In PPC, con­tent mar­ket­ing is used fre­quent­ly for lead gen­er­a­tion, as well as for high-end con­sumer pur­chas­es that require research and time. When done cor­rect­ly, PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing is high­ly effec­tive at attract­ing and engag­ing your customers/audience and dri­ving more rev­enue. Here are six steps to suc­cess­ful PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing.

Step 1: Audit All Available Content

Before you can start pro­mot­ing con­tent in PPC, you need to fig­ure out what con­tent is avail­able. Resist the urge to jump in and start throw­ing con­tent assets into your PPC cam­paigns. Tak­ing the time to fig­ure out what con­tent you have will set you up for suc­cess. The con­tent audit con­sists of four steps:

• Iden­ti­fy your con­tent mar­ket­ing goals. What are you try­ing to achieve? Aware­ness, lead gen­er­a­tion, pub­lic rela­tions, some­thing else?
• Cre­ate a list of all avail­able con­tent. Include every piece of con­tent you have, even if you think you’ll nev­er use it in PPC.
• Note whether the con­tent is ever­green or time-sen­si­tive. This step will deter­mine how and when con­tent can be used.
• Include the for­mat in your con­tent list. Con­tent for­mat may seem irrel­e­vant, but it’s actu­al­ly impor­tant. You’ll want to know what types of con­tent per­form best for your busi­ness, so note that now.

When the audit is fin­ished, you’ll have a list of every­thing you can use (often called a bill of mate­ri­als or BOM) for PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing.

Step 2: Research Your Audience

Audi­ence research in PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing is as impor­tant as key­word research in search PPC. Not all con­tent will appeal to every seg­ment of your tar­get audi­ence, so it’s cru­cial to know what con­tent to serve to whom.

The audi­ence will also help you deter­mine which PPC chan­nels to use: search, Face­book, LinkedIn, Twit­ter, Insta­gram, etc. Where does your audi­ence hang out? Which engine tar­gets them the best?

Don’t for­get to seg­ment your audi­ence into buck­ets. You may want to con­sid­er using per­sonas to help you.

Your con­tent audit can also help here – you might have some con­tent geared at C‑level exec­u­tives, and oth­er con­tent geared at end users. Use this infor­ma­tion to help seg­ment your audi­ence in a way that will inform PPC cam­paign set­up.

Step 3: Determine Content Promotion Timing

With mar­ket­ing, tim­ing is every­thing. You’ll need a sched­ule that tells you when to pro­mote your con­tent. An edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar may be all you need – or you may need to devel­op your own cal­en­dar or sched­ule.

If you don’t have an edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar, you’ll need to think about what makes the most sense for your busi­ness. eCon­sul­tan­cy has a help­ful Peri­od­ic Table of Con­tent Mar­ket­ing that can help you fig­ure out when each type of con­tent should run.

Step 4: Map Content To Your Buyer Journey

The buy­er jour­ney is an often-over­looked aspect of con­tent mar­ket­ing. The buy­er jour­ney is the stages a poten­tial buy­er goes through on their way to mak­ing a pur­chase deci­sion. The stages are com­mon­ly called aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, eval­u­a­tion, and decision/purchase, but there can be inter­me­di­ary steps in between as well.

Most con­tent is going to be suit­ed for one phase of the buy­er jour­ney. Overview videos and blog posts are usu­al­ly aware­ness con­tent. Solu­tion briefs, ebooks, and white papers fall into the con­sid­er­a­tion phase. Prod­uct demos and tri­als are deci­sion con­tent.

Map all the con­tent in your con­tent audit to the buy­er jour­ney. This step helps you deter­mine which chan­nels (social, search) the con­tent is best suit­ed for, and helps you craft ad copy.

Here’s a great exam­ple of the buy­er jour­ney from Rock­et Watch­er:

Step 5: Track & Integrate

Once you’ve mapped con­tent to the buy­er jour­ney, you’re almost ready to launch your PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. But first, you need to make sure you can track results. You’ll want to know how each piece of con­tent is per­form­ing across not only all PPC cam­paigns, but across oth­er mar­ket­ing as well.

The best way to track con­tent across chan­nels is by using a con­tent ID. Most con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems will assign a con­tent ID for you. You can also use the utm_content para­me­ter in Google Ana­lyt­ics to include a con­tent ID.

Make sure you’re track­ing not only the con­tent ID, but the type of con­tent and the buy­er jour­ney phase. Col­lect­ing this data will enable you to slice and dice in many dif­fer­ent ways: which con­tent per­forms best at each phase, which type of con­tent per­forms best, etc.

Use this data to opti­mize your PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and to inform new con­tent cre­ation.

Step 6: Measure & Test

The final step in PPC con­tent mar­ket­ing is to actu­al­ly mea­sure results. It’s crit­i­cal to think about how you’re going to track con­tent per­for­mance across chan­nels. While some assets will do well in cer­tain chan­nels and poor­ly in oth­ers, some assets will do well across the board. That’s the con­tent you want to focus on, not only from a pro­mo­tion stand­point, but to inform new con­tent devel­op­ment.

For instance, if a white paper does well across the board, you might want to write a sim­i­lar report about anoth­er prod­uct or ser­vice you offer. You could cre­ate an info­graph­ic based on the white paper. You could cre­ate an overview video about it.

Don’t for­get to look at asset types to see what your audi­ence responds to. Do they pre­fer videos, or do they like to read and share white papers? Think­ing about how to track this data at the out­set will enable you to devel­op a sys­tem enables you to make data-dri­ven deci­sions.

Are you com­bin­ing your con­tent mar­ket­ing and PPC mar­ket­ing efforts to attract and engage more con­sumers?