According to Shareaholic, 70 percent of people want to learn about products through content rather than through traditional advertising—a statistic that further stresses the importance of quality content to building trust with and educating your audience about your offerings.

As native ads become a more valuable way to reach your customer base, questions about how to best execute and measure these campaigns effectively continue to arise. As of today, native ads are a mystery to most marketers since they’re such new media and are comprised of many different formats for publishers and brands to tackle.

Among native ads, sponsored content—when a business pays to have its name or message accompany a publisher’s story to promote its interests without appearing advertorial—has seen the most widespread use and success in its early days. It’s important to clarify how to best measure sponsored content campaigns in order for everyone to better understand their potential value to an organization and their impact on the audiences they can reach, especially now that the medium is continuing to gain traction.

Native ads come in many forms, but when it comes to measuring the impact of sponsored content, keep these metrics in mind:

Attention Minutes

Coined by Upworthy, attention minutes comprise one of the most important metrics to consider when understanding the value of sponsored content. By tracking engagement with both a page and its content, attention minutes provide deeper, more thorough insight than traditional measures such as unique visitors, page views, and time on page.

Clicks and social sharing aren’t bad measures of the success of a piece of sponsored content, but they don’t always highlight the satisfaction readers derive from a sponsored post or the depth of the experiences they had. For instance, an article can be shared and clicked millions of times—but if no one reads it, those metrics don’t mean much.

Attention minutes help solidify an interest in sponsored content for both publishers and brands, while also supporting the data supplied by other metrics that helps determine success. They can inform future content creation based on what drove traction from an audience, helping marketers make better decisions with native advertising.

Click-Through Rates

As pressure to standardize native ads (such as sponsored content) rises, many marketers look to traditional metrics to measure the impact of this form of advertising. The click-through rate (CTR) is still an effective way to measure the impact of sponsored content. By analyzing the CTR of links included in sponsored content, your organization can better understand if readers were compelled to review your company’s offerings on your own properties—and if your content was directly responsible.

Conversions

A conversion that’s driven by sponsored content doesn’t necessarily have to be a sale—it could also be a download, email subscription, or any other action that adds a lead to your CRM. After all, it’s unlikely that someone will be compelled to make a purchase and become a customer after consuming your sponsored content and visiting your site for the first time.

Analyze the conversions generated by your sponsored content to determine what actions this advertisement spurs within the publication’s audience. This data can help your marketing team identify patterns in behavior and proactively account for these actions in the future to help drive more quality conversions.

Social Sharing

When a user likes, shares, comments, tweets, or takes another action with your sponsored content, your organization can determine how often it was shared through social channels. Although such information provides you with feedback on what’s popular across the web, it’s important to not take social shares as the final indicators of the success of your content. Many businesses focus too heavily on these vanity metrics and, as a result, misunderstand the best ways to use the insights they glean as part of their greater measurement regimens.

Take the social sharing your sponsored content receives and measure it against the attention minutes each piece of content drove while considering clicks, conversions, and referral traffic as a part of the equation. This will help you determine how much of an impact your content made on readers or viewers. By analyzing the social shares your sponsored content generates, you’ll likely be able to see the brand lift achieved by leveraging a publisher’s brand equity. In other words, you’ll get a better idea of the trust you’re developing with customers by sponsoring content on a trusted publisher’s website.

Consumers typically trust a publication more than a brand’s communications because of publications’ editorial guidelines and lack of motivation to sell. Brands are able to leverage some of the trust built by a publication by sponsoring content on that publication’s website that both follows its editorial guidelines and connects with the themes and topics important to a brand’s messaging.

Review the sentiment of feedback provided by consumers when they’re sharing your sponsored content to better understand any brand lift.

This article originally appeared on Skyword.

The post How to Measure the Value of Native Advertising appeared first on Relevance.

What truly matters is how you treat them once they’ve subscribed to your list. After all, a whopping 97 percent of businesses are using email marketing, meaning that your competition is certainly gunning for the same attention you are.

In addition, 44 percent of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. Therefore, your business should do everything in its power to make sure that you are going above and beyond with your email marketing efforts to drive similar results.

