Content marketing and traditional marketing both have their own place, and if you’re just starting out, it can be difficult to figure out what’s better for your business. If you’re trying to decide whether content marketing is the right fit for your business, you’ve come to the right place! We’re going to take you through an honest look at content marketing vs traditional marketing, key differences between content and traditional marketing, and when content marketing could be the right choice. Keep in mind: Always analyze the strengths, weaknesses and suitability of a marketing strategy based on your goals, industry, and available resources.
Let’s dive in!
Key differences between content marketing and traditional marketing
To really understand content marketing vs traditional marketing, we must first understand their differences. This is the first step to identifying what sounds like a good fit. While both have their own place, they serve vastly different purposes. Larger businesses may find that a combination of traditional and content marketing might serve their overall strategy.
Content marketing
Content marketing always focuses on creating valuable, relevant, engaging content. When you choose content marketing as a strategy, you’re committing to creating and sharing good, valuable content that benefits your user. Ideally, your goal would be to build a long term relationship with your target audience.
Whether you’re answering questions, providing support, solving a problem, or educating your user – you’d be doing it all through content. The big benefit of content marketing is two-way communication, which, when done right, fosters a sense of community.
From a data and optimization point of view, content marketing provides measurable ROI through metrics like website traffic, engagement, and conversions. It also provides the flexibility of choosing different channels and approaches based on your short term (or long term) goals.
Traditional marketing
Traditional marketing happens via various forms of mass targeted media like TV ads, billboards, or direct marketing. This kind of marketing certainly has its place, and can definitely make an impact! Usually, the goal here is immediate brand awareness, sales, or other forms of promotion. It can be a useful way to announce a new product launch or create brand recognition.
Compared to content marketing, traditional marketing often has higher upfront costs. Notably, it also provides one-way communication – from the brand to the consumer, but not the other way round. Feedback from the customer or actual ROI is not measurable on a granular level, unlike content marketing. A recent study found that content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
Now that we can see the difference between content marketing and traditional marketing, we can start to narrow it down.
Which is better? Content marketing or traditional marketing?
Here are some points to consider before you decide:
Whether you choose content marketing vs traditional marketing would eventually depend on your industry, your goals, and your audience. If your goal is long term and consistent value, we believe content marketing is the way to go. As an example, B2B, SaaS, and Fintech companies can build thought leadership and educational content. A suitable content strategy could help position any of these businesses as an authority in their field.
On the other hand, if you’re a local business with a limited physical presence, you may benefit from traditional marketing more. A combination of both would also support your long term goals, although local traditional media can give you broader reach in your locality. If you’re a local-focused business, or wish to expand to a certain region, traditional media may serve you better. Even in this day and age, it’s still a great way to get more eyeballs, which leads to brand recall and recognition.
When is content marketing better for my business?
If you’re considering content marketing, here are some benefits it can provide. See if these benefits align with your goals for your business.
Long term value
Content marketing provides long term value. It’s cost effective – costs less than traditional media in most cases – and scalable over time. Here at Mycoso Media, we LOVE evergreen content. It’s helpful across almost all industries, and it works for B2B, B2C, and D2C businesses!
Compounding benefits
Evergreen content provides compounding benefits – it will continue to attract traffic over time. This makes it a powerful asset for your content strategy. It also ties in neatly with content clusters focusing on a central topic. Content clusters can provide comprehensive information and showcase your expertise on that topic. Depending on your industry and goals, you could also build content clusters around evergreen content! By building content clustered around evergreen content, you create a structured, organized resource that shows your authority, benefits the user, and works well with search engines.
For example, a seeds and plant retailer could leverage content clusters. An evergreen pillar page could be “how to start your own vegetable garden”. Cluster pages around it could be guides on growing specific veggies or herbs, planting advice, care advice, soil and fertilizer tips. These are topics that will be relevant every year, some even year round. They have broad appeal for beginners and experienced gardeners alike. Content database management becomes quite important here. If you’d like to talk more about this, reach out!
Build relationships and authority
By creating valuable content that adds value to your users, you’ll be able to build a community, a relationship with your audience, and topical authority. Whether you choose to educate, entertain, or provide value in some other way, the intent is the same: to make something better for the person reading or viewing your content.
By keeping user intent top of mind, you’ll start to see the benefits. If you’re a B2B business, clear, helpful content can help you build trust and loyalty over time. It can also showcase your expertise and authority in your field. If you’re a B2C business, you can leverage informative, engaging, or entertaining content that can hold the attention of your users, readers, or viewers. This is called “retention”, and it is an important piece of the content and data puzzle.
A tech savvy target audience
If your target audience spends time online, you are likely to benefit from a digital first approach. If you’re building a B2C or D2C business, this is even more important. A tech savvy audience is likely to research your (or your competitors’) products and services online before buying. With such audiences, they also prefer having some digital touchpoints, awareness, or interactions with the business. If this sounds like your business, content marketing is definitely helpful to serve your goals.
Content for specific niches and goals
Content marketing is really versatile, and as such has shown great results for a variety of businesses. The key is to find the right kind of content for your business. That’s where people like us can help! For example, SaaS and ecommerce companies could have very different audiences, but still be served by content marketing.
A SaaS company can create content that educates their audiences about complex products or services. They could create blog posts, videos, or case studies. An ecommerce company could focus their attention on their website content, and product descriptions that are not just well written, but also SEO friendly. Companies that wish to build brand authority could benefit from creating thought leadership content.
Data driven insights
With content marketing – as opposed to traditional marketing – you have access to data. With that, you have tools to see and analyze your data, analytics platforms, and often real-time feedback. You can see what kind of content works better, which can help you refine your strategy further. A powerful way to see these benefits is by doing a content audit. As and when you want to experiment with different types or channels for your content, this data can help you pivot promptly if needed. At the end of the day, you can learn and improve from this data. See what content works better and provides value. Do more of it.
Focus on what serves your priorities
We hope the points above helped you see the benefits of content marketing, and when it can be the right choice. Yes, content marketing can do all these things, but is that what you need for your business? If you’d like, grab a pen and paper and note whether these benefits tie in with your vision for the company. You will see which points you do need it for, or you may find that some of these things do not apply to your business or target audience. Either way, by now you should be closer to answering your content marketing vs traditional marketing dilemma.
We hope this article has answered your question and helped you make a decision. If you’d like some insight, book a call with us. If you think content marketing can serve your goals, reach out to us.