Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising for B2B Companies

Abstract

This thesis follows a traditional research-based structure. The thesis focuses around content marketing and traditional advertising for B2B companies. The thesis was pro-duced for a company called INS and aims at showing that, in present times, content marketing is more valuable than traditional advertising.

The first part of the thesis covers different views and theories on both content market-ing and traditional advertising, from definitions, types, roles and stages to planning and measurement. These parts are followed by a theoretical comparison of content market-ing and traditional advertising, presenting arguments why some companies use more one instead of the other.

Qualitative research, in form of personal interviews, was carried out to analyze why B2B Finnish companies use content marketing, what the benefits are, how they allocate resources between content marketing and traditional advertising and, last but not least, how they measure content marketing. Half of the interviewees are INS clients and the other half are INS stakeholders.

The results of the qualitative research complement the theory, bringing new findings regarding the relationship between content marketing and traditional advertising. Based on the research findings, B2B Finnish companies trust more content marketing than traditional advertising to the extent that some of them do not even use traditional ad-vertising. This particular finding is important for the case company INS and the future of their business as it shows a pattern of where the market is and where it is heading.