In this post, you’ll learn eight ways your business can go beyond expectations and delight your email subscribers for the long-term.

1. Give your subscribers a warm welcome.

Much like in regular everyday interaction, first impressions are huge online. Especially in a market as saturated as email, creating positive experiences from the very first day will be key in forming a strong customer relationship.

When a customer chooses to subscribe to an email they are taking a risk. They are inviting your regular email updates into their already crowded inbox. Make sure to reassure them from the very beginning that your emails will be valuable and worth their attention.

Especially considering that welcome emails generate four times the open rates and five times the click rates of regular emails, this would be the perfect time to offer a promo code, sale or another offer as a thank you for signing up.

In this welcome email from Karmaloop, they added the bonus of a $10 off promo code that’s only valid for a week. This might prompt customers to convert after the very first day or at least visit the site after their first interaction with your email.

Either of these outcomes will increase the likelihood that your subscribers will respond positively to your emails in the future.

2. Provide something of value on a consistent basis.

Now that you’ve made a positive first impression, your subscribers are likely interested in what they can come to expect from your email marketing. As much as people say they like being surprised, a large amount of the utility of an email subscription comes from the consistent, regular updates that your subscribers can depend on.

Focus on a core offering (like a weekly newsletter of curated content, or a feature collection or regular giveaway) that will serve as a foundation upon which to build a more nuanced and varied campaign.

Ideally, this should be part of the selling point of a subscription, if not the main point.

This article is about ways to go above and beyond the expected, but the only ways you can ever hope to exceed expectations is to first set expectations and consistently meet them.

3. Sporadically offer incentives of even higher value.

Once you create a value proposition and consistently deliver on it, your business has the opportunity to truly delight your audience. Delight is one step beyond content.

After (let’s say) four consistent weeks of delivering reliably high-quality content, give your consumer something that is unexpectedly great.

In this example, Williams-Sonoma knows that their subscribers signed up to receive their weekly discounts and new product announcements. These emails are a great resource for the right subscriber, but they tend to be light promotions only applicable to online purchases delivered on a regular basis.

Now that they’ve made their subscribers happy with their consistent offerings they will periodically go out of their way and offer a full-fledged eBook on a similar topic. This is offered for free just because it appeals to their audience, therefore creating a delightful experience for them as a subscriber.

You can delight your audience by following their lead. After creating an expectation for consistent quality, go out of your way to sporadically offer something extra. An enhanced version of whatever content or offer or deal was simply satisfying your subscriber beforehand.

4. Reward them for being a subscriber at certain milestones.

After continuing this regular cycle of consistently compelling content interspersed with delightful surprises you should have a pretty satisfied subscriber and therefore, a highly successful email marketing strategy for your business. When the six-month or year mark of their subscription approaches, this will be your chance to delight your audience even further.

At some pre-determined milestone send your subscriber an email showing that you appreciate their continuing interest. Think of this as a much bigger gesture than your periodic tokens of appreciation.

This is a reward for each subscriber’s individual loyalty; whether that’s their year long mark of being a subscriber, a subscriber’s birthday or whatever other milestone you’d like to acknowledge.

Go for a grand gesture, like 35 percent off site wide for your entire “subscription birthday.” This might not be a sustainable discount to give too often, but if someone actually cashes in on it, it will be well worth the good will you’ve instilled in them towards your brand. That kind of experience is something that will be talked about amongst their social circle, which is the best kind of marketing for your business.

5. Offer membership-only exclusive deals.

All of the suggestions discussed so far should serve to create a sense of connection with subscribers. The next step for this customer relationship should be instilling a sense of belonging. After a certain amount of time, or a certain action or indicator they can be promoted from simply being a “subscriber” to becoming a “member.”

From a strictly marketing standpoint, this is just segmenting. But given the right approach, it could mean so much more to a customer. It will instill a sense of loyalty that is unique to those who feel they belong to something special. This loyalty program of sorts can help ensure your subscribers are customers for the long-term.

