When structuring campaigns for link acquisition, you should focus on outreach - targeting bloggers, influencers, and the press rather than customers directly. Meeting this objective requires the heavy use of earned and owned media. Additionally, some very targeted paid advertising focusing on influencers, bloggers, and the press can yield significant results

Increase Audience, Traffic Or Brand Awareness

The next type of content strategy is about providing a valuable resource to potential customers to build an audience, generate traffic, and to give a positive brand impression.

Measure of Success

Qualified traffic and engagement

Example Goal

Acquire 10,000 unique visitors from the UK, who view at least 2 pages of the site.

Method

These campaigns are audience-focused and influencer-focused. They involve heavy paid, owned and earned promotion, but usually the paid advertising will be much more audience-focused than influencer-targeted, unlike link or press-oriented content promotion.

Generate Direct Sales/ Sign Ups

Another goal companies can achieve through content marketing is direct sales and service sign-ups. This is commonly seen in ecommerce, B2C services, and other businesses that have a low cost, internet-only transaction.

Measure of Success

Sales or sign-ups generated

Example Goal

Create a buying guide for mountain bike accessories, promote it to the audiences, and generate at least £10,000 in sales.

Methods

For these campaigns, you will typically use audience-focused paid promotion, with a smaller amount of earned and owned media. Typically the sorts of pieces that generate direct sales are product-focused with strong ‘buy’ calls-to-action. As such, journalists and bloggers are often reluctant to cover these pieces.

Lead Generation

Another common content marketing goal is lead generation. However, content marketing casts a somewhat wide net and such a strong definition of a qualified lead is necessary to ensure that your content marketing efforts are successful.

Measure of Success

Volume and quality of leads

Example Goal

Get 10 new Fortune 500 marketing directors on the email list through promoting a webinar about increasing organic visibility.

Methods

These campaigns should focus on paid media, as third parties can be reluctant to link and share content that requires a sign up and since the goal is to acquire new customer details, owned media will also be difficult. Through paid media, targeting individuals with relevant interests and employees at appropriate companies, this goal can be achieved.

Channel Development

Content marketing can also help build your distribution channels such as email, Facebook accounts, Twitter followers, etc. These lists are very valuable, and can lead to direct sales, amplification of other content, positive mentions, and more.

Measures of Success

Numerical and platform specific.

Example Goal

Acquire 30,000 Twitter followers, with a daily interaction rate of 0.5%

Methods

Paid, earned, and owned promotion should be used heavily with the aim of building exposure and creating a desire for more content from your brand. In these campaigns, users come to the site to either enjoy or become informed on a subject, and then these users can be siphoned into opting into an email or social channel.

Content Planning

Different audiences require significantly different approaches, even within the same niche. When creating content, you must understand what types of information, ideas, memes, and concepts resonate most effectively. In order to do this, you must really dig-in to your niche and specifically define their sub-constituents. If you can’t define your target audience, it will be exceedingly difficult to create content that targets them directly. To do this you should first identify who your target audiences is:

• Demographics – age, location, gender, income levels, education levels, etc.
• Psychographics – personality, attitudes, values, lifestyles, etc.

By clearly defining your target audience you will then be equipped to do the necessary research to find out how your audience segments itself across the web, where they go to get their information, how and where they interact with each other, the types of content they like to consume, and how and where they like to share. This sets the groundwork for coming up with ideas that will resonate with your target audience and be most successfully consumed and shared.

Campaign Projections

Before jumping into promotion, it’s good to calculate how much work, budget, and time you’ll need to achieve your goal. You can use web and social analytics data to calculate how much traffic and/or outreach you’ll need to achieve your goal. Historical data and good notes on past content projects come in handy here.

Depending on your content objectives and the promotional tactics you are pursuing you can use the following formulas to make decisions, predict results, manage time and control spending.

With more data we calculate the advertising spend necessary to generate the necessary traffic. Each advertising channel will have its own required spend to meet our traffic requirements. Furthermore, each advertising spend will have a conversion rate. With this information we can decide the best advertising channels to pursue. You can also use the equations to predict the results of a particular advertising spend.

To estimate how much outreach is required, or to predict the results from a given level of outreach, you would need to know your typical response rate and at what rate the outreach is successful once you are in contact with a website.

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Promotional Timeline

Once you’ve defined your goals and the measures of success, planned your content and identified the promotional tactics necessary, you can develop a content promotion campaign timeline. By setting out a campaign timeline, you ensure that all of the necessary elements for success are completed in a timely manner. Below you can see the outline of an example timeline to follow.

Owned, Earned And Paid Media

Once you have set out the structure of your campaign, you can select individual tactics to employ in order to meet your objectives. Owned, earned and paid media is essentially a framework for how your content promotional efforts are organised and executed. Forrester Research created a chart that lays it out, including the advantages and disadvantages:

Owned Media

Owned media is when you leverage a channel you create and control. This could be your company blog, YouTube channel, your website or even your Facebook page. Even though you don’t strictly ‘own’ your YouTube channel or your Facebook page, you do control them and don’t have to pay for basic usage.

Content promotion through owned media allows you to build long term relationships with existing and potential customers and influences. It is cost effective and effective because you already have an engaged audience. However, this media type needs to be built overtime with any new site essentially starting zero. As this media type is developed and maintained, it offers the best longevity.

Owned Promotional Methods

Email

Cultivating an email marketing list is one of the strongest promotional tactics that a site can employ. It has been shown to have a ROI of 38:1 with 1 in 5 companies reporting an ROI of 70:1.

In order for email marketing to be effective, you should at the very least segment your email list into existing customers and those that have opted in but have not yet converted. The greater the customisation the more effective email marketing will be. For instance, personalised subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened.

Social Media

The next channel to think about is social media accounts such as your brand’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. The first stage is to optimise each platform ensuring that you have an engaging profile page, with images correctly sized and all descriptions and contact information completed.

Next you must ensure that you engage with your followers. The primary factors to think about are the headlines and the images that you use. This is something that you can A/B test with each platform to find what resonates best with your audience. One tactic that works well on Twitter is to tweet the same message multiple times. It has been shown that each tweet gets approximately the same amount of click-throughsiii. Why get 600 page views when you can get 2,400? Furthermore, with each subsequent Tweet we can expect to get around 75% as many retweets as the time before.

Blog Posts

If you have a blog, you can write a post about your new piece of content, and link back prominently to its landing page. The value of this tactic will be highly dependent on how much of a blog audience you’ve built. Blogs with substantial communities can drive a great deal of engagement with content, while quiet, abandoned blogs can’t get the attention good content needs to succeed.

Consider how your blog post will appear in search results – perhaps include a different set of keywords in the title than the ones on the landing page, so you can get another bite at the search apple instead of creating two competing pages.

People

Larger companies often have lots of customer-facing employees in sales, marketing, business development, support and other functions. These individuals can be great brand advocates and, if they’re active socially, they can drive distribution to customers and prospects. Let people in your company who are socially active know about what you’ve made, and invite them to share it.

Earned Media

Earned media is when customers, the press and the public share your content, speak about your brand via word of mouth, and otherwise discuss your brand. In other words, the mentions are ‘earned’, meaning they are voluntarily given by others. Examples of earned promotion include:

• Social sharing by individuals
• Sharing by industry influencers
• Featured on aggregator sites such as Reddit
• Reviews of products / service
• Linked to in other articles / blog posts

The element that earned media brings to the table, which other media (like paid and owned) can’t, is trust. Consumers trust peer recommendations and editorial content two to three times as much as online ads, and dramatically more than branded websites. Earned media is trusted more than owned media, which is trusted more than paid media.

However, earned media has its drawbacks – it can turn negative, it’s hard to control, and typically it is difficult to scale.

Earned Promotion Methods

Guest Posts

Contributing to relevant, thematic, third-party websites is one of the best methods of leveraging earned media as it allows you to tap into an existing community of engaged and qualified users. If your contribution resonates well you will be able to drive qualified users or leads to your own content. Furthermore, links back to your site may lead to increased search engine visibility for your own content.

