'Before you create any more great content, figure out how you are going to market it first.' - Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barret (Get Content Get Customers)
There is great wisdom in these words.
Today´s attention economy is dominated by one ultimate resource: the user´s time. It´s the no. 1 currency all market participants are striving for.
That´s why the great secret of becoming a successful content creator doesn´t lie in producing groundbreaking content. It´s about connecting with an audience and making content available for them.
Building a content eco-system
A digital marketing eco-system is conformed of all digital and social assets that make-up our brand (e.g. steemit blog) online.
The interaction of these assets - like a website, a Twitter account or an online advertisement - should all be perfectly aligned with a product´s brand - in an ideal world.
The communicating assets can be divided in owned media, earned media and shared media like the following graphic demonstrates.
A content eco-system - or a group of interconnected media assets - is formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment.
Owned media (eg. steemit blog) and earned media (e.g. re-tweet of steemit blog post) have the big advantage that they run autonomously once the content has been introduced into the system (see circuit above).
These two media assets furthermore don´t necessarily require a monetary investment. The only needed currency here is: time - both from the producer and the consumer.
Paid media instead supposes a financial investment.
To cover the 'paid media' part for my steemit blog, I ran a Google Adwords campaign during 48 hours promoting one of my recent articles.
Running Google Ads to promote steemit - An experiment
The following blog post had been chosen to be promoted through the ad campaign:
Content Distribution Strategy - Driving Traffic to your pearls and creating value
The adword campaign provided the article with some fresh traffic and pushed the view counter up to 166 impressions (+11) in
48 hours. These were the used ads:
These were the overall results:
The numbers:
- $9.77 Investment
- 695 Impressions
- 11 Clicks (= views on steemit.com)
- 1.58% CTR (Click Through Rate)
- $0.89 CPC (Cost per Click)
The CTR really impressed me!!! I didn´t expect it to be above 1.0% (since a CTR of >0.5% can be already considered successful). That´s a great result!
If I continued running the ad campaign with the current parameters, I could achieve a plus of approximately 165 page (blog post) views per month spending $147.
In other words: the price for 1,000 views would be $890.
For 10,000 views it would be $8,900 respectively and so on......
Obviously the Cost per Click is extremely high! That´s actually the reason why I stopped the experiment after 48 hours.
Now it would be interesting to know if there was any conversation in sense of 'brand awareness': How many of these 11 users were fulfilled by the information they found on steemit?
How many of them read the entire article? How many of them realized they were directed to steemit.com? How many of them got really 'involved' with the brand steemit?
We will never know. Regardless, we may not forget about the 695 impressions generated by the ads. Although there was no measurable interaction (click) done by 684 of them, some of them got involved with the brand (perceived the ad) in any case.
The most successful keywords, sorted by clicks:
The most successful keywords, sorted by impressions:
Content needs to be embedded into a balanced eco-system of owned, earned and paid media. While paid ads require a monetary investment, the owned and earned media´s success is mostly driven by the environment´s activity. Through earned media like comments and shares, content achieves value without being promoted through expensive ad campaigns. However, to fully penetrate and monetize a certain market segment, content needs to be constantly moved (distributed) throughout different channels. Any approach will provide the brand with a new portion of attention, contributing to the overall goal of brand awareness.
I hope you enjoyed my experiment :)
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the numbers or the article in general, I´d be happiest to read your comments.
Marly -
Picture sources:
Title image: http://www.hercampus.com/
Content eco-system graphic: http://visualcontenting.com/
Nice experiment. Thanks for sharing. It'll give me something to think about for awhile.
You are welcome! I will be thinking about it for a while as well :) There is a lot of powerful attention out there, we just need to make it favorable to steemit.
Well also consider this. Do we have some things to work out before the masses flood here?
It is in beta. It could go low for awhile but if we all put our heads together, and the developers push out experiments for us to test out then eventually some issues can hopefully not be as evident before a FLOOD of people come here.
It makes it to where we are not making much at the moment, yet if we rush the product to market before we've worked out the kinks that we can then we could damage the long term viability.
When we are READY for the hordes though I think your approach is one definitely worth pursuing.
Yeah I've been saying that for months, It can't be stressed enough. We have some bright minds, if we leave it in the hand of the @the.masses yeah lolz :D
I don´t have any direct contact to steemit developers team. But according to the general rumors, the system is not ready for the big masses yet, that´s true.
However, we´d better prepare our own brands (blogs) on steemit for that eventual situation. Then we are perfectly positioned when all these new followers arrive on the platform :)
Agree 100% with you on this. Working on our personal brands is vital because people connect to PEOPLE and those who have spent the time to nurture their communities and network with one another will be ahead of the game and vital in helping the rush of new members get comfy in their new Steemit home.
