Using Paid Advertising to Amplify Your B2B Content Marketing Reach

Having a steady stream of high-quality content is great, but it’s not enough. Creating content is one aspect, but ensuring your content reaches your target audience is the real challenge. 

I know how frustrating it can be to write highly engaging content on topics specifically for your audience without getting any engagement. I get it, you might have done your SEO optimization and made it unique, but still couldn’t see any growth. In fact, it might seem like nobody is reading the article at all.

Sadly, that’s reality. You can’t just write and wait for your content to mysteriously go straight to your target audience, especially when you are just starting out. The fact is that even the best-written content will only get seen by a small audience if it isn’t amplified properly. While your content might secure a good spot on the SERP, organic traffic is just one way to get your audience to your website. If you depend solely on it as your overall content strategy, you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your business. So, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

You might be wondering, so, how do I get my written content across to my target audience? The answer to this question is content amplification. In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about content amplification as well as content amplification tools that you can use to achieve great results.

What is content amplification?

Content amplification is the process of promoting your content through various channels including paid advertising to reach more audiences who are likely to engage with your content. You can simply think of it as content promotion or distribution. 

Content amplification is important because the more people see your content, the higher the chance they’ll engage and share it with others. This can be the little push that your content needs to get to the eyes of your target audience. So, this is a really good strategy to make the most out of your content and maximize its impact.

The importance of paid ads as a content amplification strategy

Using paid advertising to promote your content is important for growth. It is a powerful strategy that can take your content to great heights, allowing you to be able to direct your content to the right audience that is most likely to engage and share.

One good example is Michelin, one of the biggest tire manufacturers out there. They’ve had great success using native ads – a type of paid ad that fits the natural form of the platform it’s on. For Michelin, these native ads really seem to beat their regular social media ads. With native ads, they managed to lower their cost per website visitor by 16%. At the same time, they brought in higher quality traffic – visitors who were more likely to actually be interested in tires and engaging with the Michelin brand. So for them, native ads have been a total win compared to other types of online ads.

Here are a few key benefits that paid advertising can offer you.

Increased Reach and Engagement: 

Paid advertising allows you to reach a larger audience than you normally would through the organic method. You can easily target specific locations, demographics, and interests to ensure your content is seen by the right audience. With this, your content engagement will most likely increase, because when your content resonates with your target audience, there’s a higher chance it will get shared.

Increased Traffic: 

Paid advertising can drive more traffic to your website. This can help you in building your brand and reaching new customers depending on your goal. This can lead to increased sales, conversions, and revenue.

Faster Results

Paid advertising provides faster results compared to organic methods, which can take years or even months to show significant results.

Paid advertising is important if you want to grow your brand faster. It helps you amplify your content and maximize its reach. Whether you’re trying to build your brand, raise awareness, or simply reach new customers, paid advertising can help you achieve your goals.

Best platforms to advertise your content

There are various advertising channels in the market, each with a different approach. For you to determine the best platform for your business, you need to analyze it and decide whether it aligns with your goals, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, getting customers to buy a product, requesting a quote, or installing an app.

Outbrain

Outbrain is an independent advertising platform that allows you to advertise your content on various popular websites that are part of their network including, Fox News, Le Monde, Sankei Digital, MSN, Sky News etc. This allows your content to be seen by millions of people all over the world, which is a great way to boost your brand awareness, grow your audience, and drive quality traffic to your own business website or blog.

These native ads are quite different from traditional banner ads, they are not intrusive and they appear as a feed of recommended content that fits the look and feel of the targeted website.

The Outbrain ads normally look like this:

Source

Why Outbrain

Native ads have been gaining steam with marketers lately – and for good reason. Unlike banner or pop-up ads, native ads match the natural form and style of the platforms they appear on. So on a website, a native ad may take the form of a sponsored article that blends right in with other editorial content. And on social media, a native ad is a sponsored post that looks and feels like any other post. 

This seamless format means people are much more likely to actually click on, share and engage with native ads compared to more disruptive ad types. When done right, native ads don’t feel like ads at all. This power to grab attention while providing a smooth user experience explains why more brands have been embracing native ads as part of their digital marketing strategies. 

The potential for higher engagement levels and brand visibility is massive compared to traditional display ads. Just within the past year, we’ve seen native ad adoption rapidly accelerating across industries. And as consumers increasingly ignore interruptive ads, I expect the native ad revolution to continue unfolding in 2024 and beyond.

A case study by Outbrain illustrates how they can assist in growing your business. The study features 8fit, a fitness app that offers personalized workouts and nutrition plans to help users stay active with step-by-step instructions. They invested in Outbrain to promote their content about health and fitness across its popular network of publishers. The campaign objective was to drive mobile users who engaged with the promoted content to download the 8fit app and most importantly subscribe to a plan. The result? 8fit reached a new audience and got a significant increase in its app downloads (100k+ downloads) and subsequent sign-ups, within 4 months.

Targeting option and cost

Outbrain provides various campaign targeting options. They allow customers to decide where their ads will be shown based on placement, location and audience segmentation. They also offer more advanced options based on user interests, behavior, and contextual signals.

