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In business, it’s easy to be swayed toward marketing tactics that generate fast results. If executed correctly, a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign can help you bring in leads, hit your revenue goals, and drive traffic to your site in a quick turnaround time.

But what happens once that campaign is over? Will these new customers still be loyal to your brand? Would they be able to pick your logo out of a lineup? Will they continue to do business with you or engage with your content online?

With these concerns in mind, many marketers firmly believe that content marketing outperforms PPC in the long run. Let’s explore how this is possible.

Content Marketing Builds Relationships

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

When using content marketing, you create valuable content, distribute it to your targeted audience across various mediums, and thus develop a relationship with them over time. This relationship turns into trust, which hopefully transforms into a loyal paying customer. This is the ultimate goal of content marketing.

PPC, on the other hand, works to rapidly attract a consumer’s attention and drive them to a specific landing page with the goal of initiating a transaction or a next step such as email signup. With the instant nature of PPC, businesses may see a greater number of leads. But how many of them turn into loyal, continuous customers?

Content marketing works to make an authentic connection with members of a specific audience and develop a lasting relationship, while PPC works quickly to make a sale. When choosing between content marketing and PPC, always consider the customer lifetime value of your audience.

Content Marketing Acts at the Right Time

Have you heard of the inbound marketing methodology? Inbound marketing seeks to provide customers with valuable, helpful content and support at various stages of the purchase cycle. The four stages are:

• Attract
• Convert
• Close
• Delight

For instance, in the attract stage, you may use an AdWords campaign to grab a user’s attention. But if the landing page copy and design fails, that’s the end of that. Instead, content marketing works well to attract your particular user through social media posts, blogging, and providing relevant information.

It’s likely that your intended target is searching for more information on whatever they plan to purchase. While PPC ads appear in search results, users are more apt to be attracted to content that provides an answer—not seeks to gain a sale.

PPC = Short Term Traffic

When you launch a PPC campaign, you will see a spike in website traffic. But only to a particular page (plus a few more, if you include site navigation on your landing page) and only for the length of your campaign. The minute your campaign expires, you’ll notice a significant decrease in traffic.

By creating and promoting evergreen content as part of an overall content marketing strategy, you will see steady website traffic each month. When compared to a PPC campaign, Customer Magnetism found that content marketing provided consistent website traffic and better results over a three-year time span.

Content Marketing Triumphs Over PPC

For consistent leads, long-term customer relationships, and steady website traffic, you’ll want to invest in a thorough content marketing strategy. PPC does offer wonderful, fast results, but offers only short-term results. Of course, you can always use PPC ads as part of your overall content marketing plan!