Content marketing vs content strategy? Aren’t these the same you might wonder?
Let me start by telling you that content marketing is not content strategy.
Content marketing is effectively a return to the roots of advertising where the primary objective is to generate leads and sales, which can be achieved through the use of compelling and valuable content.
On the other hand, content strategy tackles broader objectives, such as increasing brand awareness (or search engine rankings) or acquiring customers into a long-term relationship with your company.
Content marketing and content strategy are two sides of the same coin.
You can’t be successful with one without the other. This is why you need to plan both, i.e, content strategy framework and content marketing.
I’ll show you why you need both. Let’s dive in.
What is Content Marketing?
In its most basic sense, content marketing is about creating and distributing content for the purpose of generating online conversions.v
These conversions often lead people into your sales funnel, where they become more informed about what you have to offer and eventually engage in a purchase.
When it comes to content marketing, the focus is on creating something unique and valuable. That’s how you get people to take action.
Why Content Marketing Matters?
In a nutshell, the key reason why content marketing is important is that it can help you scale your business by reaching new audiences and making more sales. That’s why it’s so effective.
Other than a business’s main goal is to make sales, content marketing can help in many ways such as:
1. Content Marketing Drives Sales
Content marketing is all about using high-value content to generate leads and sales. This is primarily done by producing blog posts, reports, infographics, white papers, videos, eBooks, etc.
By doing this you’re effectively delivering high-quality information to your target audience.
Your goal is to educate them about a certain topic or persuade them to do something via a call-to-action and as a result, this leads to more sales.
2. Content Marketing Builds Credibility
Content marketing not only drives leads and sales. It also helps you create a relationship with your potential customers, and nurture them.
Along the way, you will be also building trust, and credibility and finally convert them into lifelong customers.
When it comes to content marketing, building credibility and trust is vital in order to get results.
3. Content Marketing Increases Brand Awareness
When it comes to increasing your brand awareness, you need to think carefully about your audience and how they relate to you. This would include researching who they are and what they want.
Building your content on relevant keywords your audience is actively searching on the net, you can help them discover your brand, thus increasing brand awareness.
When it comes to brand awareness, content marketing is a great way to reach out to more people by providing them with valuable information.
4. Content Marketing Increases Website Traffic
In order to attract and generate a significant amount of interest from the audience, you need to deliver compelling content. Content marketing can help you do this.
As a result, you can increase the overall number of visitors to your website, resulting in more sales and leads.
5. Content Marketing Fills Your Sales Pipeline
If you have a sales pipeline to fill, you can definitely achieve this through great content.
When you provide value to your audience and guide them in their customer journey, your content can actually increase the chances of converting them to customers, thus filling your sales pipeline.
6. Content Marketing Gets you Noticed by Influencers
When your content is performing well in the search engines or on social media, you will surely get noticed by influencers who are always looking out for new opportunities for their business to grow.
This exposure can eventually translate into new business opportunities.
7. Content Marketing Provides Value
The key to success with content marketing is creating something that’s worth reading and sharing.
This means you have to offer people valuable information that they can use and even share with others.
This can be done by providing useful content that helps them understand how they can benefit from your product or service.
Now let’s find out more about the other side of the coin which is the content strategy. I’ll give you more than one definition of content strategy here.
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is about planning for content and creating a content structure that supports your business objectives. It is the foundation of all of your content-related activities and decisions.
Content strategy is the very heartbeat of your content marketing. It answers the question of how you’re going to create, publish and manage content that works for your business and drives meaningful results.
Content strategy involves all the decisions related to managing your content, from deciding on topics, creating a publishing schedule, and defining a style guide to sorting out technical details.
It’s about organizing your content in a manner that makes sense for your business. In other words, it is the blueprint for what you publish where, how often and why.
But most importantly, a content strategy is planned and executed based on this ultimate question: “what is the purpose of a content strategy?”
Essentially, your content strategy should be able to answer these few fundamental questions:
For me, I think there are 2 main pillars on which we need to build a content strategy:
1. Goal-Oriented Content Strategy
A business content strategy involves creating content that is directly applicable to your business. It should be one that helps you reach your goals.
For example, if you want to attract new customers, then you’ll need to create content that highlights the best parts of your business and shows how these benefits are so important.
This can be accomplished by answering the questions potential customers have about your business, highlighting the best bits of the company and how they can get in touch with you.
Don’t forget that it should be consistent with your company’s brand, mission, and vision.
In other words, there should be a reason behind everything that you produce.
If you create content that is irrelevant or inconsistent with the overall brand, it will not stand out from the rest and soon become dated.
2. Audience-Focused Content Strategy
Knowing who your best audience is, is critical. An audience-focused content strategy helps you understand exactly who your audience is and what they want to know about your business.
It lets you know who should be consuming your information and how to distribute content to them.
This can be done by creating buyer personas, analyzing industry data, conducting surveys, or even talking to real people.
At the very least, it requires you to actually speak with potential customers and clearly define what they need to hear from you.
So, how exactly does a content strategy works?
Content Marketing vs Content Strategy – How Content Strategy Works?
1. A Content Strategy Helps Define Your Business Goals
Content strategy is not a marketing tactic. It is the bedrock on which all content marketing efforts will rely.
Having a clear content strategy in place is a fundamental element when building your company. Your content strategy will ideally include what you want to achieve and how.
