7 Surprising Ways to Scale Your Marketing Efforts in 2016

This article was originally published on Growth Everywhere.

Did you know that there are only 7 Internet software/services with over 1 billion monthly active users (MAU)?

Just take a look at this:

If you’re looking for growth in your business, the right places to look are where your target audience is already hanging out. You probably won’t be able to advertise to people directly on MS Office or Windows, but you do have a shot at finding them on platforms such as Google Search, Facebook, and YouTube.

In this post, we’ll give you 7 surprising ways to scale your revenues using paid advertising this year. Some of them involve the channels above, some don’t.

Remember, it’s about finding your right target audience.

Ready? Let’s go!

1. YouTube Advertising

I’ve been preaching YouTube advertising for the past few years and I still feel strongly about it (after all, we were able to add about $6M in annual run rate for a company just solely on YouTube ads). Here are the key points on why I think it’s particularly effective:

• It’s not saturated yet.
• It’s a pretty big search engine—the #2 largest search engine in the world.
• Clicks are cheap—each view on YouTube can range from $.01 to $.15.
• Like Google AdWords, you can advertise to searcher intent—contrast this with Facebook, where a lot of times an advertiser is trying to generate demand for a new product that people might not know about. Search advertising helps get the message in front of the right people at the right time.
• The advertising platform is built within Google AdWords—that means all the flexibility and targeting options that you’re used to are available for you.

You can read more on YouTube advertising in my previous posts here:

• The Serious Marketer’s Guide To Getting Started With YouTube Advertising
• Entrepreneur Magazine – 4 Mistakes You’re Probably Making with YouTube Advertising 

2. Gmail Advertising

Gmail advertising is a relatively new format that Google brought back recently and it seems like it’s here to stay this time. We’ve seen click-through rates as high as 75% and clicks as low as $.10.

But what about conversions?

On a client campaign targeting a $150 cost per acquisition (CPA), we were able to acquire leads for as low as $7.

You read that right.

You can read our Gmail advertising guide to learn how to get started.

3. Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook Lead Ads is a relatively new format and for the time being, it’s mobile-only.
Here’s what it looks like:

The concept is simple:

• You see an ad on mobile and click the call-to-action.
• A mobile form pops up where you can fill out information such as Name, E-mail, URL, Budget, etc.
• After you confirm, you have the option of clicking on whatever target destination the advertiser has specified.

On a recent campaign, we compared Facebook Lead Ads to a conversion optimized campaign and here’s a small sample of the results for the same client that had a target CPA of $150:

On the conversion optimized campaign, our CPA was a little higher at $115.

What this all means is that Facebook Lead Ads is worth exploring further. On the surface level, it intuitively makes sense: if you’re able to fill out a form within the app, the conversion rate should be higher. However, your mileage may vary.

Here are two downsides to Facebook Lead Ads right now:

• It’s mobile only
• The leads come packaged in a CSV—you’ll need to manually export this every day or use a tool like ConnectLeads to connect your Facebook Lead Ads to your CRM or ESP.

4. Facebook Paid Content Promotion

One thing we truly believe is that you’re going to be seeing A LOT more paid content distribution. Facebook naturally likes it when people share content because people tend to engage with it by liking, commenting or re-sharing.

In terms of engagement, direct product advertisements don’t do as well because people are naturally turned off by ads. Just think about this: Derek Halpern of Social Triggers says that 20% of your time should be spent on developing a piece of content. The other 80% should be spent on promotion.

Let’s try to break this down with some simple numbers.

• Assume your hourly rate is $100
• You spend 5 hours on a piece of content = the ‘value’ of your content is $500 (5 x $100)
• $500 is 20% of $2,500
• That means one way to approach this is to spend $2,000 promoting that masterpiece you put together.
• Keep in mind that this can be broken down into sweat equity rather than pure dollars. But this section is about paid content promotion so for the sake of simplicity, you’d be spending $2,000 on content promotion.

You can learn about how to get started with Facebook paid content promotion here.

5. LinkedIn Ads

I must confess, I haven’t done a lot of LinkedIn advertising recently because the cost per click (CPC) rates are extremely high. BUT, if the numbers work for your business, LinkedIn might just have the exact person you’re looking for.

The one thing I want to touch upon is the different ad formats available for LinkedIn. You can use the native sponsored ad, which looks like this:

Or you can use a large image, which looks like this:

Some thoughts on what you can do with LinkedIn ads:

• Run traffic to a blog post (like you would with Facebook ads)
• Run traffic to a webinar sign-up page
• Run traffic to an e-book
• Run traffic to a video

Other marketers have reported seeing phenomenal results using the image. Again, your mileage may vary, so test it!

6. Repurposing Content

Sometimes the old content filled with information that many people already know about needs to be resurfaced—after all, there’s always someone new to the game who could benefit from it. As for us, we’ve produced a bit of content in the last few years.

• Over 200 podcast episodes
• 2 new articles a week
• 1 new webinar per quarter
• 1 guest post per week (minimum)
• and more

Just think about this: if you’ve invested a ton of time in your content, wouldn’t it make sense to extract maximum value from the blood, sweat, and tears that you put into it?

Here’s an example of an interview that we repurposed on Entrepreneur Magazine:

You can repurpose your content into infographics, videos, SlideShares, and more. If I put in countless hours to create my content, it doesn’t hurt to invest a few more to extend its reach.

7. Reposting Content (Where It Makes Sense)

My podcast, Growth Everywhere, has over 200 interviews with entrepreneurs. This is evergreen content that will stand the test of the time because they’re all ultimately short biographies with tidbits of actionable advice all over the place.

New podcast content will always continue to push my old content down inside of podcast apps so the question is: what should I do with all the old stuff that’s still relevant?

How about repost it so my subscribers can see it?

After trying this, my daily downloads has so far increased by 100% (and that number continues to grow!).

Other Opportunities in 2016

Other areas that we’ve started to dive into, but haven’t fully explored yet for 2016:

• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Pinterest Ads
• Podcast Ads

Once we’ve tested this and have more data, we’ll post our findings!