Content Index
Introduction
Gone are those days when traditional ads like TV ads, radio ads, print ads, etc. were the only popular marketing modes, they ruled the marketing industry and successfully helped businesses to establish and gain more leads. But all of these traditional advertisement modes were not always pocket-friendly for small-scale or average businesses and only big brands used to invest more in them.
So what about rest? Thanks to digitization that has given us many revolutionary modes of advertisements that can be used by every scale business. Though traditional advertising methods like radio spots and television ads have topped the marketing strategies for many decades—now marketing is moving in a digital direction.
For every business, it’s important to get your name and products in front of the right people. Content Marketing and Advertising are the two most important essentials to achieve that and for making every business successful. But marketers usually get confused about which one is best for business. So, this content marketing vs advertising blog will help you decide the same and therefore we will discuss the following points;
- What is Advertising?
- What are the Benefits & types of advertising?
- What is Content Marketing?
- What are the benefits & types of Content Marketing?
- How is Content Marketing different and a good choice?
So let’s get started...
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Are They Similar or Different?
People often confuse the two as both Content Marketing vs Advertising are used to share a kind of the same purpose and get the message out about your business, your products or your service. However, the mediums are very different. But they have a fine line of difference with respect to goals and it is essential to understand this difference before experimenting with them.
Let’s take a look at advertising vs marketing to understand how content marketing differs from traditional advertising, and how content marketing works for businesses.
Advertising can be said as a special activity for producing necessary information for promoting commercial products or related services. Usually, advertisements follow a simple base and also work for an informational purpose or for awareness. Through advertisements, your brand gets good visibility across various platforms and demographics. Effective advertising will make a positive impression about your product and the brand, change their general perception and drive them to generate sales.
When We talk about traditional advertising modes, we mean the following forms of advertisements;
But primarily, advertising is more about awareness. All the above modes of advertisements have been used by marketers of every business for years and they achieved a different level of results depending upon efforts, investments, and other factors.
Advertising vs Marketing: Major Benefits of Advertising
- Grab Attention Fast
- Build Emotional Connections
- It triggers persuasive messaging
- Introduces a new product in the market
- Expand brand/product reach
- Increased sales
- Give competitive advantage
- Enhances brand good-will
- Educates the consumers fast
- Eliminate middlemen
- supports the salesmanship
Since the last decade, a huge ratio of marketers has been trying different forms of marketing and advertising. With the great shift to digital media, companies nowadays are focusing more on digital advertising. Many of them have succeeded to a great extent in attracting relevant customers and turning them into potential leads and ultimately in increasing sales. In this content marketing vs advertising guide, next, we are going to discuss the types of digital ads.
Types of Digital Advertising: Advertising vs Marketing
Digital ads can be of different forms as listed below.
Display Ads
Display ads are image, text, and video ads shown to people as they browse websites, apps, social media, with an intent to explore or purchase any product or service. Display ads allow for catchy messaging and help create initial interest and boost branding to stand out and attract attention. Different types of display ads are Text ads, Gmail ads, App ads, App ads.
Video Ads
Video advertising is promotional content that plays before, during, or after streaming video content. Digital video ads allow advertisers to connect with audiences in a format they prefer and give advertisers unique opportunities to engage and convert prospects better than other ad formats. Different types of video ads are Outstream ads, Bumper ads, Skippable in-stream ads, Non-skippable in-stream ads, Discovery ads.
Social Media Ads
Social media ads are served to users on social media platforms, allowing you to reach a wider audience and increase your brand awareness and engagement on the respective social media platforms. Social networks utilize user information to serve highly relevant ads based on interactions within a specific social media platform.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising strategy in which you only pay when people click on your ad and you're paying for visitors to come to your site via ads on SERPs. Google Ads is the best example of PPC ads.
Retargeting
Retargeting ads allow your business to show targeted ads to the users who have visited your website earlier but didn't complete a conversion. With retargeting ads, your brand and products stay at the forefront of past visitors who earlier showed interest in your product or services.
