How To Use Facebook Ads to Distribute Content?
You published content and nothing happened – a known scenario for many of you. But there are multiple ways you can make content popular and get eyeballs. And Facebook ads is one of the powerful ways to do that. Promoting your content on Facebook doesn’t have to break the bank. You can start with little money per day.
Facebook Ads
Create Relevant Content
You need to create content that is valuable to the people you’re targeting. Ask yourself the question who is this content for? Why would they spend time consuming it? A person who doesn’t know our brand would share this? To achieve this you should do – 1) answer a common question your prospects ask. 2) Solve a problem of your customer.
To create an apt video content creation strategy, you should:
- Make its run time less than 90 seconds (as short as needed to get across the main point)
- Keep it simple
- Include actionable advice
- Include a call to action
You should also stay consistent with your content creation. If you can post something great at least weekly, over time you will build a picture of what content works best and what doesn’t, which leads nicely to the next point.
Analyze Results
When you create content regularly, you realize what works and what doesn’t. Whether its video, written or image, you can see what brings better reaction from the audience. Facebook offers an incredible amount of data whenever you post content – be it reach, engagement (including reactions, comments, and shares), and engagement rate – and you can break it down by type of post. Using video posts, you can even access to more data, including the important average watch time.
Check the analytics to see what posts are performing best based on your goals (e.g., reach, engagement rate, shares). What unique attributes does that top-performing post have? Is it short? Longer content? Video? Does it contain an image with a person? Is it about a particular subject?
Your next focus should be your promotion on what’s working best and double down on creating more content like that.
Promote Best-Performing Content
Use data to inform your paid Facebook content promotion. You should advertise or boost your content for new audiences who aren’t regular consumers of your Facebook Content.
The first step is to focus on organic performance. You want to use Facebook ads to energize content that’s already working. Generally if something does well organically, it’ll likely perform well with paid too. The main focus should be on promoting evergreen content – the longer the content’s shelf life, the longer you can boost the post.
When boosting a post, don’t use the visible big blue button. It is ideal to do it through your Facebook ads manager because you can have options of:
- Better control your promotion (and its parameters)
- Select more specific audiences
- Split-test criteria such as audiences more easily
Retarget Those Who Consume Your Content
Getting people to consume your content is important band it’s the first step. If people are consuming your content but not becoming customers then there will be some problem with your content marketing strategy.
How do you take people who have consumed your content and turn them into loyal customers?
Retarget them. Retargeting is hands down my favorite part of Facebook ads.
Ever been to Amazon, looked at a pair of shoes and been followed around the web by an ad featuring that exact pair? That’s retargeting and you’re able to do the same effect with Facebook ads.
If a person reads one of your articles or watches a video on Facebook ads, you’re able to serve a follow-up ad for additional content. You can have the option to make the ad relevant because you know the viewer already consumed your content.
Conclusion
The above areas are the basics on how to use Facebook ads as a content distribution platform. Based on your organic results, you can target who you want your initial promoted content delivered to. Once they consume that content, you can then bring them deeper into your sales funnel with retargeting ads. You’re building your audience, helping more people, and increasing your revenue, all within the one platform.
5 Ways to Fix Your Stagnated Content
People get rid of content when it stops adding company
goals. They fix content when it’s broken by redirecting content or repurposing
it as new opportunities arise. But one thing that marketers overlook is that stagnant
content can re-perform.
Stagnated content is which has seen reduced
performance contribution toward its original intended purpose, and has
therefore slowed down, or stopped adding marketing value completely.
This piece
intends to enrich stagnating content performance reflecting its original
purpose. Content may stagnate in a matter of weeks, months, or years (years in
the case of key/evergreen/cornerstone content pieces) depending on:
- The content type.
- The robustness of the content when it went live.
- The speed at which the contents perceived value deteriorates
over time.
Stagnated content can be identified by:
- Reduced metric performance.
- A slow declining reduction.
- Lower value derived over time.
