5 Paid Content Distribution Strategies You Need Now

Does your digital marketing strategy utilize all the avenues available to you? Paid content options are always changing and increasing. Here are five of the top content distribution options that could make a real impact in your marketing results. Use them individually or bundle several strategies together for a multi-pronged approach to your marketing plan.

1. Paid Search

A paid search strategy utilizing both Google and Bing is a good place to start with your content distribution. Although Google is the first search engine that people think of—and it’s been around the longest—Bing continues to close the gap in popularity. Bing’s user stats are impressive with a 33% market share.

One of the little-known facts about Bing is that it is one of three search engines owned by Microsoft. The other two are Yahoo and AOL. (Yes, AOL still exists.) When you advertise on Bing, your paid search ads appear on all three search engines, so you get a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak. Both Bing and Google paid search platforms are easy to execute. Google’s Adwords U/I is very self-explanatory, using their Search Network channel for text ads.

Bing Ads platform is equally intuitive, and they offer attractive benefits like no minimum fee, daily budgets, and performance metrics. Both platforms are highly flexible. You can quickly change course on strategies that aren’t performing well with just a few clicks. You can choose which search queries you’d like to show your content ads for, and easily control your marketing budget down to the penny.

2. Social Ads

Paid social ads can be hugely effective for your content distribution. This is a great way to build brand awareness and drive engagement across multiple platforms. One of the most appealing aspects of social ads is that you can see in advance exactly who will be seeing your ads. Advanced targeting is possible by analyzing the followers of any social platform you’re utilizing. So which social media platforms are best, and where do your ads fit in?

With social ads you have a plethora of choices; Instagram, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to name the most popular. And, you can implement your content distribution strategy in several ways within those platforms. You can buy and place traditional ads or you can simply publish on the site, e.g., Instagram Stories. Really, no content distribution marketing plan would be complete without utilizing at least two of the major social media platforms, especially with cool the cool targeting methods available to you, like:

• Job title
• Location
• Interests
• Behavioral
• Lookalike audiences
• Remarketing

And more! If you're not leveraging social media platforms and their advertising capabilities, you're missing out on huge targeting opportunities based on valuable, in-depth data.

3. Remarketing

You may not think you know what remarketing is, but you’ve almost certainly seen it in action. Remarketing is a paid content distribution strategy whereby you go back and get the attention of leads that didn’t pan out the first time. Have you ever visited a website, looked around a little bit, then left without purchasing? Of course, you have. Now it’s days or weeks later and you’re visiting another site, completely unrelated to the first one. Yet there you see an ad for the site you visited a while back. It’s not a coincidence. That’s remarketing in action.

With remarketing, you get higher conversion rates because you’re re-cultivating a lead that’s already slipped through your grasp. Remarketing utilizes cookies to track your site visitors. Incidentally, you now have to disclose if you use cookies. Most savvy internet users are accustomed to this benign practice and have no issue with it.

You’re building brand awareness with that lead because you’re maintaining your connection with them, even as they browse around and do other things on the internet. It’s even more effective because your brand will appear favorable to the lead as they visit their favorite sites and read their favorite blogs and see your ad again and again. Remarketing offers excellent ROI, and with remarketing services through Google, you have flexible options to suit your marketing budget.

4. Display Ads

Google’s Adwords platform offers the option to place display ads through their Google Display Network. Display ads have few drawbacks but many benefits. The main drawback is that the ad is obviously an ad. It’s not camouflaged as a search result like text ads. But that’s not always a bad thing. Display ads allow you to truly build brand awareness. You get to include your logo if you wish and use your brand color palette to further brand recognition. With display ads, you can focus attention on a single product image, which is often highly effective. You can use display ads in tandem with the remarketing strategy so your display ads reach previous site visitors. Display ads also have increased visibility over some other paid content distribution strategies, simply because they take up more space on any web page.

Digital display ads are very cost-effective; they cost little more than text ads, and they offer just as much, if not more, in-depth data about your customers. Finally, display ads lend themselves very well to A/B testing, since you can easily run simultaneous display ad campaigns with various product focus, color schemes, text layout, etc.

5. Video Ads

One of the first signs that digital video ads are a brilliant marketing tool was when Google purchased YouTube in 2006. Since then, viewer counts on YouTube and other video platforms have grown exponentially. More people are watching video now than ever before in history. Videos are particularly interesting for marketing because people love to share videos, search engines love videos and mobile loves video.

People share videos are that moving in some way, so placing video ads on cute animal videos or funny pratfall videos usually gives good results. Search engines like Google love videos. In fact, Google SERP (search engine results page) prioritizes video results as part of their universal search option, which was implemented in 2007. Finally, videos are highly popular on mobile devices, and since well over 50% of searches are performed on mobile devices, video ads is one paid content distribution strategy you can’t afford to skip.

Now that you have information about the five best paid content distribution strategies, it’s time to get started. If you have questions about any of these strategies or need help implementing them, just contact us. We’re happy to help!