How you can save 99% on the costs of content promotion

Many of you content marketers wish to publish better content on a more frequent basis. In order for your content to grab your target group’s attention, paid content promotion is now a bitter necessity. What does content promotion cost, does the costs outweigh the revenues and is there a cheaper alternative to reach your target group?

Paid content promotion is known on LinkedIn as Sponsored Content. It is an excellent opportunity to reach very focused business target groups. Using Sponsored Content, your posts appear on the homepage between organic updates of connections and companies.

The downside of Content Promotion

Advertising on LinkedIn is usually more expensive than on Facebook or Twitter, and rates keep on rising. Adstage looked at no less than 4.3 million LinkedIn ad impressions during the first half of 2017, and calculated that the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) had increased by 15% to $ 8.39 and the cost per click with 8% to $6.5. The click ratio usually fluctuates between 1 to 2 percent.

How expensive is content promotion?

Is six to seven dollars per click expensive or worth the investment? That depends on what a click ultimately produces, and what can be gained from cheaper alternatives. What each click ultimately yields depends on your business. Where you should invest your money depends on what you’ll gain from considering alternatives. If you are open to this, you can save more than 99% on paid content promotion fees.

According to this article on Forbes, you should publish something new at least once or twice a week, at least if blogging is part of your content marketing strategy. Depending on your industry, an even more rigorous blogging effort may be expected.

Let’s assume your team posts twice a week. That’s 8 publications per month that we want to promote with Sponsored Content. We have made considerable efforts to produce high-quality content. One thousand readers per article we therefore find the minimum that we want to achieve in terms of reach. Based on that goal, we have determined that we must achieve 1,500 clicks per promoted message.

Well, what does this mean for the cost of promotion? At a click rate of 2% (on the high side, but let’s presume we have GREAT content) we have to reach 75,000 people to get 1,500 clicks. At a price of $ 6 per click, that costs us $ 9,000 per promoted message, $ 72,000 per month and $ 864,000 per year. This is a huge investment for to buy about a thousand readers per year.

You can achieve the same for less than one percent of what LinkedIn charges

Here’s how you can save on the costs of content promotion

We’ve already made this process work at a fraction of the cost. You can achieve the same for less than one percent of what LinkedIn charges, but you have to do something for that and which you may be a bit hesitant about. In order to get the same results for less, you have to appeal to your businesses ambassadors to share your content. These business ambassadors are your loyal customers, franchisees, members, fans or employees.

Suppose you let 150 colleagues share a post. All 150 colleagues have at least 500 connections on LinkedIn. In theory, you’ve reached a maximum of 75,000 people. In reality you’ve had a little less exposure, because a post is usually not seen by all connections. On the other hand, second degree connections will also see your message. Conservatively, assume that the reach per promoter is 60% of the number of contacts. To reach the same number of people as we would have reached paying for Sponsored Content (125,000), we need 250 colleagues to promote our content.

To reach the same number of people as we would have reached paying for Sponsored Content (125,000), we only need 250 colleagues to promote our content.

How do you get all those colleagues to share twice a week, eight times a month and 96 times a year?

That’s a good question, because most colleagues (and other ambassadors) are usually willing to help you with sharing, but in practice it is mostly a hassle. Asking once as a favor is generally all you’ll get, unless you’ve implemented a broad and time consuming sharing plan.

To maintain an effective marketing plan, you must have your ambassadors maintain a high volume of shares. To maintain this volume of shares, you must therefore ensure that sharing does not take any effort and can be automated on your ambassador’s behalf. That automation is possible is possible with our social sharing tool PostSpeaker. This tool allows ambassadors to automatically share your content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

How can my ambassadors automatically share?

First, invite colleagues with a large and valuable network to become promoters on Postpeaker. That means that they give you permission to — in this case — post messages via their LinkedIn account. They create an account for this and link their LinkedIn profile (without having to give their login details). Once your promotion team has assembled, you can compose and schedule messages. After you have scheduled your messages, promoters will be notified by email about what will be posted to their accounts. They are given the option to cancel or edit the text of your post. Therefore, your ambassadors will have full control, but won’t have to put any effort towards sharing.

Suppose I can get 250 colleagues on board, what does it cost?

Costs are variable based on the number of promoters you recruit! Regardless of the size of your marketing strategy, you can publish as many messages as you want. To achieve the same results you’d get with LinkedIn Sponsored Content in the example above, 250 promoters would cost $299 a month. For perspective, this is a fraction (0.4% to be exact) of the costs for Sponsored Content.

Money isnt everything. There are also disadvantages, right?

That’s right, there are two sides to every coin. The question is whether the benefits, including the enormous savings, outweigh the disadvantages. Let’s take a look at the pluses and minuses.

Cons:

• You will have to get enough people associated with your organization to become promoters and thereby give permission to publish messages via their social media accounts. Support and enthusiasm is essential. It will takes time and requires good preparation.
• You do not have the extensive targeting options that LinkedIn offers. However, through Postpeaker you can analyze over time which promoters ensure the highest engagement and you have insight into the number of clicks and conversions. Based on that you can fine-tune your promotion team.

Pros:

• A message from a relationship has more impact because it is seen as more reliable, credible and more relevant than a sponsored message.
• You can also publish on Twitter and Facebook viaPostpeaker. If your promoters also link their Twitter and / or Facebook accounts, you can further increase your reach.
• The organic range increases over time. Because the promoters now regularly share messages, more people are going to follow them.
• You can publish as many messages as you want for the monthly amount.
• You you can save time by publishing and promoting your message at once (instead of using a social media management tool and the LinkedIn Ad Manager).
• You save considerably on the costs for paid content promotion.

Your ambassadors have their own, valuable reach with their followers and connections. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that network?

If you want to save on the costs of content promotion and have enthusiastic ambassadors who are happy to help you with sharing, Postpeaker is an effective and extremely advantageous way of getting your content to the attention of your target audience.