There are different ways to implement this depending on your specific industry, but the core principle remains the same. Treat your long-time subscribers a little bit better and let them know it. The subscribers worth impressing will notice the extra effort and you’ll both benefit.

6. Ask your subscribers for their opinion.

While offering value to customers can definitely be a way to build a relationship, it can be equally as effective to invite them to offer their opinion on a regular basis.

Your subscribers often want to be a part of the process of providing input about your business, giving feedback on your latest products and sharing your insights on what your team should focus on for the future.

Center your ongoing emails on a variety of different campaigns to encourage the participation with your email subscribers like a contest, a quiz, a survey and more.

If this experience is a positive one, then your likely to build a stronger and more memorable relationship with a subscriber than would typically achieved just by them opening one of your emails, reading it, clicking on a link and making a purchase.

7. Show subscribers sneak peeks and first looks.

Exclusivity is another way to help make your subscribers feel delighted about being a part of your email list for the long-term.

As often as possible preview your products, offer behind the scenes footage and other exclusives with your email list first to excite them about being part a special group of your customers.

Take this approach to the next level and offer promo codes, sales and other incentives exclusively to your subscribers or at least keep it exclusive for a period of time first before your entire customer base has access to the promotion.

8. Thank them often!

The concept of being thankful for your email subscribers is addressed in some capacity in most of the above tips, maybe most of all with the idea of surprising your email list with an unexpected incentive.

However, it’s important to always frame how you’re using an email list to drive sales and interaction with your company from a place of thankfulness.

To illustrate your organization’s gratefulness on an ongoing basis, start by crafting the appropriate messaging in your emails, consistently offer incentives and giveaways to your subscribers and thinking of out of the box approaches to rewarding your list for their continued loyalty.

Consistently offering a thank you to your audience doesn’t have to be backed by a six-figure budget, but it does have to come from a genuine place, be related to your business offerings and provide something of value to your most loyal email subscribers.

This article originally appeared on Jumplead.

The post 8 Ways to Delight and Reward Your Email Subscribers appeared first on Relevance.

Video presents one of the greatest opportunities for content marketers seeking to gain visibility, increase engagement, and generate sales. eMarketer estimates that the number of online-video viewers in the US will increase by 22 million, reaching 204.6 million, by 2017. In addition, in December 2013, 80 percent of the US population viewed video content—accounting for over 50 billion video views. In order to properly incorporate video into your content marketing strategy, it’s essential that your business properly measure its campaigns from the start.

Here are the four video content marketing metrics that matter most:

1. Awareness

Most marketers associate video campaigns with driving awareness, as these campaigns generate metrics that are easy to monitor at the beginning of the video-marketing funnel. You can measure awareness by tracking views and calculating the average watch time of each video—the more time a viewer spends watching your company’s videos, the more aware of your message he or she is likely to be.

Growing awareness of your business through video can help establish your company as a thought leader, increase positive brand associations among your customers and drive more in-depth actions across the marketing funnel.

2. Engagement

The biggest difference between online videos and TV advertisements is the level of engagement your business is able to generate from your audience. Through video content marketing campaigns, it’s possible to monitor actions that viewers perform as a direct result of watching your videos. So, once you’ve got a handle on your view-related data, analyze engagement metrics such as shares, comments and likes.

Engagement with your video content can be spurred through online promotions and paid advertising—once successful, it can drive earned media around your videos that, in turn, leads to a larger audience and long-term results from viewers. Platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia offer robust analytics that can help better attribute the engagement prompted by your videos.

3. Performance

The term “earned media” describes views and other publicity that your organization earns through (typically organic) promotion. Earned media lift occurs when such views beget further organic views and interactions as a result of your promotional efforts. Because this chain of events increases your videos’ performances, it’s important that your organization measure it to enable you to better understand the impacts of your distribution strategies.

Earned views, subscribers, likes, and shares can help your organization better estimate the performance of your future video efforts when it comes to the earned media your campaigns will garner over time.

4. Conversions

Usually the most difficult metrics to quantify, conversions can help your organization better understand if your campaigns have provided more data points about your customers, generated sales, increased registrations, driven traffic to your web properties and more.

