Why is Outbrain relevant in this context?

Native advertising performs 10 times better on mobile devices than traditional banner ads. Users say they pay 3 times more attention to native ads than other types of banners, a report said. These are numbers you cannot ignore.

Here’s a great example of how Outbrain can help you grow your business. It comes from 8fit, a fitness app that offers personalized plans for workout and nutrition with step by step instructions. They invested in Outbrain ads with a series of articles related to their industry which led people to their online magazine and ultimately, to their app. Their goal was to convert visits into subscriptions and app downloads. What was the result? Over a period of four months, their fitness app was downloaded on several hundred thousand devices.

Costs and targeting options

Outbrain allows customers to select where ads will be delivered based on audience segmentation, location targeting, and device targeting. You can also blacklist the websites you don’t want your ads to appear on.

The service also provides a Reach Estimator Tool that allows you to estimate your monthly potential reach. Thus, you can make smarter targeting decisions and ultimately, allocate a proper budget.

How much does it cost? Outbrain, like Facebook, lets you allocate a daily budget, which is allocated on a per click basis. Thus, if you have a $50 daily budget, and set your cost per click amount at $1, your campaign will run for the day until you have 50 clicks.

Again, keep in mind that consumers are very savvy and ad-sensitive. They may or may not click through to content if they suspect they are being manipulated.

Content Marketing Principle to Apply: As with any content, understanding your audience and their questions or needs and answering them in a winsome way is the most important factor to keep in mind. If you are sponsoring content on Outbrain, consider looking at the most popular content for each of the sites you target, then providing something that aligns with what has resonated with the specific audience.

If you aren’t sure what types of content perform best for a particular domain, take time to study the social shares of content at their site. BuzzSumo’s content analysis and content trends tool are a great way to speed up the process.

Find High Performing Content By Domain

3. BuySellAds

BuySellAds is a banner advertising platform that connects publishers with advertisers, allowing the advertisers to buy space for banners on the publishers’ websites. I can already imagine some eyebrows raised… “How can such a platform help me amplify my content?”, you will ask. “How can I create a different banner for each of my valuable articles?”

How is BuySellAds relevant here?

All content is not created equal. There may be instances when you would like to promote important and valuable reports on platforms such as BuySellAds in order to generate more downloads, views, and mentions. Long guides, eBooks or maybe an extensive report study are examples of high production value content that could be boosted with banner advertising.

Costs and targeting options

All websites that are part of the network are organized by categories and topics of interest, which allows the advertisers to make an easier selection of the websites their banners are to be published on. The platform also gives you access to stats related to the most recent audience of a website and gives you insights about the price of every banner ad placements on each website you choose to include on your campaign.

The costs depend on which website you choose. Prices for banners pace are determined by each website in particular and can vary from $10 to a few hundreds of dollars for an ad placement.

Tools such as this banner generator from Bannersnack help you to create your own professional banners.

Content Marketing Principle: Verify that your audience is interested in the topics associated with the sites where you will advertise. Once you know there is interest, consider how much competition you have to be the best answer for questions in the topic area.

4. Facebook Ads

Facebook is the most popular social media platform for content distribution, and one of the most popular advertising channels as well. According to Social Media Examiner, 84% of marketers use Facebook as a regular advertising platform in order to drive more traffic to their websites and promote their content. An average user spends 35 minutes connected to Facebook every day. Why not use this time to expand your audience and get them interested in your content?

Why is Facebook relevant in this context?

Facebook supports a wide range of ads, most of them suitable for content promotion. Several of them are well suited for content promotion.

Link Click Ads

These ads allow you to promote external websites and send people to a specific landing page such as a featured article or blog post. You can deliver these ads across multiple feeds and reach out to a large audience. Facebook allows you to design a banner ad with a headline (25 characters), an ad copy text (90 characters) and a link description (30 characters)

Boosted Page Posts

With boosted posts, you get to promote posts from your Facebook page and consequently, your Facebook content. You can also boost posts that promote your blog and website’s articles. Similar specs, to those available in Link Click Ads, apply also to boosted posts. You are allowed to promote posts with a headline, a link description, and an ad copy text. The only difference is that the ad copy text has no restrictions on the lengths of the text.

These ads are designed especially for mobile and are supposed to run ten times faster on mobile than the regular web-based ads. Canvas ads are interactive and designed to completely capture the attention of your audience. You can share images, videos, allow people to swipe through carousels and engage with products or images. You can also include text blocks here, buttons for offsite links and headers with logo.

Content Marketing Principle: Let your audience’s interest be your guide in choosing what to promote. Wait to boost your posts until they have begun to gather organic shares. This allows you to confirm that you are boosting content that your audience likes, and prevents you from paying to get likes, shares, and comments that you could have for free. Keep Mari Smith’s strategy in mind:

Costs and targeting options

On Facebook, you can target users by demographics (location, language, gender, occupation etc.), interests and connections with specific activities, behavior and social circles. According to this Facebook ads guide, there are more than 1.59 billion monthly active users on Facebook. This means that the general audience is big enough for you to target your ads effectively based on the above stats.

You can also decide to deliver ads only to your connections or create a delivery list, a custom audience based on Facebook user IDs, email addresses or phone numbers.

Facebook Advertising, like many other similar networks, is a bidding platform. This means that you, as a marketer, should specify how much are willing to spend with a specific campaign. Costs differ on a CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action), Impressions, and CPL (cost per Like) basis.

5. Instagram (influencer marketing)

Instagram is owned by Facebook and therefore, all the advertising and targeting options are available on the same platform.

Instagram Stories

Not a long time ago, Instagram also launched a new feature, Instagram Stories, followed by Ad Stories. Ad Stories allows you to publish your ads in full-screen format within the slides of other peoples’ stories. Thus, you can add another channel to your advertising strategy, one that may also take you to your relevant audience.

Influencer Marketing

Another great way to promote your content on Instagram is through an influencer marketing campaign. Unlike other types of advertisements, if you find the right influencers for your business, you get to deal directly with them and pay them for their contribution to your campaign.

According to Digiday,”Brands can start with $250 per Instagram post for social stars with less than 50,000 followers, then add roughly $1,000 per 100,000 followers per post.” However, prices can go higher if you are targeting a well-known celebrity.

If you don’t know influencers in your industry, there are several tools available online that will help you find them and ultimately, reach out to them. BuzzSumo’s influencer tools offers an option to find Instagram users who are interested in your content area. Each listing includes an Instagram Authority Score which you evaluates the accounts for audience engagement

Content Marketing Principle: When working with influencers, begin with an organic relational approach and remember to think about the WIIFT principle: What’s In It For Them. Before asking for help, offer influencers your support as an active member of their audience, sharing, liking and commenting on their content over time. Ideally, you should begin this process long before you ask people for help in amplifying your content.

6. LinkedIn Ads

“Buyers prefer LinkedIn as the top social network for sharing business-related content, with 84% sharing business content on LinkedIn” a report published on Curata says.

This means that although Facebook and Instagram are in some ways more popular among marketers than other social networks, when it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is a network you should consider as well. LinkedIn serves self-serviced ads in the form of sponsored content, sponsored InMail and text ads.

Why is LinkedIn relevant in this context?

In order to assess the relevancy of LinkedIn ads when it comes to content amplification, let’s analyze the type of ads they allow you to publish on their network: