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How to Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Overall Marketing Strategy

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How to Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Marketing is like a great dinner plate. It has some delicious carbs (pasta is our love language), a great source of protein, and healthy fats. Your marketing “dinner plate” should look something like this:

  1. Content Marketing
  2. Email Marketing
  3. Paid Media
  4. Search Marketing
  5. Social Media

And, just like any good meal, these elements taste best when the flavors complement each other. You don’t want to eat an English Trifle mixed with Shepherd’s Pie (unless you’re Joey Tribbiani).

How to Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Overall Marketing

You want to eat something that goes well with the rest of your meal. What makes a great dinner plate is exactly what makes great marketing. 

Great marketing is an overall marketing strategy that encapsulates all of your marketing efforts into one mega-strategy that gets traffic and conversions. 

It uses your content strategy in your paid media and your paid media in your email marketing. It’s a holistic marketing approach that doesn’t just lead to traffic and conversions. It’s a more efficient use of your time, budget, and team. 

3 Questions That Will Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Marketing Strategy

As marketers, we need efficiency. More often than not, we’re working on tight budgets, don’t have the time we need to get everything done that we want to (does anyone?!), and might not even have the team necessary to turn our strategies into reality.

When you unite your Facebook ads with your marketing strategy, you can repurpose content to avoid going over budget. You don’t have to worry about creating brand new funnels and testing them to get more traffic; you can let Facebook drive that traffic for you. And you don’t need to wait until you can add more help to your team to turn leads into customers.

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These are the three questions we ask ourselves to make sure our Facebook ads align with the rest of our marketing strategy:

What content can you repurpose into Facebook ads?

The content your brand is creating for emails, social media, and content marketing can all be repurposed into Facebook ads. This is prime-time content because you already have data on it. If you saw a particular post get more engagement than usual when posted organically, then guess what post you should put some $$$ behind?!

You guessed it.

Here are a few ways to take the content you already have and turn it into high-converting Facebook ads:

  1. Take your most viewed blog posts and turn them into paid ads
  2. Find organic social posts with the highest engagement and/or conversion rate and run them as paid ads
  3. Use your highest converting email subject lines as headlines on your Facebook posts

We do this all the time. If you check out our Ad Library on Facebook, you’ll see that we repurpose high-performing blog posts into Facebook ads (that drive traffic to our website). 

Once a Facebook user clicks on that post and goes to our website, we can pixel them and retarget them with a free offer that requires an email opt-in.

1640799370 723 How to Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Overall Marketing

What’s better than copy that’s already proven to be a hit with your customer avatar? Being able to put money behind that copy and know it will be a hit with your paid audience.

Are you tapping into all of your funnels on Facebook?

If your Facebook ads are living on an island with their very own funnel to get a viewer from Point A to Point B, you’re sitting on a lot of untapped potential. It’s like sitting on an island hoping someone will come and rescue you without realizing you’re actually on a boat docked on the shore.

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Let’s paint this picture to show you what you’re missing out on.

If you have a search marketing strategy that takes someone from Google to your blog post and to your offer to subscribe to your newsletter—that can be turned into a Facebook ad. Instead of having someone find you through search marketing, they can find you through a paid ad on Facebook, be taken to that blog post, and opt in to your email list.

How many of those funnels do you have?

We’d guess one for every single blog post on your website. (There’s that boat we were referring to). 

You can unite your Facebook ads with your marketing strategy by adding them to existing funnels. If you know something works, milk it!

For each of these funnels, you’ll be able to double, triple, or quadruple the amount of Facebook ads you can show your audience (bypassing ad exhaustion!):

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Search → Blog Post → Subscribe = Paid Facebook Ad → Blog Post → Subscribe

Organic Social Post → Landing Page → Entry-Point Offer = Paid Facebook Ad → Landing Page → Entry-Point Offer

You’re sitting on funnels built out for other parts of your marketing strategy that can be copied and pasted over to your Facebook ads. Efficiency is the name of the game, and we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to do more with what we create.

Do you have an email list of hot leads?

Your email list is full of people who have proven they’re your customer avatar. They told you they’re interested in what you’re doing the moment they clicked “Subscribe.” So, why is this list just waiting for you to email them with the *hope* of turning them into customers?

There are more ways than email to nurture your subscribers. That’s where retargeting comes in. We’re not talking about the type of retargeting that’s based on a user’s behavior on your website.

In your Facebook Ads Manager, you can upload your email list and retarget them with specific ads. When we say specific, we mean that you can’t show them the ads you’re showing your cold leads who haven’t subscribed yet.

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These subscribers see ads made for hot leads. These are ads that:

  • Tell them about your latest offer
  • Tease launches about products they’ve shown interest in
  • Give them exclusive discounts or access because of their subscriber status

Here’s how to upload your email list to your Facebook Ads Manager:

1640799370 556 How to Unite Your Facebook Ads with Your Overall Marketing

Just because your email list counts toward your email marketing doesn’t mean it can’t be united with your paid ad strategy. 

Unite Your Facebook Ads With Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Your Facebook ad strategy wants to be included in the delicious marketing dinner you’re cooking. 

Better yet—it’ll make that dinner turn out better than it could have without it. It’s like the added spice that turns your existing content into lead magnets, adds more traffic to your funnels, and nurtures the subscribers you’ve worked so hard to get.

Ask yourself these 3 questions to unite your Facebook ads with your overall marketing strategy:

  1. What content can you repurpose into Facebook ads?
  2. Are you tapping into all of your funnels on Facebook?
  3. Do you have an email list of hot leads?

This is how you create a holistic marketing strategy that repurposes your content, drives more traffic to your best funnels, and nurtures your audience until they’re ready to buy.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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