The Business Case for Content Promotion

Building the perfect playbook

You’re standing on the touchline, tasked with managing an accomplished team to success in one of the most competitive arenas imaginable. You have talent in all of the key positions but, for whatever reason, they don’t seem to be performing.

Now, forgive me for the sporting analogy, but this is actually a very good description of many a content marketing operation. There is undoubted talent that is producing some outstanding pieces of content, but that content is going unseen and unloved. Sticking with the football theme, if content production is the creative spark that is pulling the strings in midfield, distribution is the star centre forward that sticks it in the back of the net and scores the goals.

Content promotion or distribution is often the unsung hero of content marketing, and it is definitely one of the more overlooked aspects of this increasingly critical marketing tactic. Your audiences are standing in increasingly crowded rooms, being bombarded by marketing messages, and it is getting harder and harder for brands to make themselves heard.

But you disregard content promotion at your peril. It can, quite literally, make or break your investment in content marketing.

Owned, Earned and Paid

The channels that consumers use to engage with brands and products are becoming increasingly diverse, and consumers have adapted much more quickly to these new forms of communication.

Personal recommendation is the most powerful form of marketing there is, according to Neilson, but content that is done well can actually elevate your brand messaging into personal recommendation territory. Ultimately, real people use a wide range of touchpoints in the journey to purchase and well distributed content can and should support every step of that journey

It means that the customer journey now spans over the three key areas of marketing communications; namely owned, earned and paid, and brands need to find a way to get these channels working together if they are to deliver an effective and consistent brand experience across all channels and devices.

[Download PDF to see Venn Diagram]

How organic reach is diminishing

Social media algorithms continue to evolve in a way that reduces the potential organic reach of branded content.

The graph below typifies the decline in the organic reach of branded content on Facebook. Across the board, content reach fell from 12.05% of a brand’s Facebook audience in October 2013, to just 6.15% in February 2014. Essentially, branded content was reaching just half of the audience that it was five months prior.

There are varying reasons for this, with both natural factors and deliberate intervention from the respective social networks being a factor.

Facebook argues that the sheer volume of content now being published on the platform, particularly by brands, will naturally result in diminished reach. In a blog posted in June 2014, it claimed that there were more than 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook, and that for people with a large number of friends, as many as 15,000 potential stories were vying for attention every single time they logged on.

The second factor is one that Facebook in particular has made no secret of – that its algorithm will favour personal content (ie, non-commercial) content over branded content. Facebook refutes any suggestion that commercial reasons are the motivation for this policy, and that it is instead designed to reduce content spam, promote personal content and deliver a user experience that “is most relevant to them”.

Other social networks are moving towards a similar algorithm-powered system. Twitter launched the first phases of an algorithm in late 2014, moving away from its original ‘real time feed’ model, whilst Instagram announced its own algorithm in March 2016.

The message from the social networks is clear; if you want to get your content seen, you need to put your hands in your pocket to put that content in front of the audiences you want to reach.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Why brands are getting content distribution wrong

It is important to remember the definition of content marketing.

“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving a profitable consumer action.”

And it is the “distributing” aspect of that definition that many marketers have struggled with, or perhaps neglected. But why is that? What mistakes are they making?

Overestimating their organic reach

Many brands and marketers wrongly equate the size of their following with the size of their reach. They argue that with 100,000 social media followers, they have the potential to reach 100,000 people who are actively engaged with the brand.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, this simply isn’t the case. Social networks are becoming increasingly selective about what content they display to each and every user with the introduction of complex algorithms, and this is reducing the organic reach of branded content across the networks.

Those networks that do not yet use algorithms, or only use them to a limited degree, rely on the ‘real time’ content model and, whilst this does mean that your message can have greater reach, it depends entirely on how active your audience is at that particular time.

Not budgeting for distribution

There’s not much point in having the fastest racing car if you don’t have enough fuel to reach the finish line. A lot of brands are investing heavily in producing huge quantities of quality content, but not investing in the ‘fuel’ that actually makes this content move.