Your company can measure conversions sparked by your videos without being solely focused on the direct revenue growth your efforts generate. Conversion measurement enables your organization to gather leads and informative data points from your viewers on a regular basis.

By generating leads from your videos and creating a more complete profile of your viewership, your company will be able to grow its database of potential customers and better understand the preferences and habits of these leads as your team continues to build profiles of them. These comprehensive profiles can help your business tailor future video advertising and other messaging to their specific needs and interests, which, in turn, makes it easier for your videos to drive action from audiences in the future.

Which metrics have most effectively informed the measurement of your video marketing campaigns? Which metrics are your organization most focused on improving?

This article originally appeared on Skyword.

The post 4 Video Metrics To Make You a Better Marketer appeared first on Relevance.

Between company pages, showcase pages, groups and individual profiles, conversations are happening at scale on LinkedIn.

This extensive traffic often makes it more difficult to get your content seen on LinkedIn by your existing audience and new relevant users on the network.

Using sponsored updates is one of the most effective ways of increasing the reach of your content on LinkedIn to targeted users interested in the conversations your business is having.

A sponsored update is when your business boosts an existing update from your company or showcase page to a larger, targeted audience on the network to increase its visibility, drive more interactions, boost the amount of leads received and generate more traffic driven from a particular update.

Choose the Right Update to Sponsor

Before setting up your own sponsored update, take a look at some examples of successful sponsored updates from industry leaders like Dell, AIG, IBM, Citibank, Xerox, HubSpot and others.

To set up your own sponsored updates, visit LinkedIn’s campaign manager and select the “Sponsor an update” option. Title your campaign to help differentiate it from other ad campaigns you may decide to run in the future. Choose the company or showcase page this campaign is for and then select an update or updates you’ve shared in the past to sponsor from the list.

One mistake businesses often make is not choosing the right update to sponsor. This decision should not be taken lightly because you’re paying for this update to help market your business, while also providing a first impression of your business to particular LinkedIn users.

When spending your budget on LinkedIn advertising, choose to sponsor updates that include links to your original content that lives on your web properties.

This content should be snackable, helpful, engaging and require limited context about your business to understand its value and use when someone first sees it in their feed on LinkedIn.

Your content marketing has many goals, one of which is driving leads to convert into customers. Sponsored updates can help support this effort as long as you are choosing to sponsor updates that include links to resources like blog posts, articles, eBooks, infographics, videos, white papers and so on.

Sponsoring an update that features the content of others won’t help you reap the full benefits of your advertising budget.

Choose an update to sponsor that is properly optimized for all devices, which your team can check from the preview window at the bottom of the ad setup page on the LinkedIn campaign manager.

Check to see if the image, link and text used in your update is properly optimized for web, mobile devices and tablets to gain the most traction.

Visuals are an extremely important element to your updates, which is why it’s important to ensure they are rendering properly no matter where the update is viewed.

Target Your Ad to the Right Audience

From here, decide on the audience for your sponsored updates by targeting various demographics.

Your sponsored updates can target LinkedIn users by their location, companies, job title, school, skills, group, gender and age. By targeting a specific audience, you will limit the number of people who see your ad and thus, ensure that users who do it see it are relevant.

It’s recommended that your sponsored updates be targeted broadly in the beginning of your campaigns and then adjusted to be more specific as they continue to perform with your LinkedIn audience.

Be strategic about location. Limit the reach of your ads to the continent where your customers are located to avoid sharing ads in places without a thriving, active LinkedIn customer base.

Next, think about industry. Target your update to the industry you want to reach to ensure relevant professionals are seeing your content in their feeds.

But, don’t go overboard. If you ad is too targeted with many different specifications than your audience may not be big enough to drive any results from your sponsored updates.

Start small with your targeting on LinkedIn by focusing on just location and industry and then scale your targeting to become more specific as your ads begin to gain traction and for future campaigns.

Experiment with the content you’ve sponsored and the targeting features to learn what works and what doesn’t with your audience on LinkedIn.

