As most bloggers know, nurturing leads is an amazing retargeting tactic.

But, it’s seldom used effectively. Since most marketers know the website pages already viewed by their prospects, it’s easy for them to place high-quality leads within a pre-determined workflow.

This might consist of a few emails, or some unique content that’s designed to instill positive pressure on those prospects to keep moving forward – ensuring that the messages received are appropriate for the different stages of the customer journey.

This basically means marketers don’t want to be sending out welcome messages again and again. You need to take a measured approach when creating workflows to ensure that they support the place where your prospects are along the customer journey.

Not only that, but they also need to have the intent of helping them to take the next step. As you probably already know, over 96% of the people who visit your website are not ready to buy anything from you after that first interaction.

Bearing that in mind, you need to build relationships with those individuals who show interest in your brand in order to nudge them to purchase your products or services down the road.

At this point, you no longer have to work hard to make them like you. They have already expressed their interest by signing up for your list. All you have to do now is just not mess it up.

But how exactly do you do that?

It’s important to think about the way we retain information online these days.

Our brains are incredible filters – particularly when you consider the fact that on average, each individual is assaulted with over 5,000 advertising and marketing messages each and every day.

The brain simply screens it out because absorbing and processing that much information probably wouldn’t be good for us…

Consumers these days go through most of their day blind to the marketing blitz and the supersaturation of ads that they are exposed to everywhere.

They don’t notice a large percentage of the marketing and advertising and their attention spans have dwindled to almost imperceptible levels.

So how do you break through those internal filters your audience has?

By using amplification!

Our ability to filter out messages that are not essential is important because without it we would never get anything done. This is where amplification comes in.

As a marketer, there are many ways you can amplify content to help you target more potential customers.

What is Content Amplification?

This is just a more proactive means of putting the content you create to work so you can have sophisticated conversations that help to move your audience faster and more efficiently through the customer journey.

Without amplified content, it’s almost like crossing your fingers, hoping visitors to your website will somehow stumble across your highest-converting content.

With content amplification, you’ll be able to expand the reach of your content, targeting audiences when they need it and where they need it the most. When done effectively, amplified content helps you reach a wider, more targeted audience than the content would on its own.

For instance, think of the Facebook ads you sometimes see, or posts from the people you follow on sites like LinkedIn – or even the tweets you get from the influencers on Twitter.

These are different strategies used to amplify content, created to help display content not only in front of more people but also in front of the right people.

Different Types of Effective Content Amplification

1. Content Amplification Using Owned Media

A unified amplification plan across both owned and paid media is vital if you want to reach the largest possible audience.

Owned media amplification refers to the existing channel assets you own. This is any content over which you have complete control.

So, for instance, if someone completes a search, visits your website, but they don’t convert, you should then put them in a specific segment of your audience where you can create a campaign that reacts to that person’s next question in the search engines.

The copy needs to grab the attention of that user otherwise, it will be ineffective.

This is regardless of whatever owned media channels you are using – whether it’s your website, email newsletter, branded blog posts, social posts, or any other type of media.

Examples of Owned Media Amplification:

• Email marketing
• Consistent publishing of blogs
• Guest posting
• Free content syndication

2. Content Amplification Using Earned Media

Earned content amplification occurs whenever an external publisher is marketing your brand through social media, reviews on YouTube, news coverage, testimonial videos, backlinks, or any other non-owned channels.

You can think of earned media is a big thumbs up to show that you’re creating great content.

If influencers are willing to promote any content you create, it’s most likely because they really believe in your product or service – and audiences are aware of that.

That’s why over 90% of consumers trust recommendations from another individual over that of brands (even if they don’t know the person).

The main characteristic of earned media is that, as a marketer, you don’t have any control over it.

You don’t have much power over how things unfold and you can’t influence it. It’s happening because of your audience’s direct experiences with your brand, whether those experiences are positive or negative.

Examples of Earned Media Amplification:

• Free influencer marketing
• User-generated content
• Press coverage from events in the industry

3. Content Amplification Using Paid Media

Paid content amplification refers to a targeted, paid placement done on your brand’s behalf.

Using a paid marketing strategy helps you increase overall brand visibility by making use of existing audience engagement metrics to effectively drive traffic to targeted, sponsored content.

Paid amplification allows you to choose where, when, and the frequency with which your amplified content is displayed to your target audience most likely through social media and search.

It’s scary to think just how much Google and Facebook know about us, but this is actually great news for marketers.

You can simply pay for ad space on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or on Google search and then have your content served to a wide audience made up of those people who are most likely to become customers.

