Hitting Subscriber Gold with Paid Advertising

To Pay or Not To Pay?

Weighing the benefits of using paid advertising to support and disseminate your content can be a complicated conversation. Oftentimes it means diverting funds from other, more traditional marketing efforts such as banner ads or digital display.

Making the case to move money around to a CMO that hangs on to the old ways of online marketing is a daunting prospect unless you come to the table with some tools at hand.

Michael Brenner is a strong proponent of using paid advertising to drive your content to broader audiences that may not otherwise go to your site. He is experienced in making a strong case to CMOs that paid is the best use of marketing dollars to elevate your content game.

Using his tips on how to frame the conversation, where to pull money to support the effort, and which platforms to approach first, even the most timid of marketers can change the mind of a stubborn CMO.

In This Episode

• How the rise of ad-blockers leads to reframing the conversation around content
• Why a campaign mentality means focusing on short-term and hindering your content growth
• How effective paid advertising leads to a more efficient use of your advertising budget
• Why measuring the ROI of paid activity means looking more closely at your subscribers

Quotes From This Episode

“We’re now moving beyond the conversation of how do we create engaging content, to how do we stop annoying our audience with paid ads.” —@BrennerMichael

“The natural instinct of every business is to talk about itself, but that gets in the way of the real point of content marketing: to attract an audience with valuable thought leadership.” —@BrennerMichael

“Content marketing requires brands to act like publishers.” —@BrennerMichael

“We’ve forgotten that paid is an effective way to reach audiences that don’t already have access to or that aren’t finding your website, or that you aren’t connected with on social.” —@BrennerMichael

“Create a great piece of content and then measure the value of whether there’s effectiveness in putting paid money behind it.” —@BrennerMichael

“Testing paid promotion on social platforms is a pretty simple way to start dipping your toe in the water on paid promotion.” —@BrennerMichael

Resources

• Stat of the Week: SEM is most effective paid advertising method
• Michael Brenner on Twitter: @BrennerMichael
• Marketing Insider Group
• The Content Formula
• How Intel doubled its blog traffic in less than a year
• Outbrain
• Taboola
• Sharethrough
• Zemanta

What did you want to be when you grew up?

In his youth, Michael dreamt of becoming an engineer. However, once he discovered the amount of math involved, he switched gears and focused on becoming a creator. Having written a book and created an approach to utilizing paid advertising for content, he can now check that one off his list.