You’ve earned it. Now amplify it effectively to the right audience at scale.
How can you use paid media to amplify the earned content that you’ve worked so hard as an agency to obtain (click to tweet)?
The digital world provides many avenues, if used properly, to amplify your earned messaging, content and insights beyond its organic reach.
Focus on the issues, topic and context:
Scenario: The holiday season is approaching.
The digital ad space is crowded and everyone’s bidding competitively to be seen.
Your client is a well-known national hotel chain and they’ve just been named one of the 10 Best Hotel Chains for Families in 2015 by a prominent publication.
This is a perfect opportunity to recommend paid to expand earned reach by targeting digital native real estate on relevant female, parenting, lifestyle, and travel verticals.
Paid can return ample additional clicks to the content for a minimum out-of-pocket investment with just one week of extra boosting.
Or maybe your client is a leading financial services company and it has the research and infographics to prove that people prefer to gift themselves this holiday season. You can obtain an earned placement on a major news show which is then published on its website.
A small amount of paid amplification will work in your favor.
For content such as the earned placement mentioned above, it’s important to leave native targeting open to make sure that your reach is broad enough, and your cost-per-click is set slightly higher than normal. This way you will beat competition who might also be bidding.
When targeting is set too narrowly in a crowded environment, it can work against you by not reaching a large enough audience.
Presenting the other side of an issue:
Sometimes news-sensitive stances that aren’t scientifically backed make the front page of your digital world.
Paid offers a means of quickly putting forward an alternative viewpoint. With a planned or incremental paid budget, you can interrupt trending search terms through Google AdWords, promote tweets with positive or negative keywords and present an alternative point of view to those truly interested in the news.
When you can educate and prove how to work paid algorithms in your favor, the results will only pay off.
A version of this post can be found within our 2016 Ketchum Digital & Social Almanac 2016.
