Advertising is like renting. You get to borrow someone else’s audience for 30 seconds or a minute. The audience has come to the newspaper, magazine, radio, or television to see something they’re interested in, and you happen to be there. Hopefully, they’ll pay a portion of their attention to you rather than to what they actually came to see.

Of course, if you stop paying the rent, you’ll lose your opportunity to speak to that rented audience. The minute your ad budget runs empty, you’re cut off, and you might never reach those people again.

Does advertising work? Sure it does, but it’s tough to build equity when you rent. You’ve got to keep paying the piper, or the music stops.

What’s the alternative? How can you own your audience rather than rent it?

That’s where content marketing comes into play.

With the right kind of marketing, you build an audience that came to see you rather than something or someone else.

They’re interested in what you have to say, and you can keep communicating with them even when you’re not paying for the privilege.

You build equity in content marketing. You own what you’ve built. You’re building an asset.

For instance, as you build your website, it gains rank in the search engines. The increasing rank improves the value of your asset. As the months pass, the expense of building the site goes down, yet the value of the asset goes up. You’re building equity. The work you put in last year and last month comes to fruition this month and grows in value month after month.

The same holds true for your blog, your videos, and your audio programs. You put in the effort now, and the value grows over time. You’ve shared your expertise. The search engines plus word of mouth make those assets more and more popular.

More visitors, more value, more equity.

Renting is nice, but ownership allows you to increase your equity month after month.

In the long run, for marketing anyway, buying is better than renting.