You need to treat content marketing, and digital content in particular, in the same way you would treat any of your above-the-line marketing activity. You wouldn’t launch a TV campaign without some consideration for buying space, planning media distribution and earned media coverage, and the same applies to your digital content. Spend time identifying the resources that you will need (both skills and financial) to make your content move.

No defined objective

Knowing the objective of each content campaign is vital to ensuring that you invest in the right distribution channels and dedicate the necessary resource to getting your content seen. If you don’t know why your content exists (and just a hint, the answer is not “because your agency told you that you needed some”) and don’t know what “success” looks like, then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the investment in content marketing.

Your objectives, and your idea of success, can be whatever you want it to be - whether that’s brand awareness, engagement, driving traffic or generating revenue. But whatever it is, you need a clear idea of what your objective is if you are going to develop an effective distribution strategy.

Defining your Objectives.

How to define your content objectives.

What does success look like? How will you judge the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy? The answer to these questions are ultimately the starting point of your entire content marketing strategy, because your entire content plan, your audience targeting and your distribution strategy will ultimately need to be focused around these key goals.

Different organisations will have differing measures of success, and your objectives will vary from campaign to campaign. However, your goals and objectives will generally fall into one of three core areas:

[Download PDF to see Image]

Drive Acquisition

This is all about content that delivers acquisition, be that a sale or a lead. Your content may directly drive acquisition, or it may simply act as one of numerous touchpoints across the customer journey, but its success is ultimately measured on how effective it was at driving an acquisition.

Different organisations will attribute sales and acquisition in different ways, but the focus for the content here is to deliver something in return for a tangible engagement from the reader or consumer. This could be revenue, or it could be a piece of data or insight that is provided in exchange for access to a piece of intelligence. Whatever your organisation values at this stage, delivering this should be the focus of your content.

Drive Performance

The purpose of this content is to enhance the performance of a customer engagement channel. This could be to improve conversion rates, to increase average order value or basket size, or to reduce marketing acquisition costs. Your content will therefore be measured in the context of how it delivers efficiencies in your digital process, and how it supports the user.

Drive Exposure

For some brands, the purpose of content marketing is brand exposure and nothing more. This content is about making a splash in the marketplace, about getting a brand name visible and about creating discussion around the brand. This is where you have to make your content truly remarkable if you are going to stand out from the crown.

Understanding your audiences

Identifying your Audiences

Many organisations have a good idea of who their customers are, and this will usually be widely publicised throughout the business in the form of customer personas. Typically, they will look like this:

“Our target demographic is female, 22-49, married with children, with a household income between £25k and £35k. Our value product is at the heart of their everyday lives.”

This information is always useful, as it provides a focus for your strategy, but how does your customer demographic translate to a digital audience?

So you need to use multiple data sources to help develop a more complete picture of your digital audience, their demographics, behaviours and interests. Do your audiences use particular social networks? Are they more likely to search via mobile? Do they gravitate towards certain content mediums more than others?

Identifying your audiences

Your current customers provide unrivalled levels of data into how people engage with your brand, so using this insight should be the first step before developing any form of paid social advertising.

First party CRM data is a useful tool that provides a considerable amount of insight on your current customer base, how active they are in particular product areas and how they engage with your brand.

This data will help you target:

• Customers that are actively engaged with your brand
• New Audiences
• Audiences that have previously transacted with your brand, but have failed to complete a purchase since.

This provides you with an indication of your most valuable consumer groups, as well as providing a steer on where your content should be focused (for example, a large number of lapsed consumers could represent an opportunity that dedicated content could capitalise on).

It would be easy at this point to dismiss this process as one that doesn’t drive new customers to your brand and, in many respects, that is true. However, what this process allows you to do is take first party data from your current segmented customer list, and run these through online audience profiling tools (such as Facebook’s Advertising Tools or Google Customer Match) in order to understand fundamentally how your customers behave. It stands to reason that, unless your organisation is planning a significant step-change in the audiences that it targets, the audiences that you want to attract are likely to have very similar demographic and behaviour patterns to the ones that are already engaged with your brand.

