You have great products but if you don’t let customers know about them you probably won’t make many sales. You could simply email your existing customers (and you probably already did) but it’s also critical to find new customers.
What you need to do is to introduce your product to customers and get them interested in how it can benefit them.
Sponsored content is an engaging way to do this.
Essentially you pay to have a story about your product in the media (a magazine, website, newsletter, or even television channel). Sponsored content is also referred to as an ‘advertorial’.
Companies write the story themselves. Others are written by the publication on behalf of the company. The main point is that sponsored content or advertorials are paid for by the company.
There are two big advantages of sponsored content: 1) you are guaranteed that the story will be published and 2) you can control how the story is written, what photos are used, etc.
Editorial is free, but then it’s up to the publication whether they want to publish it and what they write about your product or company.
For example, you want to promote your products in October, but the publication decides to delay the article they wrote about your company until December because they chose to publish something else in October.
Or, you want to promote a new service you are offering, but the publication decides that they want to focus on a different service that you offer. It’s up to them when it’s editorial.
The Best Kind of Sponsored Content
The most effective sponsored content looks like its part of the publication. Other than small text that flags it as “sponsored” the reader feels like your sponsored article is part of the publication’s editorial content.
For example, on Inside Fashion’s eNewsletters, there are several sections of industry news and information. Sometimes one of those sections is a sponsored article about a company.
On Morning Brew, a daily newsletter, sponsored content is written by their staff writers so it blends into the rest of the newsletter.
To the reader of the eNewsletter, it looks just like the rest of the news, except for a small note that says ‘sponsored’.
One of the biggest challenges marketers face is just trying to get people open to marketing emails.
The advantage of sponsored content (rather than just emailing people yourself) is that people are, for example going to open an eNewsletter from Inside Fashion because they are looking to read the news and information.
To achieve high open rates, a publisher like Inside Fashion or Morning Brew has to work hard to guarantee that they are providing the reader with valuable information. Sponsored content can take advantage of this to get more people to read about your products.
