'Before you create any more great content, figure out how you are going to market it first.' - Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barret (Get Content Get Customers)
There is great wisdom in these words.
Today´s attention economy is dominated by one ultimate resource: the user´s time. It´s the no. 1 currency all market participants are striving for.
That´s why the great secret of becoming a successful content creator doesn´t lie in producing groundbreaking content. It´s about connecting with an audience and making content available for them.
Building a content eco-system
A digital marketing eco-system is conformed of all digital and social assets that make-up our brand (e.g. steemit blog) online.
The interaction of these assets - like a website, a Twitter account or an online advertisement - should all be perfectly aligned with a product´s brand - in an ideal world.
The communicating assets can be divided in owned media, earned media and shared media like the following graphic demonstrates.
A content eco-system - or a group of interconnected media assets - is formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment.
Owned media (eg. steemit blog) and earned media (e.g. re-tweet of steemit blog post) have the big advantage that they run autonomously once the content has been introduced into the system (see circuit above).
These two media assets furthermore don´t necessarily require a monetary investment. The only needed currency here is: time - both from the producer and the consumer.
Paid media instead supposes a financial investment.
To cover the 'paid media' part for my steemit blog, I ran a Google Adwords campaign during 48 hours promoting one of my recent articles.
Running Google Ads to promote steemit - An experiment
The following blog post had been chosen to be promoted through the ad campaign:
Content Distribution Strategy - Driving Traffic to your pearls and creating value
The adword campaign provided the article with some fresh traffic and pushed the view counter up to 166 impressions (+11) in
48 hours. These were the used ads:
These were the overall results:
The numbers:
- $9.77 Investment
- 695 Impressions
- 11 Clicks (= views on steemit.com)
- 1.58% CTR (Click Through Rate)
- $0.89 CPC (Cost per Click)
The CTR really impressed me!!! I didn´t expect it to be above 1.0% (since a CTR of >0.5% can be already considered successful). That´s a great result!
If I continued running the ad campaign with the current parameters, I could achieve a plus of approximately 165 page (blog post) views per month spending $147.
In other words: the price for 1,000 views would be $890.
For 10,000 views it would be $8,900 respectively and so on......
Obviously the Cost per Click is extremely high! That´s actually the reason why I stopped the experiment after 48 hours.
Now it would be interesting to know if there was any conversation in sense of 'brand awareness': How many of these 11 users were fulfilled by the information they found on steemit?
How many of them read the entire article? How many of them realized they were directed to steemit.com? How many of them got really 'involved' with the brand steemit?
We will never know. Regardless, we may not forget about the 695 impressions generated by the ads. Although there was no measurable interaction (click) done by 684 of them, some of them got involved with the brand (perceived the ad) in any case.
The most successful keywords, sorted by clicks:
The most successful keywords, sorted by impressions:
Content needs to be embedded into a balanced eco-system of owned, earned and paid media. While paid ads require a monetary investment, the owned and earned media´s success is mostly driven by the environment´s activity. Through earned media like comments and shares, content achieves value without being promoted through expensive ad campaigns. However, to fully penetrate and monetize a certain market segment, content needs to be constantly moved (distributed) throughout different channels. Any approach will provide the brand with a new portion of attention, contributing to the overall goal of brand awareness.
I hope you enjoyed my experiment :)
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the numbers or the article in general, I´d be happiest to read your comments.
Marly -
Picture sources:
Title image: http://www.hercampus.com/
Content eco-system graphic: http://visualcontenting.com/
