to be on the front page. If you've got a lot of budget, you can even be on CNN or the BBC or AsiaOne, any of these major outlets. So that's the content that you're seeing on the bottom of your browsers. 

Outbrain helps over a billion people discover content every year, and it's eclipsed by Taboola, which is the other game in town. Taboola, though, has a paid management system. I spoke to them when I was running campaigns for Morgan in China, because I was looking at using Taboola's outlets into the main publications, like South China Morning Post. At the time, what they do is they have account managers and they manage your content distribution, much more like an ad management team. They claim to have 1.4 billion users per month, which I imagine is the aggregate of these 10,000 publishers, where 10,000 publishers around the world use Taboola to provide the additional content. They also claim to have 50 times more data than the New York Public Library now. That gives you a measure of the scale of digital data just on one of the platforms. Now, you need to have a bigger budget with Taboola. They don't have prices on the website, because you sign up and you get an account manager. 

I started this conversation, because I was warned by Mark Cameron, who's an Instagram expert. We need to be careful that we can, if you like, saturate our social media channels with too much content, which I have to say I find a bit of a surprise. But if that's the case, another thing we can look at is the content syndication. That does take a little bit of budget. It doesn't cost anything to post things to Medium nor to SlideShare, but those two platforms really are posting content and having people come and find it. 

What I call content syndication and what Outbrain calls native discovery is when your content is placed through one portal or platform, and it's distributed on your behalf to multiple platforms. That distribution transportation creates huge opportunities, but it does have a small amount of cost. Get anything that you've got that you can use on SlideShare and embed the link wherever you can. SlideShare enables you to embed those slides into WordPress or into any other website. You can even embed them and link them into your LinkedIn. I recommend that if you've got some good long-form articles and content, consider Outbrain, because it has scalable cost, is very targeted, and it does bring traffic back to your own website. I know it because I've tried it. I've used it with clients to quite some success.

As we've said before, digital marketing and public relations is 20% content development, and 80% marketing. Content syndication is part of the Amplification part of SPEAK|pr, which is our five-stage methodology, that includes Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know. Content syndication is a valuable way to leverage your current content using platforms that are out there so that people can find and read or watch what you've got to say about how you add value to the marketplace without having to really do any extra work, but just leveraging the technology. It's there to serve small- and medium-sized business owners like me and you to get our word out.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash