 Hello everyone, thank you Moz for having me So I've got a link there with some slides and other resources. I'm not gonna mention it again till the end But I'll I just tweeted it out as well So as SEOs and content marketers I'm guessing most of you have been involved in a project that looked a little bit like this at some point You send your newsletter you do your email outreach. You do your social promo Nothing really seems to stick so you kind of move on to the next project You hope it builds up some long-tail rankings over the next few months And even for those projects that do eventually rank I'm guessing you have been through this sad six-month twelve-month waiting period Watching it climb from page five of the serfs to page three We've all been through it As an organic marketer and an SEO at heart I live for that stuff at the end right all the stuff that happens a year After we publish with the track traffic coming in that's when it really pays off, but as a content marketer I need to have better launches that aren't just gonna be viral every time right So my team has been trying to solve this problem over the last couple years of how do we launch a piece of content? Knowing that a lot of the value is gonna come a year down the road But show some return on investment within a month or two not six months How do we do projects that look a little bit like less like this if the email outreach doesn't go well? And a little bit more like this at the beginning regardless of whether or not somebody at Buzzfeed wants to link to it So today I'm gonna cover eight paid media tactics that we've been using to solve this problem Show faster return on investment on content marketing For the first week or first month after you launch something and really just make sure that our projects are successful from the day They launch not a year or two years later The first thing I want you to think about is using paid media for audience acquisition And not just customer acquisition now when I say paid media Almost everybody in the room thinks of paid search down here, right? We have our PPC friends building high converting ads on high-intent keywords People that have their wallet out in their hand ready to buy something clicking on those ads a Lot of us forget about paid media and paid social at the top of the funnel I think that's reasonable everybody's gut reaction is well that stuff doesn't convert How am I supposed to get budget for paid media? That's not going to drive a sale. That's a waste It actually can drive conversions and even when you're promoting content marketing instead of ads and paid social You can actually drive sales at a similar cost per acquisition To paid search if you can make the numbers work, right? And that equation looks a little bit like this if you're doing a ten dollar cost per click on the bottom and paid search At a 10% conversion rate you need to drop those numbers down and be able to drive 50 cent cost per click traffic at a half Percent conversion rate to get a similar number of conversions for a similar amount of spend The difference between these two and I'm never going to advocate that somebody doesn't do the paid search That's going to convert first if that's not covered already But the difference between these two for me as a just full funnel marketer is that I've got another 19,000 people that I can expose my brand to Those people can love our content sign up for our email newsletter and perhaps more importantly I can retarget to them pretty cheaply for a long time afterwards and start moving them through the funnel So obviously a lot of this is reliant on getting those cheap cost per clicks to drive traffic to things like content I'm going to go through a couple of steps to help you get there The first part is segmenting your audience and split testing to find the winning ad combinations Now a lot of this is not going to be rocket science to anyone in the room that's done PPC before But bear with me for through the first part the second parts where it pays off The first step is we have to segment our audience, right? So if we have nine and a half million people in the US over 40 who are golfers And let's say we are promoting like a chain of golf resorts or something like that There's a good chance if we're running ads to this audience that 9.3 million of them don't care When you start getting into audiences over a half million people especially on paid social at least The majority of them are probably not going to respond to whatever creative you're putting in front of them The goal is not to spend $4,000 reaching one audience our goal here in this method is to spend $400 reaching 10 audiences and give them creative that they actually care about So maybe we segment down to an audience that looks more like this We still have people that are passionate about golf and some top golf brands But now we're segmenting into two groups by gender We're just focusing on people that live in South Carolina in this example And we're going to filter down further by behavior that suggests people are frequent travelers or perhaps business travelers This is the kind of audience that I can reach each one of these for maybe a hundred or three hundred dollars and More importantly and moving on to step two. I can show them creative. They actually care about If you're a passionate golfer in South Carolina, there's a good chance You're not going to click on a post about the best golf courses you can play in the US But if I show you one that says the best golf courses you can play in South Carolina I'm guessing there's a good shot. You're going to click on it to see if you've played that course before So we can put creative together that really speaks to them gets better click-through rates. That's going to help drive our costs down Now the next thing we're going to do in a campaign setting is split test a few headlines and a few pieces of a few graphics for each Add and for each segment. So maybe we have these nine ad combinations We're going to run 10 or 20 percent of our total content launch budget Testing these ads in each segment. So 10 or 20 percent