Page 120 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

attempts to fit in.”
This misdirection can damage the editorial integrity of a publication, as well

as a brand’s image. The only way this strategy works in the long-term is by
focusing on providing relevant content that equals the quality of the content in
the editorial portion of the site.

Social media advertising

In addition to boosting stories, most of the major social media sites offer paid
opportunities to attract new audience members, own a trending topic, and access
specific people outside your network. Some social media platforms with vast
audiences like Reddit and StumbleUpon let you buy clicks to your content at
very low prices from socially-engaged visitors.

Chad Pollitt is the cofounder of an online magazine called Relevance devoted
to studying content promotion techniques. Here are some of his “native social”
best practices:

Brands that use paid social media must remember it’s a marketplace.
How they target interests, connections, behavior, demographics, and
geography all impact the cost of a campaign. Facebook in particular has
over a million interests that can be targeted and Twitter has even more. As a
result, targeting many long-tail interests that might be considered sub-
interests of a broader category can help brands cut campaign costs by as
much as 90 percent.
Marketers have to establish measurable goals for the content they wish
to promote on paid social channels because they dictate which channels
to use and how to allocate budget. For example, distributing content (like
a blog post) at scale every time new content is published is probably cost
prohibitive. However, marketers wishing to promote a sweepstakes,
webinar, or eBook may find promoting on social channels well worth the
cost.
After goals are established, marketers should track each channel’s
performance by cost per click, cost per action, or cost per lead.
Although the analytics provided by social networks continue to increase in
sophistication, it’s probable that you will need a combination of these
outside metrics and inside metrics to determine the cost/benefit of each
channel.
Marketers should never equate the click in “cost per click” with a