Content marketing shares a similar goal as that of traditional marketing but holds a different weight for which it is preferred.
Explore how to grow your business with Google ads and explore Google ads cost.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is considered a great way to boost your bottom line and even boost the number of loyal customers. It is a specific type of marketing that includes content creation about your product/ services and then shares it in different forms like blogs, articles, videos, etc. The content across different social media channels not only promotes the brand but also attracts the interest of potential customers towards the brand.
In this content marketing vs advertising guide, next, we are going to discuss the types of content marketing.
Types of Content Marketing: Advertising vs Marketing
There are many types of content marketing that can help businesses grow in the long run. Although they are all valuable and effective, it's better to not stick with anyone. You can leverage different content marketing formats and repurpose the same content for reaching a huge audience.
Here are the different types of content marketing.
Blogging
Blogs are a great source of in-depth information, effective blogging is an essential part of an overall digital marketing strategy. It drives traffic to your website, generates new leads for your company, helps you nurture those leads, helps businesses establish authority and gives you increased insight into your customer base.
Videos
Video content can spread brand awareness and provides a convenient way for prospects to become informed about your offering. In addition, if you publish regularly enough, people start getting familiarized with your brand, nature of services and establish connections between your company and its audience.
Webinars
The webinar helps businesses bring together a wide and varied group of people, make it easy to position your products or services in the minds of customers and drive potential leads into your sales pipeline. Webinars are the leading content marketing practices for building trust and partnerships between your existing or prospective customer base and your SMEs.
Ebooks
E-books give businesses an opportunity to demonstrate their brand's capabilities and improve their customer relationships. E-books are an excellent way to demonstrate how your company overcomes industry challenges by weaving in your own case studies to improve lead generation and boost brand credibility and loyalty.
Podcasts
Customers want a company that excels in the industry, so the podcasts help build up that trust and allow you to communicate your knowledge and expertise, hence building your credibility. Regular podcasts with accurate information or ideas help establish your brand as an authority in the business. Using podcasts, you can share advice, industry insights, product review, tips, and specific event experiences – all of which showcase your knowledge.
Infographics
Businesses use infographics in both digital and print media and are a very effective way of showing important statistics and information. An infographic can represent any data in a way that helps your audience understand the information easily. Infographics make it possible to grab audience attention fast, share information effectively and build brand awareness quickly and easily.
Whitepapers
A whitepaper is an informational document usually issued by a company or not-for-profit organization to promote that a certain solution is best for a particular problem. When it is used for commercial purposes, it could influence the decision-making processes of current and prospective customers to build authority and boost sales in an organization.
Benefits Of Choosing Content Marketing For Your Business;
It can be definitely considered as the best option for your bottom line.
Businesses and consumers both tend to find new effective ways to grow more and for this, they always try new technologies and other modes. Despite the popularity of all the traditional advertising modes, marketing experts have a strong belief that content marketing has better return possibilities for every investment and that is why content marketing is considered as the King.
How Content Marketing Is Different And A Good Choice?
No doubt that content marketing is one of the most widely used modes of marketing. It is very practical and lets people relate to the product or service in a better way. It is a powerful inbound marketing tactic that can help transform the way your organization reaches and engages your target audience.
What Do We Do In Content Marketing
We create effective blogs, articles, social media posts, web pages, white papers, etc., and post them in different social media channels to reach the relevant audience. So, whenever people search about any product or service in a search engine like Google, this content flashes in front of them through the SERP (search engine results page, where they can read our blogs or other content. It actually becomes visible to every person who is looking for related products or services. Therefore, content marketing attracts more potential customers.
Let’s Take A Glance At Some Advantages Of Content Marketing That Makes It Better Than Advertising
- Drives better conversions- This is definitely one of the best advantages of content marketing because the better is the conversation rate, the better will be the growth rate. Consistent quality content creation and posting them over the right medium and in the right way can do wonders. Many recent pieces of research have revealed that companies can create a great level of conversion rates, far higher than other brands of the industry with help of content marketing.
