Two weeks ago, I wrote about Google’s new Responsive Display Ads and the flexibility they allow advertisers. In that post, I mentioned that the new RDAs also convert into native advertisements on certain sites to draw more attention and traffic. With this in mind, it’s time to consider supplementing your content marketing strategy with paid advertising to drive traffic to your site!

The advantages of having a content marketing strategy are well known by this point. It gives you bolstered SEO for your site by producing fresh content, gives you great URLs to post on social media, and gives consumers an insight into your brand’s personality and authenticity. In all honesty, though, one issue we’ve always run into with clients is finding an efficient way to drive the most traffic to these areas of the site.

Google has now made this easier through their display ads. The native ad function and text-based ads provides an easy way to promote content and place it in relevant areas to grab more traffic. The question is what does a media strategy look like in order to fuel this type of traffic without blowing the budget? Here are some thoughts on how to approach it:

  1. Plan your content and your ads. If you know well in advance what your published content is going to be, it makes it easy to also plan out what the copy of your responsive display ads will be. Which in turn makes it easier to add in and target ads.
  2. Create content categories. If you’re posting content in a blog-like format, chances are that you are already categorizing your content. If not, now is the time to start! Then take these categories and build ad campaigns and ad groups that correspond with these categories. This will make it easy to add future ads without having to build out entirely new target audiences.
  3. Don’t pay for clicks. In the world of paid advertising, 95% of the time, you’re likely setting up a bidding strategy that pays for clicks in some way. With content, it’s more about what your grandparents used to say about kids. We want to be seen! Therefore, employ a bidding strategy that pays for viewable impressions.

So what do you do with all of this traffic as it hits your site and reads your (very helpful) content? It’s time to get creative with multiple lead generation tactics!

  • Cross-recommend more content! Once you’ve gotten a visitor…work to keep them there!
  • Let them comment! By also having them “sign in” with an email address.
  • Put a form on the page! Have an article about buying a car? Why not get them interested in an auto loan, too!
  • Remarket! There’s no point in driving traffic to your site if we can’t leverage that visit to put more messages in front of them about how awesome our bank or credit union is.

Really, the sky is the limit with advertising your content! Happy hunting!