Hey Bryan, thanks so much for your amazing comment. I’ve been meaning to respond for 2 days now and wanted to make sure I had the time. So I think you and I agree on the strategic point. 100%.

However, I have argued for years that content marketing is the central point of an integrated paid, owned and earned strategy. And that, by definition, it is owned media.

When I publish an article on my website, I own it. No one can take it from me. (Native ads are NOT content marketing, nor is social media, Because the brand doesn’t own it – major pet peeve!)

Now content may not generate any traffic if I haven’t earned organic traffic to my site overall. Or if it doesn’t earn clicks on social. Those are earned. But my website, where I publish my content marketing, is owned.

I don’t run ads. I mean I’ve done a few tests here and there. Both promotional ads and content ads. And what I’ve found is that for a small consultancy like mine, $1 spent on articles do more to get me leads than $1 spent on any type of paid ad. About 200X more to be exact.

For example, if I spend an hour on an article vs. $350 for ads (about what I charge per hour) then I get 200 leads from the article and only 1 from ad. I’ve tested and proved this out for my site and about a dozen clients. (PS – there is a diminishing return on content, where ads start to make sense. But that’s a topic for another day)

Now I’m a small company. If I were mush bigger, I would want to effectively scale and ads would help. But not all brands rely on paid ads to convert.

For me there are two types of brands in the world: those who lead with customer value, or their purpose in the world, and they try to earn the right to talk products. They talk about holes, not hammers. And if the content is helpful and consistent, about getting a hole, and the products (the hammer) can help get the job done, they convert to sales of hammers (and nails) in a predictable way.

And then there are those brands who don’t have the patience for all that. They spend money on ads, just like you described. And they convert and it’s a numbers game. As you said, content may help them “hedge” that investment for those who leak out. But it is not a focus. They are focused on the hammer, or the nail. Not the hole. And that’s fine. You gotta know who you are and own it.

However, if you stop ads, your leads go to zero. but if you stop publishing content, traffic (and the leads from it) will continue for quite some time before petering out.

This is the biggest reason for the point of understanding that content marketing is owned media. It is a retirement account. The value increases over time even after you stop contributing.

I think the answer is in the middle for most brands. First you have to decide who you are: lead with customer or lead with product. Customer-led brands advertise their content to drive engagement to drive sales. Product-focused companies advertise products to get new customers who they hope they can retain. The math can work either way as ling as both continue to invest.

But they are 2 different strategies. Both valid. But different. And with different ROI. (Again topic for another post and covered extensively here.) Make sense?

I did that piece for Adweek what seems like a few years ago (honestly, all I remember was that I was in Mexico on vacation when it was published and people were texting me)…

Here’s a funny thing about that piece… so basically I took a SHELLACKING from people like Joe Pulizzi over at Marketing Profs, etc. He and his cronies on his podcast also took me to the woodshed…

I didn’t care… and Pulizzi walks the dog back every time I mention he shellacked me… but the reality is that the content marketing world believes in content for the sake of content… or so it seems…

And that’s just stupid. And when I wrote that piece for AdWeek.. I had tried for years to make a content first strategy work…

And I couldn’t do it… which is why I kind of said out of frustration – if content doesn’t generate revenue then why the hell do it…

I’ve written some really amazing pieces of content over the years. And the best way to describe what they do for your business is like lightening hitting a field of lightning rods…

You get a MASSIVE jolt of energy. When Ricky Gervais featured to his Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram following a piece I wrote about him… yeah – I got zillions of people…

… for like two seconds.

And I’ve done that more than once… and yeah – each time… massive lightning bolts…

Problem is this – you can’t run a city (and by way of analogy a business) waiting for lightning to strike now can you?

I mean everyone in the city can’t just suddenly wait for a hundred kabillion volts and amps for a zillionth of a second…

So trying to drive leads on content alone is really really rough… but that’s the core of what the content marketing world suggests…

Write Epic Shit – money falls from the sky.

It’s total BS. Truly. I should know – I’ve written “Epic Shit” on so many occasions… and made the lightning hit exactly where I want…

But none of it lasts…

So what does work as a strategy looks like this…

You need great content. But you need it because your PAID media is going to generate awareness… but your EARNED media (aka content marketing) is going to make that audience more stick and give you a better chance to generate leads from them other than the one whack at the apple through a lead gen approach…

So you run your ads… and those ads lead into funnels… but some of the people are going to leak out…

When they do… what will they likely do? Well the obvious one is go away completely. You can’t do much about those. But the next obvious one is – they’re going to jump out of the funnel you want them to go through… but they are like “Hmmm this looks somewhat interesting, let me do my own thing….”

And that’s where they’re going to look at your website, etc… and that’s where you need to have content that is relevant, engaging, useful, and deepening of a relationship…

So you have a power plant (paid media) generating little bits of lightning for your city – lots of awareness… etc… but when the big bolt hits… you’ve got ways to store that energy a bit and feed it back into the city…

That’s the approach I do now since I wrote that article. I think the most effective lead generation strategy has a strong paid media component… to generate awareness and make sales (generate leads)… but really good content is laid all over the place for the people who fall out of the funnel in the hopes that they’re lured passively back to you and the paid media isn’t just one and done…

BTW – totally agree video is where it is all going. Especially in paid media… and right now… video has the best legs…

Video is also the hardest to do… which is why I suspect for at least a little while longer – video will largely remain untouched except by people who know how to do film and TV well… but give it a few more years… and Video will be like blogging – everybody and their grandmother will be putting up videos and expecting to make a trillion dollars…

Anyways… thanks for the mention… feel free to reach out if you need anything.

Sincerely,

Bryan