Online Advertising or Content Marketing?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ‘advertise’ stems from the Latin ‘advertere’ – to turn towards . In today’s world, prospective customers are literally drowning in a sea of advertising – almost every waking moment of their lives they are bombarded by print, radio, television, outdoor, mobile, email and web-based advertising, amongst others. Human beings cope with this by tuning out, filtering and turning away  from advertisements, something marketers refer to as ad fatigue . In my view, ‘ad fatigue’ is a myopic term – the larger problem is information fatigue. 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 certainly now has a far greater amount of information to process than ever before. Human cognitive bandwidth (the amount of data our brains can process at a time) has a limit.

When the amount of information we are required to process exceeds our short term memory storage capacity we experience psychological stress and our ability to understand information is dramatically reduced. When this information overload occurs, the brain’s executive functions kick in, filtering out whatever it deems as irrelevant external stimuli. This allows us to ignore the neon-pink elephant tap dancing in the room as we concentrate on the task at hand, whether it be driving to an appointment or responding to emails. It can also leave us fretting about personal issues to the exclusion of performing our important daily tasks and responsibilities.

One of the most recent responses of marketers to advertising fatigue is content marketing, which is the curation, creation and distribution of valuable content. In a cynical sense, this solution seeks to replace ad fatigue by exacerbating the information fatigue felt by our target audiences. Despite the claims of some content marketing agencies that ‘traditional’ advertising (which includes search ads, web banners) is all but dead and buried, it is instructional to see how many of these agencies themselves rely on  passé search engine advertising to promote their content marketing services. Certainly, content marketing is a valuable marketing strategy, even if it can be very labour-intensive, and often requires special skills. A good article, video or infographic can provide you with free marketing for months, if not years.

If you are able to consistently create (or even just curate) and regularly distribute valuable content this can be even more effective, aiding your customer acquisition, awareness, referral and retention strategies immensely. For a bookseller example of content marketing, take a look at Maria Popova’s Brainpickings website and her related social media channels. On the other hand, for bookshops with limited human resources, the skills or the time required to pursue this strategy effectively can be scarce, and employing outside professionals prohibitively expensive.

On the web, we increasingly rely on search engines to filter out irrelevant information as we contend with the vast amount of information available, and we have even adopted a new online reading pattern in order to skim and scan through large amounts of content. Content that is delivered in organic search results is constantly being assessed by the search engines algorithms for relevance. Amongst many other factors, suggested content that obtains low click-through rates will receive lower and lower rankings, and for a number of other reasons and measurement criteria, it is quite possible for excellent, highvalue content to 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 Facebook 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. 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.

Search engines and social media channels provides advertisers with increasingly powerful targeting tools, the ability to change, pause or stop your adverts at any time, to set daily or lifetime budgets, to bid for better ad placements, and to choose whether you will pay on a Cost Per Click or Cost Per Mille basis (the latter being where you pay based on every 1,000 times your advert was displayed), and you can track the performance of your adverts in exquisite, almost real-time detail.

Alan Vesty is a Quirk-accredited Digital Marketer, and manages a growing suite of digital assets for the African Branch of Cambridge University Press.