Making Money On-line: How to Decode The Connection Between Organic & Paid Content Promotion

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

How to Decode The Connection Between Organic & Paid Content Promotion

Organic-and-paid-content-promotion

We often have new customers ask us what the best approach is for breaking the code of content promotion. Is it purely organic reach, social amplification or is paid promotion the way to go?

The short answer is, all of these and more.

When content marketing first hit the market, brands used it as an opportunity to follow a formula for something they already knew, online advertising. Banner ads, spam emails and other forms of advertising were a precursor to the more recognized forms that we see today. In the mid-nineties, brands were spending upwards of $11,000 a week for banner advertisements.

Much later, once brands began to understand the potential of content marketing as an actual way to build value and credibility (without spamming), marketing investments began to shift. Suddenly everyone was investing a large portion of their funds into creating quality content and advertising investments began to wane.

That brings us to today. Brands large and small have become savvy to the fact that quality content is a must. However, the competition for the attention of consumers is becoming increasingly difficult. The mere creation of top-notch content will no longer suffice.

To help you decode the proper mix of organic and paid content promotion to make your content reach new heights, consider the connections below.

Understanding your end objective is an essential step in determining what mix of organic and paid promotion you should pursue. For example, if your content is top of funnel and the goal is to get an influx of shares and view, you’ll likely want to invest the paid portion of your promotion in social boosting.

However, if you’ve developed a great middle or bottom of funnel content asset, then you can begin incorporating pay-per-click (PPC) and other forms of advertising to convert prospects that are ready to buy.

Your hub and spoke can include paid promotion. A traditional hub and spoke publishing model centers around a larger content asset and shows the different ways to drive traffic to that asset using earned, owned and some paid media. The next iteration of the hub and spoke might look something like this:

organic and paid hub and spoke publishing

Create and promote targeted content. First of all, your content should be optimized for the humans that you want to consume, share and act on the information, as well as the search engines that you want to crawl your content.

Additionally, there are both paid and organic methods to target your content promotion.

For example, your Facebook and Twitter profiles may have slightly different audiences. In order to target your organic message appropriately, you’ll want to use messaging, visuals and calls to action that make the most sense for that audience.

The targeting options available within search and social advertising platforms has grown leaps and bounds within the last few years. In addition to the capability of uploading actual lead lists, you can target everything from location and job title, down to the smallest detail about user habits, income and more.

Need Additional Help Decoding Organic & Paid Content Promotion?

Finding the exact right mix of organic and paid promotion for your content strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It is process that includes testing, some investment and often, relying on the experts to help guide you. If you need help uncovering your biggest content marketing opportunities and finding ways to make it support your business objectives, contact us today.

Header image via Shutterstock

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