Pay to play: How targeted amplification can boost your audience - The Drum

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The role of upper-funnel content is to drive brand awareness among a wide pool of people. But there’s little point in building great upper-funnel content if you don’t pay to promote it. ‘Organic reach’ is a thing of the past. Google’s algorithms have evolved: they are smart enough to reward quality over content that is gratuitously stuffed with keywords.

Of course, a regularly updated blog hub with good links from trusted sites will build a brand’s authority and attract engaged users, but SEO will no longer drive large amounts of traffic in the short-term. Marketers need to play the long game. The same principle applies to social media: networks have shifted from growth to monetisation. Today, brands must pay to reach even a fraction of their own followers.

Whatever your level of content marketing maturity, you need to pay to play. But you don’t need to blow your budget in the process.

Using paid social and search to understand your audience

Simple paid approaches with small budgets can help you to understand your audience and deliver results. A small paid campaign can deliver value quickly. Marketers need to define the right target audience for each piece of content, deliver it using paid tactics, and use the data – alongside feedback such as comments – to plan their...

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