In many organizations, digital advertising and content marketing have little overlap. They require different skills and knowledge, so they’re often managed by distinct employees, teams, or even departments.
While content teams tend to produce lead magnets for the advertising team to use in lead generation, that’s usually where the coordination ends. But there are more opportunities for ads to give your content a boost and more ways content can support your ad campaigns.
Let’s take a look at some other ways ads and content can work together.
Ads Can Help You Identify What Content to Create
Search advertising is highly competitive. A lot of work goes into identifying the keywords that are most important to your brand and most successful at generating sales. These are the terms you and your competition spend big bucks to rank for. But you know what else shows up in those search results, right below all the ads? Content.
Landing pages, products pages, and even blog posts show up on the same search results pages you pay to advertise on. Your search advertising team already knows the terms that have the highest dollar value to your brand. They know what’s most likely to lead to sales. So why not produce a piece of content that belongs in the organic search results, too?
It could be as simple as optimizing a product page, or creating a new page that frames your services differently. Do it right, and you can get some of that high-value traffic for a one-time investment.
Between your ad team and your content team, you could put your brand on the same search results page twice!
Content Helps You Create a Retargeting Audience
Smart content gives people a reason to visit your website. It helps them solve problems, reach goals, and explore concepts they care about. Whether you distribute that content on social media, through an email list, or you simply create content that ranks in Google, over time, this content helps produce a large pool of people who have visited your website–which you can then retarget with Google Ads or Facebook Ads using a tag or pixel.
Remarketing campaigns can be highly effective. You’re showing ads to people who have already seen your website, so they’re more familiar with your brand than the average person. But if you don’t get much traffic, your retargeting audience will be small, and your results will be limited.
Developing a healthy stream of regular content feeds directly into remarketing campaigns, giving your advertising team more audiences to work with.
Ads Can Help Content Generate Value Sooner
When you produce content that’s designed to rank in Google (such as an article explaining benevolence funds or a guide to creating a church budget), it takes time for that content to climb the search results. Google has to see how people react when they see that content to determine if it’s a good page to send their users to.
But in the meantime, you have a page that puts your thought leadership on display, educates your audience about important concepts, and naturally leads to a relevant call-to-action. It feeds right into your marketing funnel.
Content advertising is the practice of using search ads and social ads to drive more traffic to your content, and smart marketing teams use this strategy to get value from their content right away instead of waiting for it to rank.
Ads Can Get More Traffic to Your Most Valuable Content
Just as you can use content to capitalize on your highest-value advertising keywords, you can use ads to double-down on your highest-value content.
It may seem strange to advertise content to drive conversions, but if your articles, case studies, videos, and other content naturally leads to relevant call-to-actions, some of them may outperform a landing page. Plus, this content delivers value to the visitor upfront. Gating your content naturally results in fewer people reading and engaging with it.
If you have a piece of content that generates leads and sales on its own, consider giving it a boost with your advertising spend.
Ads and Content Are Better Together
There are a lot of ways ads and other content can complement each other. But organizations rarely take advantage of this synergy. If you’re looking for ways to get a leg up on the competition, it might be worth exploring how these teams and channels build on each other’s strengths.
