Here are some ways that you can use Paid Media (And I’m not talking about banners here) to expose your contents to wider and new audiences:

1. Paid Social. There is no longer a free lunch. A recent study on Facebook found that only 6% of companies’ posts reach to their followers. With Twitter share at all-time low, it maybe only matter of time that Twitter will follow suite. So the way to reach out to wider audience or even to own followers is to through native advertising such as sponsored Tweets, sponsored posts. Good news is that the 3 key social channels (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) all provide sophisticated targeting option for marketers to reach out to our audience. Target followers of specific Twitter handle? Checked. Target members of specific linkedin group? No problem. With Audience Targeting Platform such as DataXu, we can target twitter users who have visited sap.com.

2. Content Amplification Network. Content Amplification Network such as Outbrain is a great channels to amplify your content to wider audience. With a cost per click model, Outbrain allow your contents to be distributed across their intensive publishers network. Outbrain has strict guidance on the content quality, so be sure that your content are thought leadership and valuable to your audience, and not another sales brochure, or registration form. The only limitation for outbrain is that it does not allow specific targeting, other than geo-targeting.

3. Sponsored eDM/ List Rental. Guess what? eDM is still one of the efficient channels to reach out to a very targeted audience/niched audience, especially for specific industry and line of business. Industry vertical sites and Line of Business Interest sites are good source where you can reach out to these targeted audience.

And here are some additional how to get most out of paid media for content marketing:

1. Have a content calendar. Get ready a content calendar and select those contents that you want to consider to amplify. Paid Social such as sponsored tweets have limited life span and performance will drop as time goes, so make sure you time the activation once the social contents are fresh out from oven.
2. Plan your targeting. With the importance of audience marketing, selecting your target audience are now much more important than selecting sites. As mention above, the wide range of targeting option just becoming overwhelming. So drill your media agency to ensure that get the right mix of audiences and reach.
3. Include a lead generation component. There is always a balance between gated and ungated content. With the abundant of contents out there that are free to consumers, we will continue to see challenge in getting user to register for a piece of content. However, writing a piece of blog with link to a gated content is a good way to engage with audience with content and at the same time allow certain form of leads Mobile-friendly content. generation (see example here). Beside the standard forms, new paid media format such as: Linkedin Slideshare Pro account, Twitter Lead Generation Card also allow certain form of contact capturing (The downside that you will need manual extraction and may not fit into CRM requirement).
4. Mobile-friendly content. With most 55% of social media content consume via mobile, any contents that intend to reach out through social will need to be mobile friendly.
5. Think always on. Rather than using short burst of media spend, think long-term on how you going to spend your budget. Check out my previous blog on this.

So next time, when you create your contents, remember to plan how you intend to reach out to your audience and prepare some budget for that.