Start with your followers, or engaged customers. These represent the most valuable group for your brand.

These followers will have friends that they are connected with. These are useful as, generally, people tend to engage with people who share their values, their social status and their interests. Of course, people are ‘friends’ with a wide range of other people on social media, so these target groups can be constrained to be within certain demographics if required. For example, a fashion brand aimed squarely at women in the teens/early twenties may wish to constrain a ‘friends’ target audience to female friends of existing followers who are under 25.

You can then start to find people beyond these circles who share the same demographic profiles as your ideal customers, and then extrapolate this data further based on wider interests, location and general demographic traits. This is essentially your target audience, segmented into individual targeting groups.

[Downlaod PDF to see Diagram]

How do your audiences behave online?

Different audiences and consumer groups will behave very differently from each other when they are online and, as a marketer, you need to understand how the audiences that you want to attract engage with brands, and engage with the web. Understanding this will not only shape the content that you produce, but it will also shape the way in which you take that content to market, and the tactics and techniques that you need to use in order to do that.

Search is another key area in which audience insight is important. Understanding not only what your audiences are searching for, but also the intent behind that search, provides a real insight into the types of content your audience is looking for. The intent of the search is extremely important, as it provides an insight into where the searcher is in the consumer journey, and you can then ensure that your content is targeted to serve this user.

[Downlaod PDF to see Diagram]

For example, does your audience engage with particular social media platforms more than any other? Without this insight, it is likely that you will simply take a ‘scatter-gun’ approach to content distribution through social media, posting to every applicable platform with no real strategy or focus.

If however, you can identify that your audience group is particularly active on Pinterest, you can dedicate greater resources to this channel, direct targeted content at this channel and, ultimately, make your content much more effective. The most suitable platform for your brand and content may not have the huge volume levels of other social platforms, but it may have an audience that is much more engaged and receptive to your content.

Knowing what media your audiences consume allows you to target your earned and paid promotional strategy. If your target audiences disproportionately consumes a particular publication, use this insight to your advantage. Also consider how these audience groups are influenced, and what online communities they are a part of.

These elements are the foundations for building a clear picture of your audiences, which then allows you to develop a strategy and tactics for engaging them.

Building your content promotion plan

Armed with this insight, you are in a position to start building a content promotion strategy and identifying the channels you need to utilise in order to attract your target audiences. The key here is to ensure that you are targeting the right channels, where your audiences are most active, and delivering content that is suitable for that medium.

The engagement tactics you employ in your content will determine how much feedback you get from your audiences, as well as what type of engagement you generate.

Different types of content in different mediums will produce different reactions from different audiences. Knowing which technique to apply and when should be a major consideration in the creation of your editorial calendar.

For example, answers to open-ended questions are highly effective at generating sales leads, as they provide lots of information whilst encouraging the audience to seek more information or clarification. Conversely, to earn better search rankings and encourage brand discovery, answers to closed questions tend to be more effective as users usually look for a quick answer.

This is where your audience insights become increasingly powerful, as you can apply the needs and behaviours of your target audience against your objectives to create your content plan.

[Download PDF to see Diagrams]

Developing your promotion strategy

Your promotion strategy, and the tactics that you will use, is about ensuring that the messages that you want to share and the stories you want to tell reach the audiences that you want to reach.

By this point, you should have identified how your audience behaves online, you should have identified the objectives that you want to meet, and you should be working on crafting a message that is relevant to both your audience and your objectives.

The challenge now is to identify the process and tactics needed for reaching those audiences, based on where they are most likely to view and engage with your message.

Knowing the media that your audiences consume, the nature of what they are looking for and the sentiment of their searches, you can start to identify the individual channels that you need to use as a distribution model, and categorise these into earned, owned and paid.

