What is content advertising?
Simply put, content advertising refers to the process of creating content with the intent of promoting it through paid means. It is designed to bypass the challenges associated with trying to get organic traffic, views, and engagement and get a piece of content in front of people who might be interested or find value in it faster.
If you wish to learn more about this concept, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What types of content can I promote using content advertising?
You can promote virtually all types of content using content advertising, including:
- Articles
- Videos
- Music
- Whitepapers
- Audiobooks
- Artwork
- Animation
At the end of the day, if you believe the content you are creating would be helpful or of interest to a specific audience, then you can promote it using content advertising to get it in front of that particular audience quickly.
Question #2: How does content advertising work?
Content advertising works differently on different platforms.
On Facebook and Instagram, for example, you can pay to either ‘boost’ a post to get it in front of your selected audience more quickly or create an ad that leads to a piece of content you posted on another platform, such as your blog, website, or YouTube channel.
Now, if you do have content on your blog, website, or YouTube channel that you want to promote to people who are not yet a part of your audience, you can use an advertising platform such as Google Ads, which would allow you to push your content on YouTube, Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), or both.
Whichever route you decide to take, however, the goal is the same: to get your content in front of the right people fast—which both Facebook and Google makes super easy, thanks to their powerful targeting features.
Question #3: Is content advertising effective?
Yes, content advertising is effective—but only if you do it right.
First, you need to really know who your target audience is and what they are looking for. As we have seen earlier, content advertising is all about creating content to be promoted—which you cannot do if you have no idea who your target audience is and what type of content they need or are at least interested in.
Second, you need to create high-quality content that you know your target audience would find interesting, valuable, or better yet, both. Just because you are paying to get your content in front of the right people more quickly does not mean you can get away with putting out mediocre or downright terrible content.
Keep in mind that for a lot of the people who would see your promoted content, it would be the first time they are encountering you and your brand. The last thing you want is to make a terrible first impression, right?
And even if you promote to people who already know you, there is still a big chance you would end up losing them if you keep putting out bad content.
Question #4: What is the difference between content advertising and content marketing?
The main difference between content advertising and content marketing is how the content is put in front of the target audience. Content advertising, as we have seen earlier, uses paid means exclusively. In contrast, content marketing utilises more organic methods, such as SEO.
Question #5: What is the difference between content advertising and native advertising?
The main difference between content advertising and native advertising is how they get clicks.
Where content advertising uses high-quality content that the target audience already wants to see and engage with, native advertising essentially tricks people into clicking ads and other forms of sponsored content by making them virtually indistinguishable from organic content.
In the case of content advertising, the target audience either does not care or does not notice that the content they clicked on was served as an ad because they would have clicked on even if it was served organically.
In contrast, in the case of native advertising, the target audience is often left feeling tricked, so it is a significantly riskier method to use.