Online advertising versus content marketing
By Alan Vesty
According to a Harvard Business Review article, the world is producing in excess of 2.5 billion gigabytes of data every day – enough information to fill around 20 billion filing cabinets. By comparison, some estimates suggest that the human brain can store around 1 million gigabytes of data. The sheer amount of data available to us is staggering, and although we have no need to sift through everything being produced, each of us has a far greater amount of incoming information to process than ever before.
In addition to information pouring in relentlessly to us via our mobile and desktop devices, we are perpetually bombarded by print, radio, television, outdoor, mobile, email and web based advertising, amongst others. When the amount of all this input exceeds our short-term memory capacity, we experience psychological stress and inability to process the incoming information.
Search engines find relevant content
Your brain contains a remarkable safety mechanism to prevent this information overload – it can block out all sorts of incoming sensory information, so that it can concentrate its resources on specific tasks. To cope with the mass of online information available, we have also adopted a new reading style of scanning and skimming through content, and we increasingly rely on search engine search page results as a means of filtering and finding the most relevant content as quickly as possible.
Whether you are a content marketer or an online advertiser this is rather bad news, making it challenging to get your message seen, let alone acted upon! For a number of reasons, high-value content can languish obscurely in cyberspace, far from the top organic search page results. Social media is also not as effective as you might think as a free distribution channel. Facebook, for instance, filters the posts displayed on each user’s news feeds, partly by measuring the level of engagement they have with each page that they are fans of, and, it seems, even the type of post. So, even if you are producing valuable content and sharing it on your page, it will eventually not be seen at all by fans who do not ‘like’, share or comment on your content regularly - unless they remember to manually visit your page, which is very unlikely.
Ads support content marketing
In contrast to this, both search engine adverts and sponsored posts on social media obtain prominent positions on a page, and remain relevant as both a stand-alone strategy to help customers locate and purchase specific products, and as a key means of supporting your content marketing. Naturally, this requires correct targeting and delivery of easily understood, relevant communications. In the case of social media advertising it is important to bear in mind that users usually see your adverts based on their interests, whereas in search, your adverts are displayed to users based on their intent (what they were searching for).
In a ‘battle’ between content marketing and online advertising there would be no clear winner – both suffer from the effects of information fatigue. To get our marketing message across we cannot rely on any one tactic, we need to use a combination of tactics in our marketing strategy, at all times looking at improving the value and relevance of all of our marketing outputs to our target audience.
Alan Vesty is a Quirk-accredited Digital Marketer, and manages a growing suite of digital assets for the African Branch of Cambridge University Press. Follow on Twitter: @alanvesty