If, for example, social media is a significant channel for your target audiences, you need to reflect this in your distribution plan, and focus on the channels that will help you to reach those target groups. In this case, a combination of organic and paid social media activity would appear to be beneficial.

Whatever behaviours your target audiences demonstrate, it is important to remember that you cannot rely on organic reach alone. Many platforms and publications work hard to protect their audience and the experience that they provide. In many cases, the only way to overcome this protection is to either provide something that offers genuine value to that audience (in other words, earn the coverage) or pay to access that audience.

[Download PDF to see Diagram]

Execution

Making sure that your content achieves its goals.

Owned content distribution

Your owned assets are generally the easiest channels to manage. You, generally speaking, have full control over the content that is published, how it is displayed and how prominently it is promoted.

However, not all of your ‘owned’ channels are fully ‘owned’ by you. Your social media profiles may be owned by you, but the parameters of what content can be posted and who that content reaches are set by a third party (in this case, the respective social networks). This is an important consideration when you consider how your content is delivered, and who it is delivered to.

This distribution channel is usually the easiest one to manage, but it is also the one that offers the lowest reach. Whilst customers will be subscribed to your mailing lists, few people are going to be actively looking for your brand content on a regular basis, so you need to compliment this with other channels.

Earned content distribution

Earned content distribution is essentially about getting your message delivered through highly authoritative media, and this is where your public relations team can make a big contribution to your content marketing strategy.

Your audience insight will give you an indication of the types of media your consumers consume on a regular basis (often referred to as their ‘watering holes’), and this provides a focus for your earned coverage.

Those brands in a B2C industry may find that their target consumers are regular readers of national newspapers or special interest magazines, so PR activity becomes extremely important here. These markets are heavily congested, so both your message and the way you sell that message to each and every publication is extremely important.

If you’re working in a B2B industry, then trade media is likely to be the most relevant publishing partner. Look for the publications that talk specifically about your niche, attempt to build partnerships and generate media coverage that, whilst may not necessarily achieve a high reach, appeals to a precise and relevant demographic.

Find influencers that talk to your audiences, particularly blogger and vloggers. These often engender more trust amongst their readers than traditional media, so their endorsement carries significant weight.

And embrace communities. Platforms such as Inbound, Reddit, HackerNews and niche-specific communities allow you to put your message amongst your audience. But be aware that whilst these communities may applaud and amplify a relevant and compelling message, they are likely to pull apart one that is irrelevant, unfavourable or unwelcome.

Paid content distribution

Paid content distribution is often the most overlooked aspect of content marketing, but it is also perhaps the most effective channel at acquiring new customers and leads – provided that the targeting behind any campaign is optimised for the right audience. Allow us to once again use a sporting analogy, of sorts.

A campaign manager for a major sportswear retailer is looking at the brand’s customer base, eCRM insight and its demographic profile data. Amongst this data, they identify that a large proportion of their customers has a keen interest in football shirts. It’s the peak season for new shirts being released from all of the major football clubs, so this is a prime moment to be launching paid social and retargeting campaigns for the latest football strips.

The retailer starts the campaign, and throws a significant investment behind it – in terms of both content and ad spend.

However, there is a problem. The content and imagery for this campaign prominently features the new shirt for Manchester United, yet the campaign actually reaches supporters of Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal. In fact, it reaches supporters of all of the other 19 Premier League clubs. As a result, the campaign misses its target, and huge sums are invested in targeting users with an ad that not only failed to appeal, but actively disengages those audiences.

That might sound like a simplistic and extreme analogy, but many advertisers are doing exactly this with their paid content, social advertising and retargeting campaigns.

