Find the Perfect Balance between Content Marketing and Paid Advertising

In today’s attention economy, competition is fierce. Getting noticed through organic, inbound marketing methods such as content marketing is extremely effective, but every marketer needs more than one string to their bow. Online advertising, including paid search, display ads, PPC social ads and remarketing can complement and amplify your marketing efforts. If you have a great business, great products and services, or great content - sometimes it pays to advertise.

Consider DOMO’s ‘Data Never Sleeps 8.0’ infographic on how much data was generated every minute in 2020:

• Instagram users post 347,222 stories,

• Facebook users share 150,000 messages,

• YouTube users upload 500 hours of video.

And there’s no indication that the rate of content creation will slow. According to a September 2020 report released by the Content Marketing Institute, content is predicted to remain a top investment priority for marketers in 2021.

The strategic application of paid advertising can help you cut through and reach the audience you define for yourself. However, while advertising is an important discipline with a distinct skill set, it cannot exist in separation from your other inbound strategies. It is part of the mix and as such has to work in unison with your organic activities, and your organic content marketing efforts will help add credibility to your campaigns and deliver value at every stage of your customer journey.

An Integrated Advertising Strategy

To build an integrated approach, there are several questions your paid strategy needs to be able to answer.

• Does our advertising and retargeting help us to create the experience we want our customers to have?

• How does our paid strategy fit in the customer journey and what do we want people to do in response to these ads at each stage?

• Does your paid advertising and retargeting feed into your content marketing strategy to build long-term engagement?

• What assets do you already have that can be repurposed and what do you need to create from scratch to fill any gaps in the customer experience?

Journey-Based Advertising

The focus on the customer journey and intent that informs your other marketing disciplines is also relevant for your ads.

Although many online ads are designed for the initial stages of the journey, they are not just a ‘top of funnel’ tool. They can be used to create an ambient level of brand awareness but, because they are highly targeted, they are incredibly versatile.

Paid advertising and retargeting is suitable for a number of jobs across the customer journey, They can launch nurturing campaigns based on browsing behaviour indicating potential interest. They can underpin lead capture, lead scoring, and segmentation, improving conversion rates when you promote for particular offerings. They’re also ideal for re-engagement campaigns, drawing back in cooling prospects as well as existing and lapsed customers.

Content Advertising

Content marketing is often suggested as an alternative to paid. After all, when content does so well organically, why would you need to pay as well? However, paid promotions and retargeting are an important and often overlooked mechanism for getting strategic content in front of the right people at the right time.

Because paid marketing relies on targeting instead of SEO or social shareability, you can be more certain of finding your audience. This enables a highly-focused approach that ties the needs of your ideal customer into the content creation process. You can refine this approach even further in a hyper-personalised ABM approach and speak directly to the needs of specific contacts within key accounts.

That said, the content you use for ads does not necessarily need to be produced exclusively for paid marketing. You can (and should) promote existing content that either performs well organically or aligns with specific campaign goals.

Marketing Automation

In order to keep up with changing customer expectations, content trends and shifts in technology, your paid marketing strategy must be agile. The pace of innovation is fast and platforms like Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords), Facebook, and LinkedIn are constantly introducing new advertising features.

Being able to respond effectively entails having a way to measure performance and determine how to best allocate resources across multiple channels and a variety of ad formats.

You will find that a marketing automation platform is a vital tool for integrating paid advertising into your marketing strategy. Without sophisticated tracking and targeting tools at your disposal, operating at scale is impossible. Automation is what will allow you to coordinate paid and organic marketing efforts and enable constant appraisal of what is and isn’t working.  

Aligning Search Intent + Ad Creative + Content 

No one appreciates disjointed advertising that doesn’t deliver on its promises and disrupts their research or buying process. Conversely, we’ve all experienced the appearance of a clearly targeted ad at an opportune moment that has helped to steer us in the right direction or solve a problem.

As long as the customer’s needs are at the centre of your execution, people don’t care if they arrived at your landing page via an ad or organic link. What people care about is the experience, not the delivery mechanism.

It goes without saying that your content offering has to be relevant and engaging across the board. The quality of the content experience should be the same whether it has been created specifically for a paid campaign, you’re boosting the reach of existing content or repurposing it.

However, it is vital that the ad creative and the content people end up receiving is congruent with how they originally got there - their search intent.

When you have different purposes for your ads, people will land in different places to download a white paper, book a demo, etc. With multiple entry points to your website, you need to match the ad copy and creative to the landing page, and also to the content to provide the cohesive experience people have come to expect.

This means you need to see the people involved clearly and empathise with what they are trying to achieve. Leveraging the audience intelligence from your organic marketing efforts for your online advertising is invaluable in this regard.

You also have to balance your promotional intent with the customer’s intent. The focus cannot only be on what you want them to do or the products or services your advertising is promoting. If you want people to do something, you have to offer something they’ll value in return. The challenge is, can you offer something valuable and innovative enough when their attention is at a premium to prompt them to take action?

Ensuring high-quality, consistent and cohesive content that works throughout individual campaigns and across the customer journey is a big ask. You will need clear lines of communication between your sales, marketing and creative teams (whether in-house or outsourced) to produce content and ad creative that:

• Creates the desired customer experience.

• Answers the needs of the customer at the targeted stage of the customer journey.

• Prompts them to take the action you want them to take.

Comprehensive Digital Marketing

At 1827 Marketing we believe B2B marketing should begin with creating positively impactful relationships. The foundation is creating useful and relevant content that delivers an engaging customer experience.

Our expert teams create content that aligns with your business strategy, across multiple communication channels. Our marketing automation platform tracks all your paid, organic and email campaigns in one place.

By tracing interactions across the customer buyer journey, we can tailor ads that engage customers with meaningful and beautiful content. Using AI-assisted automation and amplification tools, we help you get the most out of every piece of content.

Book a free call to discuss your paid advertising strategy with one of our experts. We can help you identify opportunities to merge paid ads and organic marketing to enhance your customer experience and ultimately, maximise your marketing return on investment.