How does advertising differ from content marketing?

In a simple sentence, we can say – advertising is to push and content marketing is to pull.

Advertising drives whereas content marketing attracts.

The difference is clear. Both focus on communication with customers/audience, but former persuades them to take a purchasing action and latter engages them and resolving their day-to-day problems.

Both ultimately aim to transform the audience into buyers and buyers into loyal and happy customers, but the ways are different.

Content marketing does what all advertising does but in a clean and elegant manner without any stigma of publicity or marketing attached to it.

Advertising vs. Content Marketing

Instant Attention vs. Long Term Strategy

Advertising is grabbing the attention right away through various means and ways in a hope to prompt an action and achieve predetermined outcome.

Content marketing integrates a long term strategy that first aims to establish connection with the audience, gradually become a part of their lives and make them buy a product showcasing it to be a necessity to better their lives.

Social Connection vs. Beyond Social Connection

The new breed of advertisers calls for the need of social connection when advertising. They emphasize more on social design because customers nowadays put social experience first and foremost.

On the other hand, content marketing is beyond social connection. True, most online content marketing activities revolve around social media activities but we dig deeper we find that it’s much more than that. Of course, the first things that come to our mind include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs when we talk about content marketing.

But there are other channels as well: webinars, whitepapers, podcasts, infographics, e-books, articles, etc.  There is an audience for each type of content.

Expensive vs. Economical

The whole world knows that advertising consumes a major chunk of marketing budget. If you want more sophisticated ads, be ready to shell out more money.

Content marketing is quite economical when it comes to reaching customers. Most online marketing channels are free; therefore, higher budget can be allocated to content creation. Instead of spending money on buying channels, you can focus on recruiting production and distribution resources.

Experts vs. Everyone

Who creates ads? Of course not everyone can. You need to have experts to create mind blowing advertisements that can have a positive impact on your audience and prompt them to take an action.

However, this is not the case with content marketing. Content can be produced by anyone and everyone. Not only this, your audience can directly or indirectly produce content for you.

Moreover, few years down the line, almost every internet browser will create content in some or other form.

Will content marketing replace advertising?

Content marketing is the need of the hour but it doesn’t mean that it will replace advertising. For lead conversion, you need to follow both short term and long term strategies. However, you need to ramp up your skills and make use of more sophisticated channels, budget effectively and put in consistent efforts.