The good news is that, if you have effectively identified your audience personas, you can address this problem and transform your approach to paid promotion. By identifying demographic or behavioural trends that are intrinsically linked, and then grouping these into target personas, you can segment these personas into incredibly granular targeting pools. Using the football shirt analogy from earlier, we can take a situation that is the result of very broad customer segmentation (“our customers are football fans”) and broad content messaging (“as a football fan, you will love this”), and address it. By creating much more detailed and granular audience segmentation buckets, based on both demographic and activity behaviour, we can ensure that any retargeting message is optimised for that audience based on the behaviour traits that we would expect for that group. This level of segmentation can be applied to almost any form of customer activity. For instance, travel companies can assign different segments for users that searched for different classes of aircraft cabin or hotel, ensuring that those that searched for premium class flights or five star accommodation aren’t being served content that leads with budget pricing.

The result is a much more efficient way of running paid ad and content distribution campaigns.

[Download PDF to see Chart]

This level of audience insight not only provides us with much more targeted audience personas, it also allows us to drive greater efficiencies with paid content promotion. This means that wastage is minimised and as a result, your budget works much harder. This allows you to target either a greater volume of consumer or, alternatively, remarket to those target customers with different messaging that attempts to guide them through the customer journey.

This approach essentially provides you, as a content marketer, with multiple ‘bites of the cherry’. You can direct messages only at audiences that are likely to drive acquisition, and only in ways that will most effectively engage those audiences. It ensures that only those customers that may welcome a ‘harder-sell’ message are exposed to it, whilst those that prefer less aggressive messaging are not exposed to overtly sales-heavy content. This means that ad spend can be directed on growing and reaching audiences that are directly aligned to the overall business objectives, that spend isn’t wasted on audiences that you are unlikely to convert, and that your return on investment on paid content distribution is vastly improved.

Measuring the effectiveness of your campaign

You need to consider the best metrics and reporting to measure the success of your content marketing. This enables you to justify your actions if necessary at board level, and to demonstrate the return on investment.

This is where the definition of your objectives and goals at the very start of the campaign come into their own, because they provide you with a clear focus upon which you have hopefully built a successful campaign, and your reporting needs to reflect those objectives. There are a number of metrics that brands use to measure their content marketing strategy, dependent on your specific goals. The most common metrics include:

Market Reach

This includes volume and quality of the potential audience that was exposed to your message.

Discussion

The level of discussion around your brand or the message you delivered. Remember to reflect the sentiment of the discussion in your reporting.

Acquisition

This includes traffic, leads and monetary acquisitions.

Engagement

The number of shares, retweets and comments that are attached to your content. Each of these metrics relate to a different stage of the sales process, making this model a useful way to measure how effective your content is at delivering in each area.

If your content is helping people to move through the sales funnel, it is likely that your content is effectively hitting the key metrics. However, if few customers are entering the sales funnel, or they are dropping out at particular stages, it’s a strong indication that the content at those stages is not effective and is failing to hit your key metrics.

The process that we have taken you though in this guide is about ensuring that your content can support your customers through your sales funnel. This guide has stressed the importance of defined objectives and audience insight, which ultimately determine what content you need to produce before you actively go and promote it to the market. Following this process makes it much easier to determine the return on investment from your content marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

Key Takeaways

Make your content move

Forget the notion that people will just find your content. It doesn’t happen. Even history’s greatest literary works have needed a distribution vehicle, and your branded content is no different.

You can no longer rely on organic reach and, in a world where the volume of branded content is only getting louder, you need to really push your content hard. If you don’t, no matter how good your content is, it is going to fall on death ears.

Start with the end in mind

What does success look like? Answer this before you put pen to paper. The answer to this question (as long as it is realistic) will provide a focus for your entire content strategy.

Understand your audience

Audience has to be at the absolute heart of everything that you do. Use every data source that you can get your hands on, including first and third party data, to build up a picture of who your audiences are, how they behave and how they are influenced. Not only does this tell you what content they are likely to be receptive to, but also where you are most likely to find them.

Target them with the right content

Understand how those audiences interact and engage with your content, and retarget them with something that is relevant. The more granular your customer segmentation is, the more effective this retargeting will be.