PR and Marketing content have a huge influence on awareness and credibly which helps to establish unique positioning, differentiate brand from others and drive unlimited flow of leads.
Most of the B2B companies create a bunch of useful content like press releases, articles, case studies and share it with their owned media. Unfortunately, the coverage of owned channels is not always satisfactory, so paid media is an important part of the PR strategy.
What is paid media?
Paid media is advertising and promotion via influencers, social media posts, partnerships, reviews and different types of ads. Shortly, this means posting promotional or informational content on resources that do not belong to the company on company's initiative.
Why do you need paid media?
In B2B marketing, "content is the king", but creating quality and useful content isn't enough. Cool content needs to be shared. Paid media help to quickly share content with a large interested audience, which improves the company's credibility and brings new customers.
Paid media works perfectly on each stage of customer journey and could be used as a main marketing tool.
Is paid media always "paid"?
Actually no, it can be done for free, for example through barter or partnership.
Which paid media channels to use?
The most popular channels are PPC, Display Ads and targeted advertising in social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube). But we advise not to dwell only on them.
Less popular promotion methods sometimes turn out to be more effective and cost less, and for some niches they bring in a lot more SQLs. Consider using some of these:
- Influencer marketing - bloggers, podcasters, writers and other content creators that your target audience love.
- Forums - Advertising on Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow etc. is perfect for narrow audiences
- Platforms - Websites with reviews, coupons or local businesses are great solution to improve conversion rate at the consideration stage
- Journalists - the best way to share your outstanding news with the world
- Guest blogging - sharing your knowledge on a third party website blog
- Social media pages and groups - placing advertising directly to the target community
How to find media partners?
There a three ways to find perfect channels for paid media:
- Choose the media that your competitors use. This is a lazy method where you can get some valuable channels, but it does not take into account the specifics of your audience, worsens differentiation and you may miss other important channels.
- Media lists. Ready-to-use lists of the right companies, journalists, social media pages, websites and decision makers from your niche with whom you can negotiate advertising placement.
- Customer research. Do your research and find out through which channels your potential consumers receive information and who they trust. This is a fairly expensive and laborious solution, but the results are worth it.
How to contact the media owner?
Once you have compiled a media list of suitable channels, you should contact their owners and discuss advertising placement.
Some sites have dedicated sections for this, but in most cases you should find the Advertising Opportunities page or and study the information there.
If the resource of your choice does not indicate the possibility of advertising, do not hesitate to write to an email or a message in social networks. Usually media owners are open to cooperation.
Before that, be sure to check whether your ad matches the community theme and send your text in full right away with the proposed terms of placement.
Evaluating results
Use the URLs with UTM-tags or track acquisition channels in Google Analytics to analyze which paid media channels perform the best. In case you use social media or forums you can also track impressions and engagements.
