By Alan Coleman on 9 Aug 2013
Leveraging PPC to generate traffic for your fantastic content.
You can read part 1 of this sequence of posts on integrating PPC & Content Marketing by clicking here Traffic breeds Traffic. The more eyeballs you can get to your content the more it will be linked to, liked, shared, tweeted, +1'd etc, which means your content is getting more visibility and you are becoming more authoritative in eye's of the mighty "G", meaning all your content climbs Google and thus the cycle continues. So there are great advantages in kickstarting this cycle by using PPC to do what PPC does best, get interested people to your content TODAY. Let's take an example from our very own Wolfgang Digital Blog: The Fundamental Rule of Marketing in the Age of Big Data. Not so long ago we took a look at our blog traffic in analytics & saw our most popular blog post that month was our musings on Dumb Display Advertising v Smart Display Advertising, boldly titled "Display Ads Are A Crock Of Shit".
The fundamental rule of marketing in the age of big data is that we allow our users to make our marketing decisions for us. So if the "Display Ads Are A Crock Of Shit" post is proving to be a massive hit with our online audience, well that's reason enough for us to amplify its reach via PPC.
Search First stop is search. We use AdWords Search to get our ads in front of people who are searching for display advertising. The nice part about this is that while most advertisers on Google page 1 are giving the hard sell on their fantastic display offering, we are offering insights into the pitfalls hurting display advertisers and communicating our philosophy on display to the searcher. This is a far better way to start a conversation than jumping into the cold hard sell. 
Display Next up, within Google AdWords we created a contextually targeted display campaign targeting webpages with keywords such as "display advertising". We created ads that looked like this (give it a roll over there):
[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.wolfgangdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Large-rectangle.swf" width="336" height="280" targetclass="flashmovie"]
[/kml_flashembed]
So a person who is reading an article on display advertising can see our highly targeted ad, click on it and be brought directly to the relevant blogpost. If you don't have the creative resources to whip up some banner ads try using the the display ad builder, ugly as funk but functional. We got a great laugh from using display ads to market our "Display Ads Are a Crock of Shit" blogpost, Alanis Morisette eat your heart out. Of course those who read the full post will know that although we believe there are very smart display options out there, most brands are missing them. Results Plenty more targeted traffic to our most popular blogpost. So we won a lot of new blog readers and expanded our audience. You may have noticed in the screengrabs above our display advertising webpage (not the blog post) is now very prominent in the Organic SERPs. So we've seen an SEO benefit to other display webpages on our website (SCORE!). This is in line with the noises coming out of Google that organic results are now the result of creating great digital marketing experiences. Part 3 to follow soon.