total across all of our segments What we're just looking to do is find the winners, right? Whatever is the best click-through rate the best cost per click highest relevant scores We want to pick out those ads for each audience and spend the remainder of our budget Promoting that content right those ones that are driving the best results and the effect that we're producing here Is that we spend a small amount of our budget on average CPCs and we spend the majority of our budget on the winners Right the ones that are going to have better average results again not rocket science if you've done PPC before This is a pretty basic campaign template where it really gets powerful as when we mix in two things One is that we're going to be promoting content, which is likely to get a lot better engagement than most typical sales oriented ads The second thing is that and at least this example We're going to do it on Facebook and we're going to take those winners And we're going to convert them to organic posts in the feed if I run an ad to my audience and somebody comments on it and Likes it the only people that are going to see that or the other people that I'm showing the ad to If I take those winners and I post them on my wall and then I choose that as my ad creative Anybody that same person that likes and comments on it There's a chance that their friends and family will see it in their feed and we get free organic distribution on top of the People we paid to get it in front of this doesn't always work In this example, we paid to get this post in front of 37,000 people We got around a thousand organic reach We probably would have gotten that same organic reach regardless of whether or not this was been sponsored as an ad No big deal. We still got what we paid for When the effect does work It's pretty significant. So this was a post where we paid maybe around $4,000 to get this in front of 750,000 people and the likes comments shares clicks from that audience caused it to get seen by another 314,000 people now they all don't fit into our perfect audience You know, they may not be avid golfers, but it made it through the Facebook feed algorithm and Facebook thought it was relevant to them So there's a decent chance that it might be I'm not gonna call this viral But if you want your content to have a chance at being seen by millions of people even on a page like this that only had A thousand likes pre-campaign This is the most reliable way I know to create that effect without relying on some third party like a journalist to like your content and spread it for you It's also the most reliable way. I know to consistently get traffic in that sweet spot under 20 cent cost per clicks 5 cents 20 cents. That's a great range. It's certainly possible to do penny clicks, but I Would quit chasing it at that point and just focus on What's good because if you can reach a million people at this rate There's a good chance you can continue to get some of them to convert get them on your email list all of that So the next thing I want you to try If you're doing outreach and link building is targeting influencers and journalists with small ad campaigns before you start your outreach Now Phil alluded to this yesterday by uploading your link prospecting list into the Facebook Custom audience and showing your content to those people. This is similar, but doesn't necessarily have to be video there are 66,000 people over age 22 on Facebook with journalism related job titles Another 35,000 at the same age with blogger or video blogger types of job titles And you can keep going and finding additional ones beyond this So what I want you to try is running a campaign that looks a little bit like this a few days Maybe a week before you start your cold outreach You're gonna start showing the content or maybe you get a good press win early on And you can show off that in an ad so that it's a little bit more of a third-party validation And the effect that we're looking to create is that when your email lands in their inbox They open it up and they say hey, I saw this going around on social last week This feels like something that has word of mouth traction There's a good chance that maybe I should write this up before the people at the competing publisher do or competing blog or whatever It doesn't always work But we have seen just organic links before we even start outreach coming out of processes like this especially from regional journalists and TV and radio influencers and things like that so Very valuable to test It also works on Twitter But I think targeting by a job title in a bio key words in Twitter is kind of a waste of Twitter's potential I'm not a big fan of Twitter ads But what I do love it for is that I can target individuals by their username without their permission Technically if I wanted to do that on Facebook, I need to have you know can spam compliant opt-in to upload that list Right, you're not supposed to do that But on Twitter I can go into Cision I can go into follower wonk and I can start looking up emails I can start looking up Twitter handles and I can load those into custom audiences and make sure the journalists and writers that I want to see my content are and if you only have say 400 people in that list You have to get a few thousand to get over Twitter's minimum threshold for a custom audience Just load in some of your existing fans or maybe a competitors followers And you can get your audience size up and know that a good chunk of those individuals are bloggers influencers journalists things like that The fifth thing I want to share with you is a way of getting your b2b targeting costs down So all of you chasing the elusive C-suite or VP level marketers Have logged in to LinkedIn and kind of simultaneously laughed and cringed when LinkedIn told you they wanted $20 per click For that person to read your blog post I don't really feel like paying LinkedIn $20 when I can pay AdWords $20 for somebody that's actually shopping for my product, but I Like the targeting they've got I like that I can filter down to specific size companies and specific industries and that