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Best Practices Lab

Content Marketing: Fueling the Paid Media Engine

Content marketing is like the fuel that powers your marketing engine.  It is about building trust and genuine, lasting relationships with your audience by providing them with impactful, valuable, and consistent content. It’s an investment that pays off over time and establishes your brand as a trusted authority in your industry.

RocketSauce Tip: Prior to launching any content, it is important to develop a content plan that defines who you are trying to reach, what you are trying to achieve, how much you can afford to spend, the type of content you want to develop/distribute, a content calendar that plans out topics/timing and a measurement plan that will track the success of your content marketing efforts.

How does content fuel the marketing engine?

Optimized Content Grabs Attention and Captures InterestAn illustration showing the importance of content marketing planning using a blueprint analogy

  • Cutting Through the Noise: In today’s crowded digital landscape, capturing attention is a major challenge. Great content, whether it is a captivating video, an informative blog post, or a stunning infographic, helps you stand out from the competition and pique your audience’s interest.
  • First Impressions Matter: Your content is often the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. High-quality, relevant content creates a positive first impression and encourages people to learn more about your company.

Informative Content Can Educates Your Audience

  • Providing Value: Content allows you to share valuable information, insights, and knowledge with your target audience. This helps establish your brand as a trusted resource and positions you as an expert in your field.
  • Answering Questions: By addressing common questions and concerns through your content, you can guide potential customers towards making informed decisions.

Engaging Content Builds Relationships

  • Starting Conversations: Engaging content encourages interaction and sparks conversations with your audience. This helps you build relationships and foster a sense of community around your brand.
  • Encouraging Sharing: Shareable content amplifies your reach and helps you attract new followers and customers.

Branded Content Reinforces Your Brand Position

  • Communicating Your Values: Content provides a platform to showcase your brand’s personality, values, and mission.
  • Building Brand Awareness: Consistent, high-quality content helps increase brand visibility and recognition.

Strategic Content Supports Your Campaign Goals

  • Driving Traffic: Content can be used to drive traffic to your website or landing pages, where you can capture leads and encourage conversions.
  • Generating Leads: Offers valuable content like ebooks, white papers, or webinars in exchange for contact information, allowing you to generate leads and nurture them through the sales funnel.
  • Increasing Conversions: Persuasive content can help convince potential customers to take action, whether it is making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo.

 

RocketSauce Tip: Content Marketing plans should strategically test Informative, Engaging, and Branded content against campaign KPIs to find the optimal mix of content types.

 

Let’s Supercharge Paid Media Campaigns with Content

When strategic content and paid media are used together, they build on each other, improve results, and propel your marketing efforts forward. Below are the advantages of having a strong content strategy to support your paid media campaigns:

Improve Quality Score and Reduce Costs

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Search engines like Google reward ads that link to high-quality, relevant content. This can improve your Quality Score, leading to lower ad costs and better ad positioning.
  • Social Media Ads: Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn prioritize ads that garner engagement. Ads with engaging content tend to have a longer dwell time, more comments, and more interactions. This can result in increased reach and engagement, and potentially lower costs per click (CPC).

Boost Engagement and Click-Through Rates (CTR)

  • Compelling Ad Copy: Use your content to craft more interesting and engaging ad copy that resonates with your target audience.
  • Visual Appeal: Repurpose content elements like images, videos, and infographics to create visually appealing ads that grab attention.

Optimize Landing Pages and Click-Through Experience

  • Relevant and Targeted: Drive paid traffic to dedicated landing pages that feature content directly related to your ads. This improves the user experience and increases the likelihood of conversions.
  • Content Offers: Use content like discounts, ebooks, white papers, or webinars as lead magnets to capture information from interested visitors.
  • Reduce Friction: Make sure the user experience (UX) is quick and seamless. Even good content and optimized ad campaigns can be inhibited by slow loading times or unintuitive landing pages.

Enhance Retargeting Efforts

  • Personalized Content: Use content to segment your audience and create retargeting campaigns with personalized messages and offers based on their interests and past interactions with your content.
  • Leverage 1st Party Data: Once you’ve collected information about your audience, utilize this information in content, ads, and landing pages by dynamically inserted values and segmentation.

RocketSauce Tip: With a strong content strategy, your paid media campaigns will achieve their full potential. You will be giving people a compelling reason to engage with your brand and take action.

What to Expect from Content Marketing

Once your content tank is full and your Paid Media engine is humming, it’s time to plot your course. By strategically aligning your content and paid media efforts, you can create a synergistic effect that enhances your overall campaign results:An illustration showing how content marketing fuels paid media strategies using a rocket analogy.

Enhanced Brand Lift and Recall

  • Viewers exposed to related content before an ad had 2x higher brand recall and 3x higher purchase intent.

Greater Customer Engagement

  • Brands that use a mix of paid and organic content distribution see 30% higher engagement rates than those relying solely on paid promotion.
  • Content promoted through paid social media ads can see up to 10x more engagement than organic posts alone.

Increased ROI and Cost-Effectiveness

  • Integrating content with paid media can reduce cost-per-lead by up to 80% and increase conversion rates by 50%.
  • Companies that effectively align their content and paid media strategies see a 32% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).

As noted by the results above, a strategic combination of content and paid media leads to a powerful marketing engine that drives performance across all areas of your business.

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