Free Content Marketing Opportunities from Paid Media Tools

There are great content marketing leads hiding right under your nose, IF you know where to look. Let’s say your client is a company that makes the newest, greatest product or service. Let’s choose a turkey baster – Thanksgiving is coming.

How do you determine where to share it so the right people read about it, share it, link to it, etc.?

NOTE: This strategy works for all products, even very common consumer packaged goods. I picked a product that doesn’t get used very often to show that the strategy can be used for most products/services.

You’ve got some content, perhaps an infographic or maybe an article or engaging study that proves this is the world’s greatest turkey baster. Besides this woman, who really lives, eats and breathes turkey baster technology? How do I find these sub-groups?

The very tools that help paid media advertisers plan their content placements can help you find the communities, organizations and brands that are relevant to your industry. Let’s go over the top three (Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook), and how their insights for advertisers can help you engage communities for free.

Here’s how to do it: The top tools with how-to advice designed for non-advertisers.

1. Google Display Planner

The best tool, by far, is the AdWords planner. Set up an AdWords account (you won’t need to put in any credit card info). Once signed in, go to the display planner and see what placements have content relevant to your theme.

Look at the suggestions for good domains to reach out to for linking opportunities. These sites may be great places to start to engage with the community, including commenting, and ultimately allow you to reach out to editors and authors.

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn will give you a list of relevant websites and organizations that you can investigate as potential outreach sources. Click on the icon on the upper right part of the screen, where your face is, to get to the advertising section on LinkedIn.

Then, you can find groups that are relevant for your product.

Check out the relevant groups from the suggestions. You’ll find key organizations and potential members that all share a passion for the topic. Engaging with these audiences would be a great way to get your product some traction.

3. Facebook

Facebook often isn’t as useful, but the insights page will occasionally bring up an opportunity. Check out features like ‘Suggested Pages to Watch’ to find similar pages for outreach purposes. Facebook will sometimes suggest competitors as “pages to watch”, but even competitors can provide some insights of how to connect and engage with the audience.

*Bonus – Twitter

If you have a twitter account, you have an advertising account by default. Login directly to twitter and navigate to ads.twitter.com. Create a new campaign without a credit card, and then scroll down to the targeting settings.

Here you can see related twitter profiles based on interest or similar users. You often won’t get the depth you do with other platforms, but it still may turn up something interesting. Here we can view other users similar to food network, which may be open to content regarding turkey basters.

Using these free tools (especially AdWords display planner and LinkedIn) can give your outreach a jump start and give a clearer direction for your content.