That´s it @merej99! If everybody keeps pushing the own brand there will be a positive side effect for the whole network as well. The more we invest in our small islands, the more the whole planet will grow...
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts with us! :)
I don't disagree with you one bit on that.
Then steem price will get up to $5 and we are all going to be millionaires :-D
Nice idea, and nicely put together. I'm not sure that I personally would go the adwords route for my stuff, but it looks like it could be pretty beneficial especially if you've already got a good readership here that can help to pay for the advertising.
Yeah, that´s the idea: take some of the earned money from steemit and re-invest in into marketing. Like that the capital never really leaves the own content eco-system :)
Thanks for your time!
Yeah I suppose that would work well. Much like the promotion here, but better if you can burn money :D the sad part is that readership is hard to get. Any hints on how to improve that part. Create readers, HOW :)
Here's one hint...;)
This is good stuff. I'm currently running a FB ad to my scaredycatguide.com website, but never thought to send one to my steemit posts. It's essentially the same content I am posting to both so might make some sense.
It´s always helpful to support all of the 'satellites' (e.g. twitter, FB, steemit) with a little portion of paid media. In the end it will strengthen the core brand (in your case: the main website).
Thanks for your kind feedback and shared experience!
Very interesting post, something I need to look into a bit more.
I am glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for stopping by and leaving your feedback here.
You´ve got a new follower now :)
Fab, you have one too! 😉
Hehe, cool!
Quality Information! Thank you.
Good to read that! Thank you :)
This was my business for many years and it is sad to see the CTR rates decline so much. I focus 100% on social media now because people want to trust the content they click on and if they know the person that shared the content it helps. If you want to use ads FB and Twitter ads are pretty powerful but avoid North America to keep the cost of clicks down. Thanks for giving us an inside peak of the campaign.
Thanks for your professional point of view, Randy!
I was actually celebrating these 1,5% but it seems that you´ve seen higher CTRs in your career - lucky you!!! :)) I´ve been working for Condé Nast´s online sales team (GQ.com, VOGUE.com, etc.), and a CTR of 0,5-1,0% made us quite happy.
Maybe it´s the mix that will succeed in the end: trustworthiness through social (earned) media like you mentioned, and a bit of rumor / noise through ad campaigns.
Very interesting experiment and results. I know from being on YT that people have used it to varying degrees of success to grow their channels. Still to my mind, it seems like incentivizing referrals on the part of Steemit may be money better spent? On Niume, they pay both the referralee $1 and the referral $1 once they make their first post. I followed you :)
What do you mean by 'incentivating referrals on the part of steemit'? I don't understand that, I am afraid :)
Thanks for the follow anyways! Too kind!
OK Niume is a blogging platform that pays you for content, much like YouTube. if I refer you, and you join, once you make a post you are awarded a dollar and I am awarded a dollar. IOW there is an incentive to refer people
"Referral Program
With Niume's referral programme you will receive $1 for every user you bring to the platform who creates at least one post. Any user you bring will also receive $1 straight after creating their first post.
For us to track your referred users make sure they use the following personal referral link when registering:
https://niume.com/101496
That´s a nice principle!
I´ve done a post on a similar idea for steemit some weeks ago, wondering what happend if any "committed" steemian acquired one new user... Seems that other platforms are one step ahead when it comes to easy marketing :)
Thank you for the nice write, I will save this article for the future :)
It brings a lot to think about and the pictured really do speak a thousand words.
I would like to see Steemit Improve but I suppose a core site should always be there :) A nice experiment hopefully many will learn here.
There were a few "trending" posts that went viral on YT and generated 1000 maybe more views here that was an interesting story. So yeah promoting on other platforms is worthwhile.
Good luck Kind regards :)
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts @j3dy!
Look at the view count of that one - it will surely blow your mind :-))
https://steemit.com/life/@wadepaterson/20-questions-with-john-goehrke-the-guy-who-landed-a-date-with-genie-bouchard
So there is no doubt about steemit's potential.
wow I've missed it for sure, I was going to say 15k but I thought it's too much :D guess not :D
Yeah! Just by being a trending topic... So sticking with the theory shown above: that was earned media (not paid) :)
Thank you much for your time. Both the time it took to do the research and the time it took to post the results. Like you said, time is valuable. Thanks again. Followed and reSteemed.
Thanks for your kind words and great support! I had a lot of fun doing the experiment since I am a naturally curious person. I furthermore enjoyed a lot sharing my experience and knowledge with you. But yes, time means value.
Following you back :)
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That's very interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Have you used an adwords competitor analysis to optimize your adwords?