Shares from Customers and Influencers

Beyond sharing your content on independent websites like blogs, it can be very useful to get customers and influencers to share your content. Buzzsumo analysed the social share counts of over 100 million articles and found several elements that induced sharing. Long form content often generates more shares:

This may appear contradictory considering that content length is an element that induces shares but what this tell us is that when creating long form content, it should be skim-able and not a wall of text, and that images help break it up and make it easier to digest. Buzzsumo also found that shares from an influencer (someone whose tweets are retweeted on average at least twice) contributes to a page receiving more shares.

• 1 influential person sharing resulted in 31.8% more social shares.
• 3 influencers doubled the number of social shares
• 5 influencers quadrupled the number of social shares

We can use this knowledge to inform our content creation process to ensure that it is conducive to outreachdriven earned promotion. Rather than coming up with ideas and then trying to find angles to pitch it, we can instead work backwards, identifying target influencers and creating content tailored to them. To do this, we would first find content similar to what we want to produce with high social engagement and identify the influencers that shared that content. We would then involve these influencers in the content creation itself by:

• Asking for feedback on the content idea
• Asking for quotes
• Linking to articles that the influencers have written
• Interviewing influencers for the content itself

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Paid Media

Paid media is when you pay to leverage a third-party channel, such as sponsorships and advertising on third-party sites. In many ways, the problem with paid media is one of quantity and quality overload. There are so many targeting options and so many paid media platforms, it can be difficult to identify where best to focus.

Social Ad Units

Social ad units – the ‘Sponsored Updates’ you see in your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other streams – are some of the best opportunities available to content marketers today. Broadly, these units have some unique characteristics:

• They typically appear in the main stream, next to content from brands people already follow and people they know. This prime real estate gives your content lots of attention, clicks, and shares – and these ‘in-stream’ placements far outperform sidebar and other less social ad units.
• They often have both an earned and a paid component, enabling advertising to experience a ‘social groundswell’, where traffic from sharing can be even greater than paid clicks.
• They can be targeted by social network user data instead of broad demographics. For example, if you’d like to show your content to 30 year-old women in San Francisco who are single and like yoga, you can. This enables you to advertise to very specific demographics and buy exactly the attention you want.

However, they’re not without disadvantages. User generated comments and sharing can turn negative instead of positive – so when you use these, make sure your community managers and social help folks are on the lookout and can deal with any negative sentiment.

Display Advertising

There are literally hundreds of display networks enabling marketers to purchase banners, but the largest of these networks is Google. Display ads are highly reusable – you don’t need to come up with something different for each platform, and it is very easy to scale campaigns to a high level. However, unless they’re highly targeted, display ads are often ignored by consumers.

Other Paid Media Options

There are many, many more paid tactics – including old stalwarts like paid search, email drops and print. This is a non-exclusive list, and new paid opportunities emerge on an almost daily basis. To find the ad units that work best for you, experiment a lot and pay attention to the sites and networks that your audiences hang out on.

Combining Paid, Earned And Owned Media

Here are two ways to combine paid, earned and owned media to drive results.

Using Sponsored Updates To Generate A Snowball Effect

Using Sponsored Updates To Generate A Snowball Effect

Targeting Journalists, Influencers And Writers With Social Media Advertising

You can target ads on social media to influencers and journalists, getting your content in front of the right people as soon as you launch it. This can be a great addition to email outreach. There are a number of ways to target ads for journalists, influencers and writers on social media. You could target your ads based on job titles such as:

• Journalist
• Editor
• Editor in chief
• Writer
• Blogger
• Freelance writer
• Web editor

You could also target ads by employer. For example:

• The Wall Street Journal
• The Guardian
• The Times
• Local newspapers
• Relevant magazines.

In Summary

While each media type has its own advantages and disadvantages, you can get amplified results by combining them. By clearly defining your target audience you will be equipped to do the necessary research to find out how your audience segments itself across the web, where they go to get their information, how and where they interact with each other, the types of content they like to consume, and how and where they like to share.

Owned, earned and paid media are your tools for pushing content out to your chosen target markets. Use them, test them and enjoy the results of a tightly targeted, controlled and measured campaign. If you’d like any more advice on how to get the most from your content marketing strategies, just get in touch with us here at WMG to find out how we can help.