3 Innovative Ways to Blend PPC Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

What tactics come to your mind when you think of creating a content marketing strategy for your brand?

Creating great content, optimizing it for SEO, and maybe sharing it on social media, right?

But what about Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing? Have you ever tried combining PPC with content marketing to see what happens?

When done correctly, PPC+content marketing is a lethal combination that can 10x the growth of your content marketing strategy.

In this detailed article, we’ll share three practical ways you can use PPC with content marketing to skyrocket your brand’s growth.

Let dive in.

How To Combine Content Marketing With PPC 

The core idea behind content marketing is to answer your audience’s biggest questions with well-researched, in-depth, and actionable content that establishes you as the go-to brand for everything related to your niche.

So the next time your prospects want to purchase the product or services you sell, you’re the first brand they think of.

And it works.

According to research, 61% of US consumers have made a purchase after reading a company’s blog.

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However, there’s another side to this story.

Most content marketers rely solely on SEO and other organic channels to drive traffic to their content.

But a study by Ahrefs shows that only 5.7% of newly created pages make it to the top ten search results in less than a year.

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Even high domain authority (80+ DR) sites have only a 10.8% chance of ranking on the first page in their first year.

Does it make business sense to wait for so long? Not for me.

This is where Pay Per Click (PPC) becomes an ideal partner to your content marketing strategy.

It’s an on-demand traffic source that allows you to target the audience groups who’d love to read your content, subscribe to your email, and purchase your products.

It shortens the whole buyer journey and helps you achieve your desired results much faster.

And that’s just the most obvious benefit.

If you get a little creative, there are various ways to supercharge your content marketing strategy with PPC.

Let me share a few examples.

1- Use PPC For Brand Awareness Campaigns

If you’re fully invested in content marketing, you’ve likely published guest posts on other high-authority publications in your niche for brand awareness and backlinks.

Getting featured on Forbes, Entrepreneur, or any other top publication is the hard part (we should know). But, once you’ve achieved it, maximize its benefits by using paid promotion.

For example, if you land a brand mention on Forbes, don’t let it sit quietly on their site.

Instead, promote that article using a Facebook or LinkedIn Ad campaign to your target audience so that everyone in your niche knows that Forbes considers you a credible brand.

But don’t stop there.

Track the visitors who click on your link and serve them more relevant content from your site via retargeting ads.

I know what you’re thinking.

You can’t retarget the visitors on Forbes since you can’t place your Facebook Pixel or LinkedIn tag there.

There’s a clever workaround.

You can use a link shortening tool like RocketLink that tracks all the users who click your link and read your guest post on Forbes (or any other site.)

Here’s a short breakdown of how this method works:

• First thing’s first, get mentioned in an article by a credible publication that enhances your brand authority.
• Use a tool like RocketLink to create a unique, short URL that you’ll use in your ad.
• Every user that clicks that link will land on a URL that contains your Facebook and LinkedIn tags to track the user’s activity.
• The unique URL you created will redirect the user to the original article URL after it successfully recorded the user’s activity.

This process takes about 1 second so the user probably won’t even notice the redirect happening.

Using this tool, you can retarget these users, serve them specific offers from your site, drive them to your landing pages, and add them to your sales and marketing funnels.

Since you’ve already made a strong impression on these users by getting featured on a top tier publication like Forbes, they’re more likely to take your offer and sign-up to your list.

2- Promote Your Best Content For Early Momentum

Creating high-quality content is hard work.

According to a study by CoSchedule, 28% of content marketers take 1-3 hours to create a single piece of content.

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Believe it or not, that’s still quicker than the majority.

Because 49% of content creators say, it takes them anywhere between 4 to 19 hours to create one high-quality content piece.

After investing so much time and resources in a single article, can you afford to just leave it in the corner of your blog waiting for the occasional visitors?

Of course not.

This is why 83% of content marketers use some form of social media ads (mainly LinkedIn and Facebook) to promote their content to relevant audience groups.

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PPC campaigns help you create early momentum by driving relevant visitors to your content who share it with their social media followers.

Plus, it opens up the possibility of getting backlinks from other sites, especially if you’ve published a link-worthy content piece such as data-heavy articles, case studies, statistical roundups, or infographics.

Make sure you have Facebook’s Pixel and Google’s and LinkedIn’s tags added to your website’s code before running a PPC campaign.

This allows you to retarget the traffic that comes to your site through the ad, on top of organic traffic that found your article without your ad.

Ultimately, all of this helps you develop multiple touchpoints with your audience and increase your chances of converting them into leads and customers.

3- Feed Your Lead Magnet Funnels With PPC

Converting your traffic into subscribers and generating leads for your sales funnel are among the top goals of a content marketing strategy.

According to SEMRush, 51% of marketers consider lead generation their number one content marketing goal.

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Creating a lead magnet and promoting it with Facebook and LinkedIn ads to your target audience is a proven example of a PPC+content marketing strategy for lead generation.

All you need is an enticing free resource like a survey report, a template set, a cheat sheet, or any other proven lead magnet type you can place inside your content.

As soon as a subscriber signs up to your list, add them to an email sequence that nurtures your relationship, offers more free value, and finally makes an attractive offer to close the deal.

Once you have all these pieces in place, promote your lead magnet with well-designed Facebook and LinkedIn ads that start sending traffic to your content and activate your funnel.

If you do this right, your funnel will automatically pay for your advertising costs while still keeping you profitable at the end of the sequence.

Ready To Use PPC With Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Savvy marketers don’t see PPC and content marketing as opposing strategies.

Instead, they combine the best of both these approaches to reach their target audience faster and give their content the exposure it deserves.

If you need help using PPC with your content marketing strategy or need to discuss your long-term content marketing goals, we’d love to hear from you.