MozCon 2017: 8 Paid Promo Tactics That Will Get You to Quit Organic Traffic

The following post is part of WTWH Media Marketing Lab’s ongoing blog series from MozCon 2017. You can find the full presentation here. 

Kane Jamison, Founder of Content Harmony, spoke at MozCon 2017 about paid promotion tactics that truly work. We’ve all been through the traffic dying on Google Analytics. As a content marketer, how do we show return on investment of content marketing over the first week?

1. Think Audience Acquisition

Most people think of paid search down in the conversion section of the marketing funnel but they forget about paid social in the awareness and engagement section. Social can drive sales at a similar cost per acquisition. Here’s the math:

• How paid social math works: 20,000 visits x $0.50 x 0.5% conversion = 100 sales
• How paid search math works: 1,000 visits x $10 CPC x 10% conversion = 100 sales

2. Split Test to Find the Winners

Step 1: Segment your audience. In this example, targeting 9.4 million people who are interested in golf over the age of 40 in the United States is way too broad. You’d get better results targeting 36,000 men and women who live in South Carolina over 40 years old and are frequent travelers interested in Golf.

Step 2: Segment your creative to your targeted audience

Step 3: Split test creative for each segment to identify a winner

Step 4: Spend 10-20% of your budget identifying your winners and spend the rest of your budget promoting the winners

3. Convert Winners to Organic Posts

Converting winners to organic posts doesn’t always work but when it does, the effect is significant and CPC drops in turn.

4. Targeting Influencers & Journalists

Another great way to get your content out there is to target influencers and journalists. There are more than 35,000 Facebook users in the US over 22 years old with blogger job titles. The potential influencer and journalist audience size for Twitter ads ranges between 8-12 million. This is too broad. Choose your exact Twitter audience and target by usernames. Use tools like Cision and Followerwonk to look up emails and usernames. Begin targeting these influencers with ads before you start your outreach to them. When your email lands in their inbox, you can hope for word of mouth traction and that competing blogs will post it before others do.

5. Getting B2B Targeting Costs Down

We all loved LinkedIn for its advanced targeting but no one likes paying $15 CPC. Avoid paying LinkedIn more than once by using Google Adwords retargeting. Take the best performing content, put it on LinkedIn with a CPM bid and attach a site parameter of retargeting groups.

6. Integrating Your Email List

70-90% of your subscribers like your content but don’t like your emails. Build a custom audience of email haters and make sure they’re seeing your most important content. Build 1% lookalike audiences of your best subscribers and customers and run your best content ads to other people like them.

 

7. Use Video for Super Cheap Engagement

After split testing images and video ads, Jamison found that the video ads had a +43% higher ROI than image ads after factoring in higher production costs and a +300% higher ROI after calculating lifetime value. You can create videos easily with Native Facebook videos or third party video tools like Soapbox, Shakr, and BIGVU. These tools help non-videographers create great content.

8. Retarget for the Conversion

Retargeting visitors that didn’t take your email offer on the website is a great next step. 90-98% of people aren’t going to sign up or claim that offer you sent them in the first email. Don’t be afraid to retarget for the sale after a visitor views content on your site. The easiest thing you can do is to show the offer to them on Facebook with a coupon code.

Which paid promo tactics are you currently using? Keep the conversation going by commenting below or tweeting @WTWH_Aly.