Do you feel that content marketing may be a nice way to help prospects get to know you, but it’s ultimately not as effective as advertising?

In some cases that may be true. Many small businesses aren’t very good at content marketing and some types of business are simply better suited to advertising. But you may be surprised to find out some of the advantages content marketing does have over advertising. Let’s take a look at three of them now:

Here are three reasons why content marketing is better than traditional advertising:

1. Content marketing can be done with a small budget

An advert in even a local newspaper can be expensive for a small business. A single advert isn’t going to be very effective, so the small business owner will need to pay for a series of adverts over a number of weeks which increases the costs even more.

Compare this to content marketing which can be done at no cost other than the time of the person creating it. With some careful planning this time can be kept down to a minimum, too. For example, video clips can be recorded at presentations that have already been scheduled and the notes from that presentation can be turned into an article or downloadable PDF.

These days you may well benefit from paying to ‘boost’ your content to wider audience, say on Facebook – after all, social media is a very noisy place. But once your audience reads, listens or views your content, you have much more potential that you would with a traditional small advert. Plus, you will get a wealth of data on who has seen and clicked on your content that you wouldn’t get from traditional advertising. You can use this information to improve to improve your targeting in future.

2. Content marketing builds trust

True, you can build trust with advertising. But with content marketing you’ve got many more opportunities to build those relationships. People will spend a second or two looking at an advert, with a podcast, video, blog post you’ll have the chance to keep their attention for much longer. If they follow you on social media the chances are they’ll see your posts regularly in their feeds, too. With content marketing you’ve got the potential to build a community of fans.

3. You’re building an audience with content marketing

Unless you set up your advertising campaign to collect leads (and many small businesses don’t do this) then you have to pay for an advert each and every time you want to reach your prospects. With content marketing you’re building your own audience that you can reach cheaply (maybe even for free) because they will have subscribed to your blog, podcast or YouTube channel. Or they may have  your e-book on their Kindle or saved on their hard drive. Ideally, they will be on your mailing list because you offered a downloadable bonus resource in your e-book in exchange for their email addresses.

This means you’re reminding your prospects of what you do on a regular basis, you’re proving that they can trust you to deliver and you will be at the top of their minds next time they need to buy what you offer.