While many marketing professionals endorse Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for its ability to generate fast leads and a temporarily spike in website traffic, the digital marketing experts at Alecan Marketing Solutions believe that the key to sustainable, long-term growth lies in developing a great content marketing campaign first, then supplementing this content with PPC as needed. To illustrate how effective content marketing can be (especially compared to traditional PPC campaigns), marketing pioneers Consumer Magnetism conducted a fascinating study comparing the success of their own content marketing strategy with their PPC campaigns.
Read on for more!
Content Marketing vs PPC
Defining The Terms
- Content Marketing – Designing, writing, or filming original content (i.e. blog posts, videos, infographics, photos, memes, etc.) and distributing this content across relevant websites, directories, and social media channels like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. Great, shareable content generates traffic to a website, which in turn generates leads.
- PPC (Pay Per Click) – An add campaign designed to generate website traffic for certain keywords using catchy, cleverly-written headlines. Because a business does not pay for the advertisement unless it generates a “click”–that is, someone actually gets onto the website by clicking on the ad–many marketing professionals prefer this to the (often) costlier content creation option.
The Study
To accurately compare their PPC campaigns to their content marketing campaigns, Consumer Magnetism selected various types of content and determined the budget needed to create the “how-to” guides, white papers, tutorials, and infographics, then compared this content to the performance of a PPC campaign with an identical budget. The results, though astonishing, were not surprising.
According to the study, content marketing with the same $10,000 budget as the PPC campaign generated 10x more visitors and 3x as many leads! Though each piece of content required a larger initial investment (for researching, copywriting, and designing), these resources continued to generate visitors and leads long after the budget was cut, while traffic for PPC evaporated immediately after the money ran out. It is also important to note the impact (though difficult to measure) content has in producing social shares, inbound links, and engagement, while PPC campaigns don’t typically result in social activity, links, or engagement.
Our Conclusion
Though lots of companies argue that PPC campaigns are more effective, dollar for dollar, than content marketing, Alecan Marketing Solutions encourages business owners to consider case studies like the one conducted by Consumer Magnetism. We believe that, if you invest in content marketing, the long-term results will far outweigh the steady (yet flat and completely budget-dependent) results from PPC campaigns.
[Read Is PPC Marketing Better Than Organic SEO? from the Alecan Marketing Solutions Blog]
Getting Started with Content Marketing
While not every company has the resources to invest $10,000 toward constructing a comprehensive content marketing campaign, there are several ways to create and distribute great content without breaking the bank. Blogging, for example, is one relatively inexpensive way to bring traffic to your site, and relevant articles can also help establish your business as an authority in a given field. If you want to start content marketing, just remember: creating the content is only half the battle; once the article has been written or the infographic has been designed, you will still need to invest time and resources to distribute and promote it!
For more advice on how to launch a successful content marketing campaign, schedule a free consultation with Alecan Marketing Solutions today!
