Secret Sauce: What Every Other Company in Your Industry isn’t Doing

Paid Content Outreach

Have a great new piece of content that your sales team has been developing for months? Did you recently pay someone a sizable chunk of change to develop a video for a service or product? Has your company been trying to grow a following for your social media accounts or blog, with little to no success? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, read on! If you answered no, it’s time to talk to a professional. The Internet is here to stay. In every industry, lead development, direct sales, and customer acquisition is increasingly moving online. Your industry isn’t a gray duck in a flock of geese; every business, in every industry, needs to be online.

The Viral Fallacy

Content, no matter how great, rarely goes viral. You can consistently pump out top notch content, but without a ton of luck, that information is not going to reach a wider demographic. Sorry, but the deck is stacked against you. With social media channels shifting to paid outreach and the vast expanse that is the Internet, it is unlikely that an influencer will find -- let alone distribute -- your beautiful piece of content. This is not to say you should give up. Constant and quality content will still help your site, especially in the SEO department. Furthermore, the more chances you take, the more chances you have to succeed. Try, try again!

Manufacturing Infectious Content

Question: If the deck is stacked, what’s a business to do!? Answer: Have an ace up your sleeve. What companies aren’t advertising is that they are using paid content distribution networks. Paid content distribution is nothing new, but technology has advanced to the point where you can pay a relatively small sum to distribute articles or white papers on other, bigger websites throughout the Internet. Outbrain and Taboola are the most popular networks of content distribution, but there are others. You’ve seen paid content distribution before, you simply may not have noticed. This is from slate.com: With these networks, your company can choose audience, demographics, and even put your content on major websites. With a catchy title, you can reach tens, hundreds, or even millions, of otherwise unreachable potential clients.

Social Media Marketing

If you’re distributing unpaid content through Facebook, you’re only reaching a tiny percentage of your audience – the people who actually like your page already! The most recent data show that -- at best -- one out of every eight of your Facebook fans will see your content. It’s frustrating, and it does feel like a major burn, but with Facebook becoming a public company, what can we really expect? The bottom line is more important than ever and I expect, (know), that the trend towards paid outreach will continue. However, for as little as $5 per post, your company can expand an article’s reach that would have numbered in the hundreds into the thousands. Common sense dictates that if a piece content is seen by more people it has more of a chance to go viral. Furthermore, if the content is actually good, and people are clicking on it and sharing it, Facebook’s algorithm with pick up on this and your post will actually be boosted even further -- for free! Twitter works in a similar way.

Adwords for YouTube

Finally, there’s the video conundrum. I hear about companies spending thousands of dollars on videos for their website and then just putting them on YouTube and hoping for the best. This $X,000 video becomes just another few seconds of the 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute! But if companies would give their videos a little bit of a paid bump through Adwords advertisements on YouTube, those videos could get views, be established as relevant to the topic, and then potentially get more views for free. YouTube gets more than 1 billion unique visitors each month and reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network (Source: YouTube).

Final Thought

Great content is king. Paid content distribution is king-maker.