Examples of Paid Media Amplification:

• Posted Facebook posts
• Promoted tweets
• Instagram Ads
• Sponsored LinkedIn content
• Paid influencer marketing
• PPC through Google ads

The bottom line is, content amplification has massive use in each of the three forms of marketing.

Your goal needs to be to co-ordinate amplification efforts across all media formats so that you produce stronger results.

Listed below are some of the collective benefits you will get to enjoy by amplifying your content:

• More Traffic
• More Shares
• More Links
• More Conversations
• More Engagement
• More Leads
• More Sales
• More Revenue

When you amplify your content, you effectively accomplish the following:

• Optimize for one of Google’s top ranking factor: Back-links from relevant, reputable sources.
• Optimize for another of Google’s most important ranking factors: Direct website traffic from searchers, which shows Google that you are an authority.
• Incentivize strong user behavior, as well as signals for social engagement authority.
• Promote brand awareness and boost social lift.
• Generate guest posting potential and content syndication opportunities.
• Increase organic brand mentions.
• Generate more link-less back-link signals.

These are just some of the direct and indirect advantages of content amplification and they speak volumes about the importance of this practice.

Being able to reach your target audience on a wide variety of platforms helps you significantly increase the lifespan of each content assets you create, which ultimately offers up greater ROI potential for each piece of content.

How to Get The Most From Your Content

The main goal of amplifying content is to push it to the farthest and most targeted regions of the Internet.

If you want to measure how effective your approach is, here are a number of KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can track:

• Back-links
• Brand mentions
• Reviews and comments
• Click-through rate
• Follows, likes, shares, subscriptions
• Cost per lead
• Unique sessions
• Unique email open rates
• Direct website traffic
• Return visitors
• Email Forwards
• Domain authority
• Page authority

Depending on where your prospects are in the sales funnel, you’re able to customize your amplification activities to help you nurture leads appropriately. For instance:

At the top of the funnel, you have your awareness stage where you could create content that connects emotionally to your audience, creates product awareness, and encourages more research.

Some of the best tools for doing this include influencer marketing, digital PR, and paid social media.

At the consideration stage, your content may have a role of delivering product features, being helpful, specific, and helping customers to take the next step by giving them all the information they need to make a decision.

The best tools for this are paid search, organic search, and lead nurture.

At the decision stage, the role of your content may include promotions, creating urgency, offering value, and reassuring your prospects by addressing all their doubts.

Tools you can use include lead nurture, paid search, paid social, and influencer marketing.

At the nurture stage, your content’s role is to offer support, encourage feedback, offer incentives, and provide new product updates. Here you can use lead-nurture and organic social among other tools.

Being able to amplify the content you create across a variety of channels which help serve your business’s main goal by bringing your message directly to your prospect’s doorstep.

For someone who is just about ready to purchase a product or service, a well-timed email doubling down on the value you offer can help to spur a purchasing decision.

In a very similar way, running a paid ad on one of your branded keywords can be an extremely effective tool for targeting prospects that are still at the awareness stage or consideration stage.

As a marketer, it’s also important for you to understand that even if a paid ad helps to drive traffic to one of your high converting landing pages, or if a blog post that you wrote leads to a sale, both these examples are narrow in scope and highly variable.

Yes, you did an awesome job!

You amplified the content and achieve the desired effect. However, the goal was super-specific and it wasn’t completely transferable to each piece of content that you create.

Content amplification is fundamentally more about getting links and shares – goals that are easier to track, attribute success to, and ultimately much easier for you to replicate across the content you create.

Although amplification, by definition, means to make something louder or more intense, you shouldn’t think of it as being just about noise or volume. After all, when you consider just how much content is being produced on a daily basis and shared online, it can be mind-boggling.

So it’s not just about contributing to the noise, but targeted amplification can help you get more of your content in more of the right places for the right people to see.

Here are some statistics on the minefield of competition that content amplification can help you break out of:

• Every second, 6,000 tweets are sent
• Every 15 seconds, a new social media user goes online
• Every day, there are over 8 billion views of Facebook videos
• Every minute sees 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube
• Every month, they are over 70 million unique LinkedIn slide-share visitors
• Over half of the planet’s population has access to the Internet, and almost 90% of those online users have at least one social media account

If these figures made you break out in a cold sweat, don’t worry.

With targeted amplification your strategy will be a lot more effective than just posting anything and everything on all social networks then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

An effective content amplification strategy will help you generate more exposure from a fixed number of assets using just a couple of channels so you don’t have to spend all your time blowing up every social network.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published May 15th 2019