In any business, its important to have a good mix of short term and long term bets. If you focus on only long term bets, you will not have enough revenue to keep the business running. And if you focus only on the short term, inevitably you will miss out on larger opportunities and limit your growth.
When it comes to online marketing, ads can be seen as short term bets. Whereas a content marketing strategy would be a long term bet. It may be a year or a few years before the content marketing actually reaches enough people and has built a large enough audience to sustain your business, but eventually you will get to a point where the content marketing strategy you put in place has the power to eliminate the need for ad spend. The authority you’ve built with your audience makes you their go to choice for that category.
Its not necessary that long term bets will take a long time to materialize, just that there is a higher level of investment and risk associated with them. The payoff can be immediate in some cases, but generally it takes time and money up front before you see any returns.