Content Promotion Strategy for Marketers, Including Pay to Play – #Pubcon Liveblog

Influencer marketing and social ads are the hot topics up for discussion in the “Content Promotion Strategy: Including Pay-to-Play” at Pubcon Las Vegas. Speakers Will Scott, Phillip Thune and Casie Gillette are going to walk through their best strategies.

Native Advertising – Will Scott

Will Scott (@W2Scott), CEO of Search Influence, has four main points:

• True social is getting a lot harder.
• Traditional media is selling out.
• Platforms are continuing to emerge and will for another five years.
• Great content still really matters.

Social media really gets value from good content — it’s about human response, rather than rankings on Google. The content that one creates for social is typically way better than the content created with only SEO in mind, he says.

His tip for getting your content shared socially? Make it native advertising or sponsored content.

“Advertising used to be more obvious. Ads were clearly ads. Sponsored content? Not so much,” says Scott.

Are native ads just better monetized PR?

Newspapers have been brand-building for the last hundred years. Leverage their brand for your brand.

You can buy placement for your articles on:

• Tabula
• Outbrain
• Yahoo Gemini

Remember, this is not about SEO — it’s about marketing, he says.

Nativo and Polar get your sponsored content into news feeds on online newspapers and make the native content look like the newspaper sites it’s populating on.

Influencer Marketing – Phillip Thune

Phillip Thune (@textbroker), CEO of Textbroker International, is going to talk about influencer marketers. But first, he lays out the benefits of influencer marketing.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

• Brand awareness rises.
• Credibility enhances and consumer trust builds.
• Search engine rankings improve.
• Reach expands.
• Inbound leads are generated (No. 1 benefit in Thune’s opinion).

How to Approach Influencer Marketing

Identifying relevant topics is the first step in influencer marketing. What is your audience interested in? Research what type of content is popular with your competitors. Measure user behavior with Google Analytics. You can also simply use the search command “related:www.yourbusiness.com” to find out who Google sees as your competitors.

Choose the right influencers. Find them with this criteria:

• Reach: To reach the largest audience possible, the person must have followers.
• Context: For a large following to serve its purpose, the audience has to be interested in and relevant to your industry.
• Credibility: To convince followers to complete an action or follow through with a recommendation, the influencer must be considered a credible source.

Find influencers on platforms like:

• Traackr
• BuzzSumo
• Cision

Convince influencers to help you. You have to compensate them with:

• Money or free products and services
• Cross-promotion
• Engagement

Influencer Marketing in Practice

ModCloth: Their target audience is women interested in vintage fashion. They embarked on influencer marketing by promoting women wearing ModCloth clothes on their site (providing the women engagement and visibility), which in turn led those women to share those promotions on their social networks.

Kraft: The food retailer used TapInfluence to find influencers and then paid influential bloggers to post recipes using Kraft products. They received 16,000 clicks to coupons and 760,000 views to the 180 recipes that were created.

Content: Creation, Planning and Promotion – Casie Gillette

Casie Gillette (@CasieG), director of online marketing at KoMarketing, starts out by noting we’ve all been taught that content is king. But she says enough is enough. The goal isn’t to create as much content as you possibly can, but to create good content that your audience wants. You’re spending time and money on content, so it shouldn’t be a waste.

Every piece of content has three components:

• Creation
• Planning
• Promotion

Just putting something on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean you’re going to get reach. How do you cut through the noise?

Creation

You have to have content that your audience likes. Look at your landing page reports and find out what your top content and top converting content is — then create more pieces like that. This boils down to money — you need to create content that drives sales.

Gillette recommends BuzzSumo to look for more data on your content, as well as your competitors’. Where is the content being shared? Who is it being shared by? Find out.

Planning

Look at your referral traffic in Google Analytics. When you create more content like the content these have shared, reach out to those referrers — you already have an in!

Build a list of influencers and use that list in social ad targeting. She recommends Followerwonk for building the list, as well as BuzzStream.

Promotion

It sucks, but we have to pay now. But if you’re going to pay, make sure you’re paying to reach the right people.

If people are posting questions in Quora or other forums and your content speaks to those questions, share it with them. It’s not spam when it’s useful.

Don’t make up hashtags. Use Keyhole.co to find out what hashtags people are actually using. It will show you who’s using those hashtags, as well as other useful data.

The whole point is that when you launch a piece of content, you know who it’s going to and you have a plan in place. This is it — the promotion is executing everything you planned.

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.