the job title Targeting is actually reliable So there's a good way that we can avoid paying LinkedIn more than once to get that data We're gonna create we're gonna take our best performing content right the stuff with the highest click-through rate We're gonna load that into LinkedIn ads. We're gonna run it on a CPM bid To help you know knowing that it's gonna perform well on a click-through rate basis to help get those cost per clicks down Maybe five to ten dollars or even better. We're gonna get that audience to the site once We're gonna attach a parameter or something to our URL so that we can create retargeting groups and Google display network and in Facebook ads and I can continue to market to those C-suite VP level individuals for 12 months 18 months However long the cookie lasts on those networks That's a really valuable way to use LinkedIn ads without continuing to pay them $15 every time you want them to come to your site So the sixth thing is a way of getting more value out of your email list one of our superpowers as content marketers is Actually giving people a reason to give us their email address other than discounts, right? Whether it's great content or a great newsletter, whatever we've got going Maybe it's a good opt-in on the site But we're kind of sad to log into our email platform and find out that 70 to 90 percent of those people that liked our content Don't actually want our emails That's okay Those customers aren't dead to us yet. We can still get value from the fact that we have their email address So we can load all of our email haters the people that love our content and don't want to open our emails And we can make a custom audience out of them make sure they're seeing our most important content releases in their feed instead of their inbox Or if they're not getting the drip campaign that we find is converting route really well on email We can just convert that drip campaign to a series of ads on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever and make sure they're seeing the same Messages in another inbox because that's basically what their feed is We can also take our best customers and our best email subscribers Load them into small look-alike audiences perhaps do some additional filtering on those look-alike audiences And now we can do fresh top of funnel marketing to people that look exactly like our best customers And we can start again right at the top with our best performing content get those people down to site and Send them through the same funnel that everybody else went through The seventh thing I want to share with you is a way of using video for super cheap engagement Now Phil covered a lot of this stuff last night But it really works especially on platforms like Facebook although all of the social platforms really are pushing video pretty hard This is a case study on marketing land that just went live a couple weeks ago I was written by Aiden Andrews from disruptive advertising I'd recommend you read it if you're interested in video or PPC or paid social Because they went and split tested image ads against various qualities of video run as video ads They found that even after Factoring in those high production costs on video They still got a 40% higher ROI on that initial lead gen and a 300% higher ROI from their highest production quality commercials When they factored in the full lifetime value of those clients, that's pretty huge And that's a B2B example on Facebook. So if you're still skeptical about B2B Facebook, that's a great place to start changing your mind Now, of course, everybody says I don't have the budget for video. That's all good Phil showed you how to do one in all of two minutes on stage yesterday with soapbox Facebook has native tools like slide shows being created out of images Flipping through and there's a lot of other great third-party platforms popping up like big view promo shaker These platforms exist solely to help non videographers create short 20 second 60 second videos that are perfect for social ads And you can create animated ones talking head ones, whatever all of those are great ways to drive your costs down on multiple social networks So the last thing I want to point out is that if we're driving all of this paid traffic to content on our site Yes, some people will convert. Yes, some people will sign up for the list But there's a good chance that 90 to 98 of the percent percent of the people that we send there aren't going to do that So if we're not following up with retargeting We're wasting a lot of these people that are being exposed to the brand The easiest thing you can do and this works really well if you have a long sale cycle And you just want to get people on the list so you can continue to reintroduce yourself to them is to just take Whatever checklist or white paper or whatever lead gen promo you had on your site for your email gate Show that to them on Facebook and maybe test out your other five opt-in Email opt-in opportunities with ads as well if they don't bite on the first one But if you do have a shorter sale cycle, especially Ecommerce types of brands I think it's important to not be afraid to just retarget for the sale after somebody visits a piece of content Somebody's researching backpacking trips and then you happen to sell backpacking stoves I don't think it's unreasonable to show them a good deal or a coupon They might be in the market for some new gear before their next trip so Wrapping all of this up if you're willing to test some of these paid media tactics even at reasonable levels hundreds of dollars per campaign Doesn't always have to be thousands if you're willing to take the time to test some of these tactics figure out what works for you I think there's a good chance you can go back to your boss or your stakeholders and say look We're getting a two-month return on investment from that last big content marketing project instead of 12 months or 24 months Can we start doing this quarterly instead of once a year? Can we start doing more video? Can we start doing more paid social and see if we can make these numbers improve? Thank you