- Better brand awareness- There are many consumers who can be really happy with your service or product and can become loyal customers. But if you don’t create quality content and follow traditional advertising only, they can turn towards other similar products in the market. Therefore, try to create content that serves your target customer’s purpose and should ultimately lead to brand awareness.
- If you write to educate your customers, you can do wonders with content marketing- Writing with not just an aim to promote sales, but to write for educating the target customers about your products and services can do wonders. This is because, once customers will know in and out about your brand offerings, they will genuinely come and become loyal customers. Just make sure you address customers’ pain points and write informational content.
- Cost-effective model of marketing- More and more businesses have been towards opting for content marketing because it suits every pocket. Be it a small-scale business or a large-scale business, everyone can invest in content marketing and get good returns.
- Long-term returns and a higher level of trust- Content marketing never fails to increase the level of trust between the brand and the target audience. If it is done strategically and content is placed over the right medium to reach the right audience, long-term results will never be amiss.
It has become next to impossible to achieve desired business goals through traditional advertising modes only. You must think out-of-the-box and utilize content marketing in an effective way to see a revolutionary increase in the growth rate.
In this advertising vs marketing post, next, we are going to discuss the major differences between the two.
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Major Differences
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Showing or Nurturing
Traditional marketing pitches the consumers all about a business, a product, or service directly for sale. They show off images and direct information about whatever they want to sell.
Content marketing isn’t as direct as advertising, instead of showcasing and pitching things to sell, content marketing puts out informative & quality content that the target consumer finds interesting, useful, or valuable. Content marketing raises the audience's interest in particular products or services and then redirects them to the sales funnel.
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Instant or long term
Advertising banks on the fact that customers see your products/services and buy it instantly. Advertising is more focused on generating instant leads and conversions, but this rarely works.
Whereas in content marketing, you’re not directly pushing a product to sell, but you are consistently getting in front of your target customer with your captivating content relevant to your products or services. With content marketing, you are intended to make your customer feel that your product is better than other available options and how it adds value to their life.
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Direct or Indirect selling pitch
Advertising is a marketing communication that employs openly sponsored, non-personal communication to promote or sell a product, service. In advertising, you’re simply showing consumers what you’re selling and praising the benefits of that product or service to sell it.
With content marketing, there is much more opportunity to build connections with consumers. You can ask them to leave comments or suggestions about your blog. Similarly, it allows you to respond back; letting you really get to know your potential customers and allowing them to really trust you. Using indirect pitch, make them feel how the particular product or services are helpful for them.
Content Marketing vs Advertising: General or specific
Advertising is about getting your message in front of as many people as possible whereas content marketing is about getting it in front of the right people only.
Content marketers spend time researching what information their audience is searching for and curate the content accordingly. Though content marketing pitch indirectly but it is more targeted than advertising.
Content Marketing vs Advertising: Best Tool & Platforms
Best Content Marketing Platforms:
Best Advertising Platforms:
- Twitter Ads
- LinkedIn Ads.
- Pinterest Ads.
- Amazon Ads
Hope this content marketing vs advertising guide helps you understand the difference between content marketing and advertising.
Read more about eCommerce content marketing vs advertising.
Final Words on Content Marketing vs Advertising
Advertising helps drive qualified visitors whereas Content marketing helps you build brand authority and stand out from competitors in organic channels. Both content marketing and advertising are effective at their places, advertising merely promotes a product directly whereas content marketing develops relationships.
Keep in mind that content marketing does tend to be a bit slower to generate results than advertising practices. It takes time but, over time, you can produce consistent and valuable results. For instant results advertising is better to go with and for long-run business benefits, content marketing is better to choose.
Would you like to learn more about what content marketing and advertising can do for your business? JanBask is a leading industry expert for digital marketing services including both content marketing and advertising. Feel free to reach us.
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