The Importance of Content - Paid Content v/s Consumer Generated Content

Gone are the days where the thing that is broadly visible, is also easy saleable. Today, consumers are smart, and thanks to the bloom of various social media platforms, they are updated as well. Therefore, to be in sync with the consumers, the companies have changed their marketing approach. The companies now believe in content marketing in order to sell their products. Content marketing is not direct marketing, but in fact strategic marketing; so as to understand the consumer and market to him accordingly.

One cannot deny that content is very important for any company or a business. Therefore, in order to get better ROI, companies often go for paid content. Paid content is the content on the Internet (maybe video, graphics, texts and so on) that is paid for and is usually copyrighted. The other way to market any product via content is by the approach of consumer generated content. The consumer generated content means using the consumer presence in social media to market the products.

Both ways of content marketing - paid content and consumer generated content - have the same goal i.e. to increase the sale of the product in order to benefit the company or business. However, these approaches are different from each other. Paid content is generally written or designed by professionals, although it has all the necessary information but sometimes it may still not be able to match the width of the consumers. On the other hand, the consumer generated content is from the consumer itself, or it can be said that it is straight from the heart of the consumer, so it relates to the other consumers easily.

Given a choice between paid content and consumer generated content, the latter is appreciated more. There have been many recent cases where even the big companies have chosen this mode to connect with the consumers. They have launched big budget campaigns where the consumers upload their picture with the product and get prizes, and many more similar campaigns are being run every day. These campaigns have proved to be very effective for the companies.

We are in the century where it is common practice that whenever we plan to buy anything expensive or even economical; we prefer to check the reviews and ratings. The consumer today trusts reviews and ratings from fellow shoppers; so, getting a product marketed by the consumers itself will give best results. The very common example of consumer generated content is the review of any movie. There have been many cases where after the movie release, despite a bad rating by a critic, the movie still gets good reviews from the common people. Since, the review by consumer is good, the people will go and watch the movie. Therefore, it is safe to say that consumer generated content is more beneficial than paid content.

In digital marketing, content marketing is the most important channel to promote both paid and free content. But you have to have the proper knowledge to develop the right content which interests the consumer. And to gain knowledge, a digital marketing course or digital marketing certification is a necessity.