Performance Marketing vs Content Marketing

Here’s the difference between Content Marketing and Performance Marketing:

Content Marketing is organic. Examples are posting on LinkedIn, posting on Twitter, posting on Instagram, publishing a blog post to your website, etc.

Performance Marketing is paid. Examples are Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Adwords, etc.

Content Marketing is free, because anyone can just post on Linkedin, but it takes longer to ramp-up because you need to build an audience form scratch.

Performance Marketing costs money, because you need to put a budget behind your Facebook ads, but you can scale it faster because you can spend $1,000/day and immediately get wide distribution.

Those are the main differences.

But both have content at their heart.

Content Marketing consists of video, text, and image posts. It’s the same for Performance Marketing. Your ads are still essentially video, text, or image posts.

So, I don’t see them as separate worlds.

For example, we started by posting organically on our LinkedIn and YouTube channels. Videos like the one you are watching now. We did this for 2 years.

2 years later, I now have a big content library of hundreds of videos. And I can see, from our data, which of those videos got the most engagement and resonated most with our customers.

Recently, we started running Facebook retargeting ads. And guess what content I used for our first ads? I just used the 15-20 best-performing videos we ever posted on our LinkedIn.

It is saving me a lot of time and money because the content is already created and I did the trial & error before putting a budget behind my experiments.

Many companies make a mistake, especially when they’re funded, by immediately going to paid ads.

So they end up wasting a lot of money because they don’t have message-market fit yet, they don’t know what insights, topics, and tag lines resonate with their customer base.

So IMO, it’s most sensible to first find message-market fit on the organic channels, where it’s free to post, and then once you know what headlines, taglines, and insights resonate with your customers, you scale it by putting a budget behind it and running them as ads.