First let’s understand the difference between owned content and sponsored content. Owned content is the content that you produce, write or get written on your own and then publish it on your website or blog (or on a third-party website or blog with complete attribution to you or your brand). Publishing a series of blog posts, articles and informative webpages under your own website or blog is a good example of owned content. Sponsored content is content that talks about you or your brand as a reference and then that content is published on a third-party website or blog. Your name or the name of your brand appearing in a New York Times articles is a good example of sponsored content. Which should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy?

I think both have their own place. When you have just started creating content you don’t have any audience. It takes time to build that audience and unless you have built the audience, you cannot leverage owned content. So what do you do? You go for sponsored content. Sponsored content helps you build audience while you’re creating your own content.

Besides, sometimes you want to reach an audience that doesn’t directly come to your blog or website no matter how much owned content you have. Sponsored content helps you achieve that.

Do you stop investing in sponsored content when you have created a considerable inventory of owned content? Depends on your marketing strategy. Do you want to reach out to a diversified audience? Or are you simply happy with the sort of people coming to your website or blog at the moment?

Benefits of investing in owned content

• Gives your brand its own unique content
• Strengthens brand identity
• Prospective customers and clients don’t have to scour the web in order to find content relevant to your product or service
• Your website or blog becomes a resource hub – you give people a reason to come to your website or blog repeatedly, or refer your links to the family and friends, or share your links on social media and social networking websites
• You generate more targeted traffic that can give you more leads, sales and even repeat sales
• As a personal brand you become an authority figure

Benefits of investing in sponsored content

• You can target bigger audience from the word go (although it’s not recommended to go for sponsored content from the word go because the exposure will go waste if you have got nothing substantial to offer on your own website or blog)
• You can build an audience for your brand much faster
• You increase respect among your own audience by appearing on reputed publications (the New York Times example, for instance)
• You can leverage the reach of well-established blogs and websites