Properly Budget for Your Campaign

Your company can choose to pay for your campaign based on when someone clicks on your update or pay every time your update is shown (cost per 1,000 impressions).

While there are certainly valid reasons to run your campaigns on a cost per impression or CPM basis (to increase brand awareness for example), the majority of your sponsored updates should be measured on a cost per click or CPC basis.

It’s important that your sponsored updates drive interactions with your content, not simply a view of your ad and no action.

Measuring the success of your campaign on a CPC basis ensures that you’re paying for users who are actually visiting your LinkedIn page, viewing your content, interacting with your updates and taking action with your business.

These interactions on your sponsored updates are what actually drive results for your business, which is why they are worthwhile to pay for over impressions.

Choose the Appropriate Length of a Campaign

The length of your campaign with sponsored updates will vary depending on your goals and budget, but as a general rule, run a campaign for at least two weeks to see tangible results.

Running a campaign for less than two weeks doesn’t allow your ads to garner the visibility they deserve with your audience.

Depending on the lifespan of the content featured in an update, it can be promoted for as long as your team sees fit, but it’s important to vary your ads on LinkedIn. Ads tend to be ignored and no longer interesting to your audience if they are repeated over a long period of time.

When planning to run a sponsored update for a long period of time, ensure the content featured in the update is evergreen and not time sensitive.

It’s recommended that the same ads run no longer than a month before focusing on sponsoring different updates from your pages.

Measure Your Results

Pay attention to what’s working and consistently try to duplicate your most successful sponsored updates campaigns.

The campaign manager offers an analytics dashboard to inform your company about how your campaigns are performing, illustrating the ROI of your content efforts on LinkedIn.

Each of your LinkedIn updates shared from your page also feature metrics at the very bottom to highlight the impressions, clicks, interactions and overall engagement acquired organically and through sponsoring to give quick oversight into the success of your campaigns.

What tactics has your organization found successful with sponsored updates? How has your organization grown your audience on LinkedIn?

This article originally appeared on iAcquire.

The post Increase Your Reach With LinkedIn Sponsored Updates In 5 Easy Steps appeared first on Relevance.

It’s critical that you continually move past your job description and contribute to the industry conversation on a larger scale. Without doing so, you risk blending in as “just another marketer” in a very crowded and noisy profession.

What Does It Mean To Be A Thought Leader?

Building thought leadership throughout your career is a helpful way of differentiating yourself from those around you. A thought leader is someone regarded as an authority in his or her field — someone other professionals in the field look up to. It’s a term first coined 21 years ago in the pages of Strategy+Business, the publication from consulting firm Booz & Company.

Through consistent education of other marketing professionals, you’ll slowly be recognized as a leader in your area of expertise. Since the marketing industry is so vast, there are many areas of expertise that a professional can become familiar with and really own—like wearable tech, social media marketing, mobile advertising and more.

Education is the key to establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field, which can be executed in a multitude of ways through different forms of content and media. How each individual establishes thought leadership depends on skill set, interests and – most of all – comfort level with specific subject matter. Much like networking online today, it’s important to test different techniques to see what works best for you and what resonates well with others.

Try one (or a few) of these approaches to help establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of marketing expertise.

Write Consistently

One of the best ways to contribute to the conversation in the marketing industry — and build your credibility at the same time — is through writing about marketing news, strategies, your perspective, industry trends and more.

The writing you’re doing to help build conversations around you as a professional should live in a couple of different places to help reach different audiences interested in what you’re saying about the marketing world. A marketer should attempt a combination of writing on a personal blog, writing for an employer’s blog and for third-party publications through guest blogging and syndication to get the most reach.

To begin, start blogging on your own website — but do it consistently to build your credibility, confidence and writing style. That will prepare you for writing for your employer and eventually third-party publications.

Participate in Speaking Engagements

Not everyone is a good writer or enjoys writing. Nevertheless, there are plenty of opportunities to build thought leadership through public speaking as a way to share your expertise.

