+1 Except AFAIK Des only ever wrote 2 posts that were in any way "promotional". And even at that, they're pretty damn classy posts. E.g. this is the other one and it's been one of the most popular posts on the Intercom blog to-date: http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/ But isn't any post on a company blog a promotional post in some way? (Maybe not.) Disclaimer: I work at Intercom.
Blogging has been our most effective weapon thus far. We'll give advertising a go soon, just to compare. But right now it looks like a good article that's related to the product drives readers, which we try to then funnel into the site.
By promotional I think we're talking about "selling a product", so when I write a post like this say: http://blog.intercom.io/retention-cohorts-and-visualisations... there is no "Buy now" proposition, it's just me explaining something that I've invested considerable time into researching.
