How much money are you wasting on paid content promotion?

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How do you get more traffic from content marketing? You can either create more or better content, or you can distribute that content better. In the latter case, it’s likely you’ve considered paid content promotion. And rightly so: if your content performs, it makes sense to promote it, right? The thing is, does it perform? The whole ROI equation for paid content promotion is in that “if”. Promoting content that doesn’t perform is wasting money while promoting content that performs is money well spent.

“Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half” said John Wanamaker. Do you know?

1. Allocating your paid content promotion budget in a smart way

Let’s take an example. Say these are the results you typically get from your content over a given period:

You produced 13 pieces of content
They generated 9,000 visits
Of which 640 leads generated

It’s tempting to say each piece generated an average of 692 views and 49 leads. But averages are misleading. In reality, not all content is created equal. Content performance is not evenly distributed: you have some wins, some fails, etc… In reality, your content performance probably looks more like this:

Type of content	Volume	Traffic / piece	Conversion rate	Traffic	Leads
Top-performing	2	2000	10.00%	4000	400
Average	9	500	5.00%	4500	225
Low-performing	2	250	3.00%	500	15
Total / average	13	692	7.1%	9000	640

So now let’s say you want to double the performance of your content with paid content promotion. If you’re focused on the right content marketing analytics KPI’s, it’s likely that lead generation is the stat you want to double. So let’s see the various ways you have to generate 1,280 leads with the same 13 pieces of content.

Evenly spread your budget on each piece of content

What a lot of marketers tell us they do is that they spend a similar amount of money on each piece. This rule has the benefit of being super easy. But is it efficient?

If you’re paying $1 per click and you’re spreading a $11,725 over each of the 13 pieces of content, you’ll get exactly the result of adding 640 leads to double the initial number. In detail:

Each piece gets exactly $902 worth of promotion.
Each piece gets 902 more clicks

In terms of results, this is what you’ll get:

Traffic	Number of pieces	Budget	Additional traffic from paid	Conversion rate	Additional leads from paid
Top-performing	2	$1,804	1,804	10%	180
Average	9	$8,117	8,117	5%	406
Low-performing	2	$1,804	1,804	3%	54
Total / average	13	$11,725	11,725		640

Is the budget you’ll need with this method. Let’s compare it with other methods that use data to optimize results.

Allocate budget according to traffic performance

The most common statistic marketers measure is traffic, so it’s tempting to do just that. In real life, it’s hard to optimize this in real time because you can’t predict how content will perform. More on this later. Let’s imagine though that this is feasible and that you can allocate paid promotion budget based on traffic performance. You would spend money to double the organic traffic generated by each post. This would require you to:

Buy 2,000 clicks for each top performing piece to double its 2,000 organic visits.
Buy 500 clicks for each average piece to double its 500 organic visits.
Buy 250 clicks for each low-performing piece to double its 250 organic visits.

Traffic	Number of pieces	Budget	Additional traffic from paid	Conversion rate	Additional leads from paid
Top-performing	2	$4,000	4000	10%	400
Average	9	$4,500	4500	5%	225
Low-performing	2	$500	500	3%	15
Total / average	13	$9,000	9000		640

So now you’ve only spent $9,000 to achieve the same results, saving 23% of your budget

Allocate budget according to lead generation performance

Now let’s see what this would look like if the KPI that matters to you is lead generation. Again, there’s some difficulty in doing this and I’ll cover that below. But let’s say you knew which are the 2 top performing posts from a lead generation standpoint. What would you do?

Simple: bet everything on red! Allocate your entire budget on these 2 posts.

The results would now look like this:

Traffic	Number of pieces	Budget	Additional traffic from paid	Conversion rate	Additional leads from paid
Top-performing	2	$6,400	6,400	10%	640
Average	9			5%
Low-performing	2			3%
Total / average	13	$6,400	9000		640

Now you’re only spending $6,400 to double your content performance, a 45% savings on your initial budget.

In summary:

This model is of course oversimplified. But no matter how sophisticated the model is, in real life, you’ll have the same phenomenon. The way you allocate your paid content promotion budget makes a huge difference in the results you get.

2. How to leverage content marketing intelligence to stop wasting paid content promotion dollars

So you might be wasting up to 45% of your paid content promotion dollars by not allocating it properly. How can you fix that?

To do the right allocation, you need data. You need to know as much information in real-time as possible to understand how your content is performing. And not just from a traffic generation standpoint: from a lead generation standpoint. This is precisely why you need predictive insights – or what we call content marketing intelligence – to guide your promotion efforts.

Here’s how it works.

Without any real-time predictive insights on how your content performs, you’re probably doing this:

What content marketing intelligence enables you to do is that:

Content marketing intelligence technology starts analyzing your content in real-time as soon as you’ve done some organic promotion. This means data on traffic but also leads generated for each piece of content. From there you can make several decisions: update or fix content or amplify its impact with paid promotion. So you’re not spending money on the low-performing content – only on the top-performing ones. And you can repeat this indefinitely as the data evolves.

As we’re consistently suffering from information overload (or content shock), marketers are fighting for limited attention from their target audience. To overcome that and get results, it makes sense to pay to play. But by doing so without having the technology to gather the data, you’re wasting a big part of this budget. With the predictive insights that content marketing intelligence system brings, you can allocate your budget dynamically on your topic performing content and generate much better ROI from paid content promotion.

If you want to get 30 effective techniques to master content marketing along with valuable insights from 10+ influencers like Mark Schaefer, Rebecca Lieb, Lee Odden, Jason Miller or Ian Cleary, download our free eBook now!