This question causes wide discussions on Quora and is highlighted by every self-respecting advertising blog. By the way, Joinative is no exception. We’ve created a detailed blog post describing the difference between content marketing and native advertising and illustrating how you could combine these methods.

In a nutshell, if you want to understand the connection between the two, turn to the definitions.

Content marketing is a marketing approach that helps you reach your target audience and gently lead them to customer action by producing and distributing content that meets their needs. Blog posts, video tutorials, webinars, newsletters – whatever type of content you produce, you’re doing content marketing. You can also apply different content distribution methods to put your content in front of the right people.

Talking about content distribution, native advertising does a good job here. Being used to promote content to the relevant audiences, native advertising is rather a part of content marketing.

So, native advertising and content marketing can be neither opposed nor compared. But these two work better when combined, that’s for sure. While native ads can help you get better results out of your content marketing efforts, native advertising is effective only when aligned with a proper content marketing strategy.