There is a three-word saying that every marketer, new old and in between, has heard time and time again: content is king. Bill Gates was one of the earliest adopters of this phrase. In 1996, he suggested that, “content is where… much of the real money will be made on the Internet.”
He wasn’t wrong. It is primarily through content that companies connect to audiences in the Digital Age. Content is extremely valuable for those that produce it and those that consume it.
But, content has been king for so long that the crown is starting to lose its luster. There is so much content on the Internet that it becomes increasingly hard for businesses, especially new ones, to attract eyeballs.
Some businesses produce amazing content that only sees a few readers because it lacks visibility. To remedy this problem, more and more marketers are turning to promoted content.
What is Promoted Content?
Promoted content is just like its name sounds. It is content that has been promoted to gain distribution and reach. This means that the content publisher has invested some amount of money to get this content out to more people.
Essentially, it is content advertising, or producing content with the intent that you will pay to have that content reach more screens. This can be done through a number of ways, such as PPC marketing, paid social media posts, paid influencer marketing and more.
Why Does Content Need Paid Promotions?
Again, content has exceptional value. You can’t survive in today’s marketing climate without it. But, not all content is created equal. There are undoubtedly some content pieces on your website that you love and that required lots of time and effort to create. Others, while still good and well-written, don’t have the same amount of value.
Ideally, you want people to find your best content pieces and then follow it to the smaller assets. Not only does this encourage more page views across your site, but it improves your brand experience and encourages conversions.
That’s the ideal scenario, but it rarely happens that way. With promoted content, you can ensure that those star assets are the first thing that viewers see!
To put simply, relying only on organic traffic to your content doesn’t always work out. In fact, it works out less and less as time goes on. Now, marketers need to go out and promote their most valuable content assets.
What Are The Other Benefits of Promoted Content?
The primary benefit of promoting content, as described above, is supplementing your existing content traffic with more viewership. Considering the value of content, that’s reason enough to investigate content advertising. However, it isn’t the only benefit.
Focus On The Topics You Want
With traditional, organic content marketing, businesses try and focus on topics that are commonly searched by their audiences. This is effective, but not always fun. Plus, your competitors are also targeting the same keyword phrases, which creates a lot of duplicate content on the search results pages.
Value comes from the new. Audiences want to read something fresh! You may have some interesting ideas or out-of-the-box solutions to common customer problems, but the topics are too narrow to find traffic organically.
With promoted content, you can pursue any topic and you aren’t bound by what the SEO gods dictate will perform well organically.
Promoted Content isn’t Disruptive
Many forms of online advertising are disruptive to Internet users. They get in the way of their normal browsing behaviors and distract from the page or content that they intended to view. This causes some Internet ads to feel more like spam than marketing messages.
Promoted content doesn’t have this problem. Since you only promote your best content assets, the value is practically a guarantee.
You Don’t Need Any New Content
If you’ve been diligently creating content for your social media accounts, blog or any other channel, then you’re already part of the way there! You don’t need to promote new content. Instead, you can advertise your older content assets and give them a second life!
So, if you have any content pieces that you wished more people saw, then you have a great start for your content advertising!
Here I have some example who updated their content on daily basis PPCexpo, PPCHero, Wordstream
Conclusions
With all of the content saturation on the Internet, promoting your pieces is the next evolution of content marketing.
You’ve spent a lot of time creating compelling content that you hope your audiences will enjoy. Unfortunately, some of these pieces collect dust in the bowels of your blog never to be seen. So, why not invest a little money in getting your content the views it deserves?
