Exploring Pay-Per-Click & Content Marketing Advertising Models

If you have an online business, there’s probably one question that’s often on your mind: How can you ensure that potential business is driven to your website? After all, more traffic means more potential sales, and a single visit could plant a seed for future sales. Before that traffic can get to you, it needs to see you. There are different ways to attract internet users to your site. Pay-per-click and content marketing are two internet marketing models by which to drive traffic to your webpage.

There is a bit of a debate about PPC vs content marketing. One difference between the two is the idea that you’re paying for advertising with PPC and gaining attention in different ways through content marketing.

What Is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising model in which advertisements are run on a platform, like Facebook, and a fee is paid by the advertiser each time the advertisement is clicked on. When you Google a given topic, the top of the page will yield advertisements, followed by search results. If you type cereal in the search box, online and brick and mortar cereal sellers, like Walmart, will be front and center.

Other platforms for PPC include Google Ads, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube. You’ll certainly recognize these names because millions of people spend loads of time on these platforms daily. When a business uses such well-known entities as these, they get clicks.

When a small or medium-sized business engages a digital marketing agency for a PPC campaign, they can expect to pay thousands of dollars per month. Startup costs can run into the thousands of dollars and then there are different pricing plans according to the kind of campaign package the business employs, offering different services. The reason that PPC plans are so widely used is because of the direct correlation to the business’s bottom line. The high volume of traffic generated by high-profile advertisements translates to sales.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is much more of a grass-roots campaign than PPC. If PPC is straight-up advertising, content marketing is more like attention-getting. It’s just a little more subtle. Content marketing is the practice offering of online content to existing and potential customers. Common content mediums include social media posts, videos, emails, blogs and newsletters. 

Some keys to content marketing are consistency and accessibility. Online marketing is about developing the online presence of your brand. If the goal is for people to keep on noticing that you’re out there, you ought to be consistently uploading content that speaks to your brand. This could mean putting out videos demonstrating your products or services, or writing blog posts updating your followers about this or that. 

Content marketing is about introducing the ethos of your brand to the world. A simple way to look at this concept is to consider emotion. All of your posts might be oriented toward a service or product that you offer. Will you apply or avoid tones to your posts? Should you have angry posts? Should they be silly? Should they employ a business tone or apply some quirkiness? Whatever route you go, remember that there are oodles of personalities out there and they each have their likes and dislikes. Be consistent with your online voice so that people will know what to expect. 

Accessibility is important because you want people to feel your presence. You can establish this by setting up comment sections on your platforms and engaging with those who took the time to leave one. You could also host live events, every so often. Remember that when keeping up with your content, a tweet or Instagram picture is quick.

Whatever methods you choose to invest in to drive potential traffic to your website up, the goal remains the same: visibility. The debate rages as to what works best, but there are benefits to both PPC and content marketing.

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