There are fundamental actions that you can take to redress content performance decline and natural stagnation over time, enabling you to revitalize your business-critical content.
Keeping Up With The Changing Audiences
When you create content over time it
becomes dated and disjointed. Initially, the key driving force for drops in
performance comes from changes in audience behavior, wants, needs, and
perceived value of the content compared to other alternatives.
Leading signals that tell you content is beginning to fall is:
- Lower engagement rates.
- Declining social shares.
- Fewer page views.
- Reduced time on page.
- Decreased results – impressions, traffic, new users, goal completions etc.
Improving Technical Performance
From time to first byte (TTFB) and mobile
friendliness, to lazy loading images and fixing internal broken images or
links, there is a myriad of technical improvements that can be made
to improve content performance and accessibility to the audience.
Content speed is a ranking factor as much
as it is a site maintenance and usability issue.
When you make content all-device ready,
faster to access, and available spanning all relevant mediums, you expand its
reach and suitability for purpose.
It is not uncommon to see content
performance peaks derived by improving the speed of delivery and associated
technical updates in isolation.
Technical SEO has experienced a
dramatic resurgence in its strategic application and resource attention over
the past several years. In no small part, this is directly correlated to
technological changes such as:
- Mobile first content prioritization.
- New SERP features including accelerated mobile pages (AMP) re-results.
- The broader gains attributed to technical activities implemented.
Increasing Content Understanding
Partially overlapping with technical
updates, content understanding can factor in structured data as a key focus
area, as well as on page content revisions.
You can even consider the external link
signals (for example anchor text used, and external site topical relevancy) as
part of the content understanding exercise.
For the purposes of this
post, structured data and the associated items (schema.org,
microdata, JSON, rich snippet targeting and more) should be your primary
concern.
Google QAPage code is a must for
longer page question and answers content. This single technical update can
refresh and flag the topical value of existing content to Google for inclusion
within the SERP rich results such as the pre-results and Google Answers.
Other examples of structured data update
you can make include:
- Local business
- Organization
- Logo
- Media
- Recipe
- Review
- Social Profile
- Event
- More
Enriching Topical Completeness
Completeness of content coverage is a
subtle trend that has been growing in market value for some time, coming to the
scene over last 3 years.
Surprisingly, few companies are investing
the time, resources, or expertise required to fully maximize this opportunity
to impact stagnating content.
Some of the most impactful actions to take
to enrich the completeness of the content you are improving focus on:
- Bringing the content up to date.
- Adding new statistical reference points and sources.
- Including genuine authorship to content topics.
- Expanding/adding the depth of FAQs.
- Covering all core intent areas tied to the content topic and purpose.
- Focus on making the content better than the closest match or top performing/ranking content.
- Turn individual content items into hubs of topical value or series on content pieces.
- Provide alternative ways to digest the content (podcasts, videos, webinars, presentations, info-graphics, and images).
Trimming & Combining Competing Content
Why has one page on a topic when you can
have 20? Because those 20 pages are most likely fighting each other for
position, causing content confusion, and sending conflicting messages to users
and search engines.
Typically unnecessary content pages on the
same topic create problems understanding what the content is for, which content
is expected to rank well, and what you want people or bots to do with the
content compared to it alternatives.
There are of course logical ways to create
content clusters, align disparate content items into logical series, and bring
together competing signals, but at this time, the question to ask is:
Do all these items add value to the user?
If the answer to this question is no,
consider what elements of the content do add value and think about how you can
bring all of these shallower content articles valuable elements into
an integrated hero piece of content. Most likely the hero content will be
currently stagnating and ready for improvement.
Content stagnates all of the time and frequently gets removed, repurposed, or overlooked entirely.
Here are the five core tactics to deploy
and improve the stagnating content present on your website towards your
business goals:
- Keeping up with changing
audiences. - Improving technical
performance. - Increasing content
understanding. - Enriching topical completeness.
- Pruning and combining competing
content.