Why You Should Invest in Content Marketing More than Paid Advertising

Believe it or not, digital marketers know the trick of constantly balancing challenging deadlines, extract value of less-than-ideal budgets and produce instant search engine visibility under complex situations.

Digital marketers often use online ad networks including Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, and LinkedIn Ads to increase their website’s visibility and meet the bottom line.

Google AdWords is one of the best advertising techniques because of its awesome benefits that it provides to businesses of all types and sizes. It offers marketers a chance to rank on page first and in return, they pay for it.

If truth be told, using display ads or paid search are an effective way to generate instant results for brands or companies and is getting increasingly popular.

Let’s have a look at some interesting stats regarding paid advertising.

• In 2016, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported a huge 17% increase in advertising revenue compared with the previous year.
• Facebook also reported 12% increase in its revenue from paid advertising.
• Statista also aims to spend more on advertising techniques, as paid marketing expenditure is expected to rise up to $92.4 billion worldwide this year.
• According to IAB, mobile advertising grew massively in the first six months of 2016 with a total spend increase of 89% and $15.5 billion.

Content Is Everything

Getting the right balance between paid, earned and owned media is quite challenging, but in the long run, content is everything.

This is because whatever type of advertising you invest in, whatever posts you share on Facebook, Instagram adverts or paid search campaign with Google, the real estate your advertising takes is only rented. This means that when your budget comes to an end, your ads disappear.

So, can marketers afford to have that happen?

Paid advertising is unquestionably effective for short-term visibility or when you need a quick solution to support your other digital marketing efforts, but it creates the risk of leaving no digital footprint at all.

On the other hand, investing your time, money and energy in content will ensure you that you’ll always have marketing assets that will purely belong to your brand.

There will be no risks of disappearing any moment when the budget runs out. The efforts you invest in repurposed content are permanent – not temporary like paid advertising.

Content Can Offer Great Returns

If truth be told, content marketing has a better rate of return than many other forms of marketing techniques. This makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that once you have evergreen content in hand, there are no limits to how often you can repurpose it, or how frequently you can share it.

You can create content in multiple forms for marketing and get the most out of it.

• Blog post
• Infographic
• Landing Page
• eBook
• Social media post
• Slideshare
• YouTube video
• Podcast
• Lead generator

These types of different content are your own and you can make the most of it. In contrast, if you invest money in a paid advertising campaign, the only way you can outspread and display your ad on other sites or in other formats is to invest more. It’s never your own property, whereas content (in any form) is your own.

You Have the Real Power to Use Your Spend

Paid advertising is as like a real estate rental in that you have to pay for the space rented. You have to set aside an amount for the cost per click in AdWords and the fixed fee to run your display ad on a site of your choice. And still, there is no guarantee that your return will outstrip your spend and you are helpless to determine the spending rate.

When you choose to own your marketing with the power of content, everything will be in your control. You can determine how much time and money you have to spend in order to get higher rankings. This will give you more flexibility and possibilities your marketing efforts can work for you, instead of placing a strain on your marketing budget.

Custom Content is Always Great

90% of consumers find custom content useful but not the space websites occupy for a paid ad.

The usefulness of custom content opens up new doors of business opportunities. It offers benefits only when you pour your resources into creating content assets instead of temporarily renting an ad space.

With custom content, you can create meaningful relationships with clients, understanding their needs, getting more likes, shares and following base, and of course having greater control of the sales funnel and getting the chance to attract more potential customers through personalization.

Content Offer Dynamic Online Experience

There are a number of compelling statistics and figures that show that consumers these days spend most of their time online searching for content. Now think carefully, if consumers are looking for any information what do you think, would they consider a blog post, a PPC ad or a sponsored post?

Here are some amazing stats taken from Content Marketing Institute:

• 64% of consumers say that customer experience matter most to them instead of a price of a product.
• The user experience will overtake product value as the key brand differentiator by the year 2020.
• 70% of consumers believe that content marketing makes them feel closer to the particular brand.

Any brand truly believes that content is essential for building trust among your audience. They think that content is the lifeblood of any successful brand. No matter if you are a web design company, advertising agency or SaaS startup, only the written and visual content can tell the story of your brand in a more professional way that paid ads simply can’t.

So, do it right and consistently, and it can provide your existing and potential customers with reasons to believe in your brand, to take the desired action, interact with your brand and ultimately convert.

Since there is nothing wrong with doing paid advertising for temporary hit and getting visibility with ads, you should invest more efforts in owning your marketing assets rather renting them, in order to generate better opportunities in the long term.