Whether you’re speaking with an audience in person at a conference, online through YouTube, Google+ Hangouts or on a TV segment, you’ll be able to articulate your unique perspective on the industry. Look for speaking opportunities at a local Meetup, a business association, a well-known conference like SXSW and more to get in front of the right audience of other professionals interested in marketing.

Each opportunity a professional can take to help market himself as a thought leader is a step in the right direction since each appearance or article offers promotion for more interviews, speaking engagements, and guest author opportunities. It’s a virtuous circle.

Facilitate Networking Opportunities

As a marketing professional today, there’s always a fear of becoming obsolete due to industry changes. Many professionals attend networking events in order to grow their professional connections and remain relevant on the latest trends, platforms, companies and ideas.

However, thought leaders not only attend networking events but they help create and host them to foster connections in the larger marketing community and further grow their personal brands. Take the initiative and start your own Meetup, Twitter chat, Google+ Hangout series or conference related to your industry. They’ll be of value to other members in the marketing community.

Melinda Emerson is an expert on small business success and is referred to as the Small Biz Lady on Twitter, where she started the #SmallBizChat in 2009. The chat reaches 2.5 million Twitter users every week as Emerson, participants and guest experts discuss how to grow as a small business. The chat has become a resource for small business owners, a means of connecting small business professionals and a way to grow Emerson’s personal brand as a successful online marketer.

Starting a networking event online or offline about your area of expertise can help better associate your personal brand with your niche. It’s an effective way to grow your network, learn from others in the field and stay relevant on emerging trends; but it’s also a powerful way to lead the conversation about your industry.

Use Social Media to Answer Questions

Offline thought leadership opportunities are arguably more effective than online, since the speaker is presenting in front of a live audience rather than being in front of a computer. But online platforms and tools allow marketers to build thought leadership at a scale like never before.

First, visit social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora to look for questions about your expertise in marketing and then answer them in real time on these networks. Consistently do so across social media to associate your expertise as a professional with the topics you’d like to be an expert in, whether that’s mobile marketing, SEO, data analysis or another marketing discipline.

If you make a long-term commitment to answering the questions of others, it can propel you toward becoming a thought leader in a subject area. Take this Q&A approach to the next level by calling for a question-and-answer “office hours” on one of your social accounts. Once you’ve built an engaged following, frequently remind them you’re here to help and would love to answer some of their questions. Don’t think about what you’ll get in return; instead, experiment to see what you can do to help the greater marketing community around you.

What tactics and strategies have you found helpful when it comes to growing your personal brand and thought leadership?

This post originally appeared on Adknowledge.

The post How Marketers Can Build Thought Leadership appeared first on Relevance.

There’s been widespread coverage in Inc., the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Fast Company and many other publications that Facebook is now a pay-to-play platform because paid advertising has become entirely necessary to ensure your messaging is regularly seen on the social network.

According to AdAge, even Facebook admits to a diminished focus on organic content from page posts:

“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

However, we’ve seen this kind of thing before when search engine optimization lost some of its luster with the growing prevalence of pay-per-click advertising. In the end, these are all marketing channels that must monetize to stay in business.

As a marketer or business owner, it’s important to begin incorporating paid advertising as part of your existing Facebook strategy to continue to see results from both your paid and organic efforts.

Everyone’s budgets are stretched thin, but of all the social media channels available for businesses today, it’s important to apply your advertising spend to Facebook since the network commands the largest and most nuanced audience on the web.

According to Pew Research, 90 percent of Twitter users, 93 percent of Instagram users, 87 percent of Pinterest users and 83 percent of LinkedIn users use Facebook. If you’re trying to reach your audience with the right messaging, Facebook is where your social advertising budget should start.

Here’s what it takes to properly balance your Facebook strategy to better incorporate organic and paid content.

1. Update your page daily with organic content, with paid opportunities in mind.

Your Facebook page should still be updated on a regular basis with content relevant to your audience’s interests since it’s still one of your main content marketing hubs.

It’s important to maintain your organic reach as much as possible by sharing a variety of content in different forms, including the feedback of your following, experimenting with the best times to post and establishing the right frequency of posting from your page.

