7 Ways to Boost Your Content Marketing with Facebook Ads

Content Marketing (aka blogging or inbound marketing) is generally accepted these days to be one of the best ways to create awareness for your brand and to grow engagement with your company.

But what happens if you don’t have many people consuming your content at the beginning?

Unfortunately, a lot of companies find it frustrating that when they start their content strategy, they find that, despite investing in creating awesome content, they are having a hard time getting their articles seen by their target audience.

The good news is that with a relatively small budget, Facebook ads can be a great way to get your content seen by the right people. If you are matching great content with the right audiences, you should see that Facebook ads are a great way to get people to enjoy and share your articles and then join your email list.

Here are 7 strategies that you can try with your latest and greatest blog posts. Test them all and see which ones work best for you.

Keep in mind that the strategies below can be used for promoting blog posts, ebooks, webinars or any other content that your company is producing.

1) Promote Content To Your Facebook Fans

Unless you’ve made the mistake of buying irrelevant fans, your Facebook fans should be the people who are most interested in what you have to say. Other than your mother, your Facebook fans are probably your biggest brand advocates. So make sure they are seeing your best content.

By this point, you should be coming to grips with the fact that organic reach is consistently decreasing, so don’t be afraid to spend a few bucks promoting content to your fans.

 

2) Promote Content To Fans of Related Pages and Competitors

The best thing about Facebook ads is their ability to target your perfect target audience. Take some time to figure out exactly who is the ideal person that you want to target and then create campaigns to promote your best new content to them.

Think about promoting to the following groups:

• Fans of competitors
• Fans of other companies or products in your industry who are not competitors
• Target people based on work place or job title
• Use Facebook’s Broad Categories or Behaviors to target people based on their offline behaviors.

 

3) Promote Content to People who Previously Visited Your Blog

Chances are that people who recently visited your site to read your articles will be interested in visiting again to read more of your articles. Trying using Facebook retargeting to show new posts to people who have already visited your posts in the past 7-14 days.

Facebook retargeting is one of the few, cost-effective, “set it and forget it” campaigns that can be left on and don’t require much ongoing campaign management. Even if you don’t have a big budget, I recommend that all companies should spend at least $1 – $2 per day with Facebook retargeting. You’ll be surprised how much of an impact it can have.

Pro Tip: If you want to get even more targeted, you can create several specific retargeting audiences based on different subject categories of your blog and only retarget people with new content that is similar to the content that they read during their first visit.

 

4) Promote Content to Your Current Customers, Trial Users and Leads

Create updated Custom Audiences using email addresses from your customers, trial users and current leads. If these people liked you enough to consider using your product, then they’ll probably love your blog content.

 

5) Promote Your Best content to Industry Insiders and Influencers

The best way to get your content seen on a massive scale is to get industry influencers with large social networks to share your articles with their followers.

However, in order for influencers to share your awesome new article, they need to know it exists first… Use Facebook ads to promote your content to thought leaders and influencers in your industry.

You can accomplish this by creating a custom audience from scrapped Facebook user IDs (This technique is very effective, however, it is against Facebook’s rules. So use it at your own risk). Alternatively, you can craft specific niche audiences based on what you know about the people you are targeting. This will inevitably be less effective, but it is totally kosher with Facebook.

 

6) Promote To Lookalike Audiences

One of Facebook’s most unique features is their ability to create Look-a-like audiences based on your existing audiences. Trying promoting your best new content to lookalike audiences built based on the follow groups:

• Your Facebook Fans
• Your Customer Audience of Customers, Trial users and leads
• Your retargeting audience of people who visit your site

Note: When creating Lookalike Audiences, I always recommend that you start with the small reach possible so that the demographics of the audience created are as similar as possible to your target customers.

 

7) Promote Different Types of Content

When thinking about content promotion on Facebook, don’t limit it to only promoting blog posts. In fact, sending people to a landing page for an ebook, white paper or Webinar can be even more effective that sending them to a simple blog post because it’s usually perceived as more valuable content and you can capture a visitor’s email.

You should expect conversion rates for an email submission on an ebook or webinar to be pretty strong from somebody who already has some familiarity with your brand. So for that reason, it will probably work best with Fans, customer lists or retargeting.

Your Turn…

How are you using Facebook to promote your company’s content? Share you best tips in the comments below.

Also, if you found the ideas in this article helpful or if you know other people who might find them helpful, then please do me (and them) a favor and share this article on your favorite social networks. It sure would mean a lot to me 🙂