They allow you to make smart targeting decisions by using their reach estimator tool which allows you to estimate your monthly potential reach and allocate the right budget accordingly. 

How much does it cost? Outbrain supports a pay-per-click model. This works in a way that the advertiser will be charged for every click they get on their ad. They won’t be charged for impressions, just actual clicks. 

An Outbrain campaign can cost $50 per day, or $500, it’s up to the advertiser.

Let’s imagine you have set aside $50 to spend on online ads that cost $1 each time someone clicks on them. So with your $50 budget, you could potentially get 50 people to visit your site by clicking on your ad. That’s because 50 clicks at $1 per click adds up to $50 total.

Of course, you may not always get 50 clicks. Say your ad got 30 clicks during the campaign. Well, in that case, you would have spent 30 x $1, or $30, of your $50 budget. 

The nice thing about CPC advertising is that you only pay when someone engages with your ad. So if your ad isn’t attracting any attention and no one clicks, you don’t waste any money. This gives you more control over your spending compared to paying upfront without knowing if the ad will be effective.

Basically, CPC helps you tie your advertising expenses directly to real user interest, as measured by clicks. Hopefully, those clicks then translate into business results like sales or newsletter signups!

Facebook Ads

Facebook is one of the most popular advertising channels. 84% of marketers make use of Facebook ads to drive traffic to their websites and promote their content, according to Social Media Examiner. An average user spends around 35 min on Facebook, that’s more than enough time to get them interested in your content and grow your audience.

Why Facebook

Facebook has several options for promoting content that can help businesses achieve their goals. Some of the advertising models they support are cost per click (CPC), where you pay each time someone clicks your ad, and cost per impression (CPM), where you pay depending on your ad reach. 

No matter which model you choose, Facebook ads can be a great investment for reaching your target audience. The key is to test different types of ads and analyze the results to see which performs best for your business objectives and budget. A combination of CPC and CPM campaigns may give you the right balance of visibility and clickability.

Facebook just gives you more flexibility than other platforms when it comes to fine-tuning an ad strategy that generates results. And you can start small with any of their pricing models to evaluate effectiveness before ramping up your spending. Experimenting with Facebook’s variety of ad types is worth it for many marketers aiming to grow their business.

Targeting option and cost

With Facebook ads, you can target your audience using demographics, interests and connections with specific activities, social circles and behavior. Facebook has over 1.59 billion active users monthly. This means that achieving your goals should be a piece of cake, considering the above stats.

Just like any other advertising network, Facebook ads also require bidding. When creating an ad campaign, you should specify the amount you are willing to spend on that particular campaign, which would be your ad budget. The cost depends on what type of advertising model you choose, whether it’s CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per Like), CPA (cost per action), or CPM (cost per mile).

Google Ads

According to CMI, most B2B marketers make use of Search engine marketing (SEM) for content promotion. While social media platforms are getting more recognition each day, search engines will always be an important part of content marketing. Google Ads can be a really useful tool for getting your content in front of people who are already looking for solutions you can provide. The way it works is that when someone searches for something on Google, it allows you to show ads with your content at the top of the search results.

For example, let’s say someone types in “how to lose weight fast.” As the searcher, they obviously have a goal in mind or a problem they want to solve. This is where your content could come in handy if you’ve created something relevant, like an article or video with weight loss tips. Google Ads would then display your promo ad above the normal search results, immediately catching the searcher’s attention with a possible solution.

So the power of Google Ads is that you can take advantage of search intent and provide helpful content to people right when they need it. Getting your content directly in front of an engaged, targeted audience gives you a great chance of driving real results, whether that’s a sale, a signup, or just traffic growth. It’s about giving searchers what they want and solving their problems.

Why Google Ads?

According to HubSpot, 75% of Google users don’t get past the first page of the search result. So you need a way to get your content to the top, that’s where Google Ads comes in. By running a campaign with Google ads, they allow your content to be at the top spot on the first page, allowing it to reach thousands of people which can ultimately convert to website visits, purchases or sign-ups. While paid search isn’t free, it is an effective and quicker way to grow your brand.

Cost and targeting option

Google ads allow you to target keywords based on popular searches related to your industry or a complementary industry. You can also target users by location, language or the device they use to browse the internet. The cost for each keyword varies depending on the quality of your keyword, your competition in the auction, and other factors. That means the more popular your keywords are the higher the cost of using them. Google allows you to specify the amount you are willing to pay per click depending on your budget.  

Conclusion

As a marketer, I know you’re well aware of how vital content is for your marketing strategy. But simply researching, writing and publishing content isn’t always enough. You need to get that content in front of your audience, and that often requires some extra strategies. Paid ads should be part of your overall plan. 

We’ve talked about why ads are so effective at boosting content reach. And we covered some of the main ad platforms you can sign up with to launch a campaign. Running ads can help you achieve your marketing goals efficiently by getting your content in front of the right eye. With the right promotion, your hard work researching and creating content can really pay dividends for your brand. The key is using ads effectively to connect that content with customers who will truly appreciate and engage with it.