“Create high-quality content that addresses the challenges your customers face and you’ll succeed.”
This is what most marketing evangelists advise business owners to do. However, many people running a business are ready to contradict this statement. Why? Because most of them have already tried everything they could, including creating and posting great content, relevant to their target audience. Yet, their companies have stopped growing.
Businesses can fail for many reasons. One of them is that business owners forget the importance of promoting the content they create. Well-written blog posts, killer sales copies, educational white papers… Regardless of what you write and how well you do it, your content will soon be buried under a pile of articles published by your competitors IF you don’t know how to promote it the right way.
Paid Social Media Is Part of the Answer – Find Out Why
Sharing content from corporate social media accounts with business partners, employees and friends, hoping that someone will click that button to distribute your posts further, doesn’t sound like a marketing strategy. We’ve all heard the slogan “good content markets itself.” But in reality, nothing “markets” itself, not even an iPhone or a Porsche.
Though social media started as an organic marketing tool – in this context, “organic” means publishing interesting, engaging content that people search for, like to read and want to share – paid media has become the new key to a successful content marketing strategy.
Whether we talk about blog posts, how-to tutorials, positive product reviews, white papers or educational videos, all can have tremendous value for your business IF you know how to use paid social media to get your content in front of a larger audience. To help you out, here are some effective paid content promotion tactics.
- Facebook Sponsored Stories – While using regular Facebook ads can help promote your business, Sponsored Stories offers a greater opportunity to drive traffic to your blog and website, advertise your brand, and increase your revenue. One thing to bear in mind before you start using this feature is to create catchy titles for your “stories”.
- Twitter Promoted Tweets – We can’t talk about Twitter without talking about Promoted Tweets. With Promoted Tweets, you can promote your posts to targeted audience, previously segmented by interest, gender or geography, and connect with potential customers. Twitter also allows you to check how your tweets are performing so that you can optimize your campaigns and adjust your bids accordingly.
- LinkedIn Sponsored Updates – Yes, you’ve guessed it right. LinkedIn also has a paid social media program for content marketers. Though this channel was especially developed for the professionals in the B2B industry, anyone can use Sponsored Updates to post content and receive shares, comments, and likes. Furthermore, you can filter your target audience by industry, location, job title, etc.
- StumbleUpon – Have you created a new tutorial with great illustrations or a how-to video and don’t know where to post it? Try StumbleUpon. Focused on visual content, StumbleUpon is a great option for anyone targeting an audience interested in interactive, engaging content. Paid Discovery is StumbleUpon’s paid social media program that advertises your content and directs users to your website in exchange for a fee. With Paid Discovery, you don’t have to create ads.
Regardless of what others may say, paid social media isn’t against the code of business ethics. As long as you’re providing useful, accurate information whose primary purpose is to serve people rather than to bring you a quick buck, you can use all the legitimate tools available online to promote your content and spread the word about your business.
