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Today is April 21st. It’s a Saturday. It’s raining here in Austin, so instead of continuing the battle against the bamboo in my backyard (proof), I’m cozied up inside looking at Moz’s Youtube Channel. I half-started this process just to see how their Whiteboard Fridays were carrying on without Rand Fishkin.
While it wasn’t Rand, I did find a great piece of content.
I found Kane Jamison from Content Harmony talking about using paid social for content marketing.
…and I’m happy I saw it.
The video is incredibly relevant as we scale up content marketing at my companies, and can benefit almost every business creating content.
Over the next month, we’ll be testing this strategy, and sharing the results here.
Problem: Most people who would be interested in your content, won’t see it organically – on Google, or email, or social.
Solution: Use paid social for content promotion.
Potential ROI: Expand cookie-list, expand engagement audience, expand email list, grow readership.
Expected Learnings:
Over the next several weeks, Jack (the content marketer at Ad Badger), will put this theory to the test to see if it’s worth it.
That’s all good, and I’ve got some initial thoughts:
Compared to the organic video:
28 likes vs. nine likes. It’s a smart assumption that talking-head video paid social promotion will have higher engagement (and thus cheaper CPC’s) than just a simple image.
So there is a good theory going that paid content promotion on social is a great amplifier to get your content read & watched. But what’s the actual business impact of this?
Over the next few weeks, here’s what I’ll be working on:
I want to measure to see if paid content promotion leads to a cost-effective way to acquire new top of funnel (TOFU) leads to our Amazon PPC Software Ad Badger.
I am also well aware (as my friend & Search Scientists client will attest to [Eric Bandholz from Beardbrand], of the immense power of brand lift. Becoming the authoritative source of Amazon PPC information, tips & strategy is precisely what Ad Badger aspires to be. More people will be exposed to your brand, and when it comes time for them to seek additional information or make a buying decision, forming that relationship at the top of the funnel is what great companies do. How do you measure brand lift? For this experiment, we’ll be looking at branded searches & follows on social.
This won’t be a perfect experiment. I’m well aware that other activities will influence leads & brand awareness. To help isolate the data and form our experiment, I’ll be reaching out to Kane from that Moz video to get some additional insight into the strategy.
Sounds interesting- please shoot me an email – kane at contentharmony
— Kane Jamison ” /> (@KaneJamison) April 22, 2018
-May 20th, 2018
Baby steps.
This has been slow to start.
First, I decided to unify Search Scientists & Ad Badger marketing processes. Originally I thought we’d only be doing paid content promotion with one company, it makes sense to expand it out to both.
I was experimenting with uploading a native video to Linkedin discussing content. A few notes:
Here is the post:
In addition to 28 likes & 11 comments (which is well over the average engagement for me), here are the full stats.
This content repurposing led to an extra 1,412 views on me & my content.
The engagement in comments, new follows, new messages led to a few meetings I’m excited about to talk about Amazon PPC. Personal branding win.
Could I pay to promote this? Unfortunately not with my personal account on Linkedin. I spent years curating a list of almost 5,000 connections.
All their paid ad video offerings need to be run through a company page. It’s something to experiment with. I know this post started as a test for paid social content promotion, we landed on an organic technique that I couldn’t pass up.
Foundational Learning: I will continue to upload videos through my personal Linkedin. Averaging 10 videos a month at 1,500 views would yield an extra 15,000 views on my content – for free.
This video helped turn our “AdWords vs Amazon PPC” post to our most popular blog post (and infographic) of the last 30 days. It also ranks number 1 for “AdWords vs Amazon PPC”.
Ad Badger Youtube Promotion. On Youtube, I decided to run a video ad that was less-personal more “Official Video”. I also only ran it to a retargeting list only.
Not very exciting. Stats:
Learnings for next time:
Foundational Learning: Spending a few dollars a day on retargeting video views as an authority builder is part of our mission to become a trusted source in the Amazon PPC space, so it’s something we’ll continue to invest in.
On Facebook, we went with a very similar approach. We targeted all previous visitors and optimized for video views.
The video ad:
We ended up with 97 10-second views for 13 bucks.
“Today, one of the best skills an entrepreneur or marketer can have is talking directly into their phone or webcam.” That’s a quote from a good friend who runs the terrific podcast Austin Brawner of Ecommerce Influence.
Proving his point – the organic videos I’ve been posting on Linkedin got more engagement than the YouTube or FB Ad videos we paid to promote.
Marketing on social is and should be a social experience.
For future posts it might be more effective (more reach & engagement) to record a short 1 minute talking-head video, as opposed to sharing the post itself.
Consistently spending thousands of dollars every month of paid content promotion – for the purposes of promotion, not lead generation – is a tough sell. I want to be more intentional about it.
Using a very basic optimization principle, we can identify the specific posts that are worth being promoted.