How a five-year-old blog post got us more customers than a PPC banner campaign entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

We know content marketing works better in the modern day than traditional advertising.

Most people on this sub-reddit will be aware how consumers are switching off completely from banner ads, as well as print and broadcast advertising.

But, let me drill this message in with a case study using our article writing company.

The AIDA customer funnel: Banner PPC vs content marketing

Below, I'll explain the basics of a PPC banner ad campaign and a blog post we created five years ago.

A key concept I want to hammer home is the stages that leads go through to turn into customers, and how well each marketing effort targets either of them.

Imagine a customer funnel with these four stages.

• Awareness – the customer is aware of article writing services
• Interest – the customer has expressed an interest in our brand
• Desire – the customer has felt desire to purchase article writing services from us
• Action – the customers is set to take the next steps towards purchasing

This AIDA model has been established within marketing for centuries...so please bear it in mind as we continue.

Scenario 1 - Banner Ads

Ok, we bought some banner ads reading:

'Article Writing Services from Article-Writing.Co - 20\% Off Over Thanksgiving'

How well do you think people at each stage received these?.

Sure, it's a great deal for people in the Desire and Action stages of the funnel. Probably enough to turn many of them into customers...

But what about the people who don't know how article writing services can benefit them? Or those who aren't aware of our agency's quality? This advert isn't helping to add people into the top of the customer funnel, nor is it moving people from the top downwards.

What's more, who is going to spread the word about this deal, other than me and my colleagues at article-writing.co? No-one.

We're paying for every lead out of our own pocket. Plus, the efforts of those who are do share the news of our deal will be worthless once the Thanksgiving turkey has been gobbled down.

It's expensive, it's time limited and it's only targeting people that already like us.

Scenario 2 - Blog post

Around about the same time of year, our founder David Tile wrote an exceptionally useful blog post explaining how to create a blog that drives leads into customers. We managed to attract a ton of social shares and a decent SEO ranking for the post. As such, traffic swelled (at no financial cost to us).

So, let's think of our customer funnel again.

The post may not have single-handedly led to any sales, but we attracted hundreds of people to subscribe to our email list through the free incentive offered at the bottom of the post (another piece of content marketing).

In fact, people are STILL subscribing to our emails through this blog post, more than five years later. That's the power of a good organic search ranking. Who knows how many of those particular subscribers eventually turned into customers.

Here’s are some of the reasons why we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on content marketing over PPC:

It’s a long term solution:

Content marketing generates a linear increase in traffic.

If you press pause on a PPC campaign, the traffic stops flowing. If you implement content marketing with an SEO focus, the overall traffic sprouting from each piece of content should grow incrementally.

It’s a value driven approach:

Most PPC campaigns tend to focus on enticing the consumer to click based off incentives, CTA’s and features. Content Marketing focuses on building a relationship first by showing free value in the content.

It’s generates more quality leads:

In PPC, the buying cycle is short. The touch points from the awareness stage to action are minimal. It relies on the consumer making a purchase off a quick elevators pitch of the benefits and features.

In content marketing, you have the ability to walk your customer through the stages of the funnel while educating them about your product/service and industry. By the time they’ve taken action, the consumer has a firmer grasp on who you are and what you can do for them, making them a more quality lead.

We've come a long way since that turkey of a PPC campaign

To summarise, we ran one traditional ad campaign that got us limited results over a limited amount of time, at great expense to the company. We also published one blog post for free that continues to generate leads for us.

There’s a misconception that putting some skin in the game with a PPC campaign will out perform the sweat equity you put in for content marketing, but it just isn’t so.

Of course, there is a time and a place for PPC, but content marketing will always generate better long-term results for a company.

I'd be interested to hear your experiences of content marketing vs PPC, and what motivates you to choose either...

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