Amplifying Your Content Performance with Content Distribution Platforms

At iProspect, we are constantly looking for innovative tactics to deliver our client's content to the right audience. Nowadays, as many already know, a good content strategy makes all the difference in a brand's digital performance. The content discovery and distribution platforms have now become essential to amplify the reach of your content on the web. There are several platforms already out there including Taboola and OutBrain. Lets take a look at how they work.

Drive traffic and increase engagement

It is never said enough: the creation of quality content is the first step in a sustainable content strategy. Once the content is published on your blog, you'll need the lever of all the relevant channels to ensure its performance. By submitting your content to a distribution platform, it will be suggested as a recommendation at the end of articles on the sites of hundreds of publishers, including several renowned: Huffington Post, Time Magazine or CNN, to name a few. 

One of the advantages is that you do not offer advertising but only relevant content to the user. In addition, through effective targeting algorithms, this content will be distributed to a targeted audience engaged and interested in consuming the content of your site.

Just as in Paid Search, there will be a need to optimize your landing pages in order to brilliantly fill your campaign goals. It is even possible to do A/B Testing your ads: Taboola and Outbrain allow you to create multiple variations titles/images to a single URL, an undeniable advantage to track what performs best. 

The tracking code offered by both platforms will allow you to monitor your goals. Of course, it must be completed with the amazing Google Analytics.

In addition to the traffic generated by the promotion of your articles, these platforms allow you to acquire a good number of links and social signals. It's simple, the more your content is seen, the greater your chances that it is quoted on the web.

To whom is this addressed to?

Before you begin, it is important to define your goals. Are you looking for traffic or would you generate events on your site? These platforms are reserved for websites with a very high content strategy (post regularly to blog, interesting content etc ...)

The presence of a blog is almost mandatory since Taboola for example prohibits you to promote your product pages. However it will require a minimum monthly budget of $ 2,250 to $ 5,000 for Taboola and Outbrain. These amounts will allow you to generate consistent and quality traffic on your blog posts.

Case Study

One of our clients has set up a very interesting on-site content strategy by publishing an article every other day on his blog. The B2B industry is a challenge because the content is less focused on the end consumer, which significantly reduces the pool of potential customers. We still wanted to test whether the performance was going to deliver despite this fact and the results were very interesting.

Client Objective: Increase in traffic so as to increase the events on the site (social sharing, subscription to the newsletter, contact form) while working on the brand awareness.

We decided to gradually increase the daily budget while gradually reducing the CPC in order to keep a high CTR. With a daily budget of $ 120 we reached a peak of 340 clicks. It was of course possible to block the editors on which we did not want to appear in order to greatly increase the relevance and the actions on the client's site.

The target for the month of November has largely been achieved since we were able to record an increase of around 11% of total conversions on the site.

These new platforms are a great bargain to complement a good on-site strategy. Although they are based on a PPC model, the SEO perfectly finds its benefits as you now have the ability to increase the odds of acquiring fresh links while generating actions on your site. Unfortunately no content amplification platform exists for Quebec Francophones, although we have heard of some projects through the grape vine!

Taboola still remains our favorite for its low cost per click, easy to extract the number of reports and powerful algorithm targeting sites strongly linked to the customer's theme. Nevertheless you will enjoy the retargeting options offered by both platforms.

This article was originally written by Alexandre Delierre.