Typically, the rule of thumb here is to share content one to three times a day during the week and a few times over the weekend from your Facebook page, but it’s important that your organization finds what works best with your audience through extensive experimentation.

When experimenting with content shared on your Facebook page, keep in the back of your mind that this content can be boosted through paid advertising and presented to a much larger audience on the social network.

When sponsoring previously published posts, be sure that they have a direct impact on helping your organization achieve its goals with social media, since you’re spending your budget to deliver this content to a larger audience.

If this post features your original content, product or service offering, link to your website or a recent promotion. That makes it far more valuable to apply your advertising budget to boosting this type of post.

While it’s important to occasionally share the content of others on your social channels, never pay to promote a Facebook post that features someone else’s content. Your budget should drive a strong ROI for your business, not pay to boost the influence of another individual or organization.

2. Organic posts should have broader appeal, while paid content should focus on niche audiences.

It’s important that all of your content shared on Facebook be relevant to your audience.

When posting content from your Facebook page to be found organically in the News Feed, it should be of relevance to a broader demographic since a majority of your audience will likely see this content.

Most businesses have a few demographics that make up their audience, which require a variety of messaging to suit their needs and interests.

Focus on a broader appeal when it comes to the content shared on your Facebook page since everyone can see a majority of these posts, but narrow the specific nuances of each demographic that makes up your audience when it comes to your Facebook ads.

Use Facebook ads to target your various audience personas with specific messaging meant to drive conversions, since they are the only group of people on Facebook who can see these types of ads.

Whether you’re targeting customers who respond to sales and discounts or you’re targeting users of your mobile app, Facebook ad campaigns should be designed to reach a specific audience with tailored messaging.

3. Match organic and paid Facebook campaigns to different parts of the funnel.

In addition to remaining broad with your organic Facebook posts and focusing on the specific messaging of your different audiences with your paid advertising, match your Facebook campaigns to different parts of the conversion funnel.

Your Facebook posts distributed organically in the News Feed should focus on top-of-the-funnel concerns like driving awareness, pushing traffic to your content, encouraging engagement with your brand’s Facebook page and other “low touch” actions.

The goal of your organic Facebook content is to introduce users to your organization, its content, and offerings in an effort to slowly build trust and begin to move prospects down the conversion funnel one post at a time.

Using Facebook website Custom Audiences targeting and other features offered by Facebook’s paid advertising solutions, your business will be able to zero-in on customers at all points across the funnel with relevant messaging.

For example, targeting an existing subscriber of your email list with an ad related to recent shopping habits on your website will help you craft a more timely and relevant ad in an effort to create a conversion.

The targeting capabilities of Facebook advertising allow your organization to focus on those who have interacted with your business before, those prospects close to making a conversion, and existing customers or other audiences similar to your current customer base.

When it comes to your paid campaigns on Facebook, focus on reaching audiences further down the funnel.

4. Analyze success with organic or paid to fuel future campaigns.

Both your organic and paid Facebook campaigns can guide your organization’s strategy when trying to find an appropriate publishing balance by planning to be spontaneous.

Since your organic content efforts are free, there’s more of an opportunity to survey your audience and see what works and what doesn’t. In most cases, when something doesn’t work on Facebook, the audience just doesn’t see it, which really doesn’t cost your company anything aside from time and effort.

If you’re looking to test the waters with new messaging or a new type of content, see how it performs organically in Facebook’s News Feed before paying for its distribution.

Consistently monitoring what’s working organically will help give your team insight into which content to sponsor and share with a larger like-minded Facebook audience.

When it comes to your paid efforts, this gives your team the opportunity to get insight from users outside your existing Facebook following and customer base. These fresh data points can help give your team a new perspective on the content you’re distributing organically on Facebook.

How is your organization managing the balance between your organic Facebook posts and your paid advertising on the network? Is your strategy generally consistent or does it regularly change depending on the feedback from your campaigns?

This post originally appeared on AdKnowledge.

The post Developing a Pay-to-Play Strategy: How to Create a Balanced Facebook Publishing Schedule with Organic and Paid Content appeared first on Relevance.