Content marketing and advertising are similar yet distinct.

Recently, for a project our team is involved in, we asked users to submit "things they want to start in the new fiscal year." Within about a week, we received nearly 12,000 submissions.
What do you think when you hear that?

"Only 12,000 people?"
Or perhaps, "Huh? 12,000 people?"

Does a large volume automatically mean it's okay?

People from mass advertising backgrounds tend to wonder if a modest number is really sufficient. Even knowing it's unrealistic to expect hundreds of thousands or millions like in mass campaigns, they still feel uneasy. They start seeking comparison points: "How many do you normally get?" or "What do competitors get?"
What matters is evaluating the numbers against the campaign's purpose.

Was it a "measure to get more people to respond"? Or was it a "measure to gradually but surely increase the number of people loyal to our company," focusing on steadily building a solid foundation rather than capturing a large number of people all at once?

For the former, benchmarks like advertising metrics already exist. For the latter, however, the ideal response varies significantly by industry and company. Therefore, it's crucial not to judge based on a single attempt, but to run the initiative multiple times to establish your own baseline – to understand how your specific users typically respond.

While growing numbers are reassuring and welcome, content marketing isn't like advertising—it's not limited-time or finite. So, even if you achieve a happy milestone like "exceeding 1 million registered members" at a certain moment, the next challenge immediately surfaces: "How do we leverage those 1 million members? How many of them are actually contributing to our business?"

While relying solely on temporary metrics for reassurance isn't sustainable, you still need numbers and logic to convince your internal stakeholders. That's the tricky part of this field.

Loyalty!?

One goal of content marketing is to increase engagement and aim for higher loyalty. When setting this as your target, it's clearer to approach your content strategy as distinct from an advertising strategy.

In other words, it's different from aiming for volume like a mass campaign, and it's also different from counting solely based on behavioral data like digital advertising.

Loyalty involves a psychological element, and high favorability doesn't always correlate with frequent action. There are people out there who genuinely love a brand but are too busy to check the site often, or who simply don't have the inclination to share their enthusiasm widely. High loyalty doesn't guarantee desired actions.

Moreover, for some products, achieving short-term results can be difficult, making analysis complex. How do we capture aspects that website analytics and survey questions alone cannot fully grasp? More importantly, how do we combine and interpret the emerging facts? This is where analytical skill is truly tested, and where simple narratives, like those in advertising, are hard to construct.

Is it a replacement for advertising? Or is it for marketing?

The act of publishing content and getting it seen by everyone is similar to advertising. Content marketing can also fulfill some advertising functions, which is why the two are often confused.

If you consider content marketing as a replacement for advertising, the goal becomes "informing as many people as possible."

On the other hand, content marketing ultimately aims to deliver valuable information to each individual customer, encouraging some form of action. To achieve this, quality truly matters more than quantity. This requires understanding each person's specific situation and monitoring how that quality changes over time.

Is content marketing being used as a substitute for advertising? Or is it being approached more broadly, aiming to contribute to marketing as a whole? It might be wise to clarify this at the outset. Doing so will likely change how you allocate costs and effort.