Creating a content strategy is not something that can be done at a whim or half-heartedly.
It should have been thought out, discussed, and planned well in advance, identifying the key components that are most important to your business’s success.
Every piece of content should have a measurable goal associated with it.
2. A Content Strategy Helps Define Your Audience
As I said earlier, knowing your audience is critical to your business’s success. That’s why it’s essential to know who you are trying to reach with your content.
By “knowing”, I mean precise knowledge. You should your audience’s interests, age group, pain points, what they want, what they need, and so on.
And it’s only a content strategy that will help you define your audience so that your content is able to resonate with them.
3. Helps Define Content Objectives
Your content strategy should guide your content marketing objectives.
For instance, you’ll need to consider the types of posts that will best fulfill these goals.
A content strategy that helps you define the objectives of each piece of content you create will have a fruitful impact on the way you do business.
Since you will be creating content with a purpose behind it, I think that can dictate whether that content is going to be a success or a failure.
4. Helps You Consistently Deliver on Your Brand Promise
Like any other type of business strategy, a good content strategy should be focused on achieving clear objectives that are in line with your overall brand promise.
However, it is also an ongoing process that identifies the challenges you face in delivering on this promise as well as how to overcome them through a combination of branding, promotion, and execution.
5. Helps You Monitor Your Content Marketing KPIs
Your content strategy should take into account your organizational goals and the types of KPIs you will use to measure performance.
This will help to establish your reach, impact on sales, and time spent on the various web marketing strategies.
The use of a content marketing strategy will allow you to create a structure that makes it easy to track progress and measure results and optimize where necessary.
6. Helps You Maintain Control of Your Business
A content marketing strategy will help you manage your business in a way that’s consistent with your overall corporate objectives and enables you to measure performance.
Having control of your business is of the utmost importance. And a content strategy can help you with that.
For example, it can ensure you stay focused on your business goals, instead of getting sidetracked into other areas that won’t help you achieve these goals.
The creation of a strategy that includes a plan for future growth can help you ensure that your business stays on the right track.
Using a content marketing strategy helps ensure that everything is working in harmony and elements are effectively overlapping to produce a consistent result.
9. Content Strategy Helps you Reach your Audience Effectively
Content strategy isn’t just about creating the right content, it’s also about putting that content in front of the right people.
This is why you need to have a dedicated strategy for reaching out to your audience. This can be done through blogs, webinars, eBooks, and other types of educational content.
It can also be done through social media and other channels with an emphasis on digital marketing.
Content Strategy: Content Marketing’s Best Friend
Whether you’re creating something new or repurposing existing content, anything that you produce for your company will be impacted by a set of strategic guidelines or principles.
This is what we call content strategy.
Content strategy determines why, when, for whom and how you create your content. It also tells you how much time and effort to devote to creating that particular piece of content.
You might have a very clear vision of the message that you want to convey, but you might still need a little outside inspiration to get your creative juices flowing.
The structure of your content strategy can also be used to create an editorial calendar that tells you what you should be publishing each and every day.
The value of a content strategy is that it allows you to be more efficient.
It prevents you from being emotionally attached to your ideas and allows you to let go of things that might not work as well as others.
A content strategy also creates a path for audiences to follow in your sales funnel, from awareness to final conversion.
Content Strategist vs Content Manager | What’s the Difference
If you’re thinking about who you need to hire for your content marketing needs, it’s true that this may sound confusing.
But let’s break down the differences between a content strategist and a content manager.
The name speaks for itself, right? A content strategist is the one in charge of developing a content strategy.
But above that, a content strategist is someone who has a clear understanding of your company, the customer market you serve, what your customers really want and what you can achieve through content marketing channels.
Content strategists have the knack to create the purpose and overall direction for a company’s content marketing efforts.
Not only should they know what gets people excited and how to get them excited but they also know what keeps people engaged in the first place.
A content manager is someone who handles the execution of a content strategist’s ideas and takes them from concept to completion.
They make sure that the content produced is going to be appropriate and that it meets the needs of all stakeholders (your customers, employees, colleagues, etc.).
They are also responsible for ensuring that your organization stays current on industry trends and standards.
For example, they might have a team that’s responsible for creating blogs, articles, and press releases.
So how do you know who you should hire? Let’s face it; our clients aren’t hiring us because we are expert content strategists.
They are hiring us because we get stuff done. And we can get that done with the help of a content strategist.
The role of a content strategist is to help establish the best practices in your industry. The role of a content manager is to make sure that those best practices are executed.
Both roles are integral to content marketing success. You don’t need to have one person handle all things content marketing or you will lose effectiveness.
Wrap Up
Our content marketing vs content strategy is now over and I hope you’ve learned something along.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy where you focus on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and engage customers.
It is the ultimate way to reach potential customers with high-quality information that they can’t get anywhere else!
It’s not about creating thin and useless content – this type of marketing should be thoughtful, creative, and useful.
You want to create content that is user-friendly and shows off your expertise. This way you can cut through the noise of marketing and drive foot traffic to your website, product pages, or sales funnel.
A content strategy is a key foundation for every content marketing campaign you take on. It should be created with an eye toward the long-term growth of your business.
A content strategy will allow you to have an in-depth understanding of your company, who your customers are, and what they need.
It offers a means of branding and stands as the foundation for all of your marketing content. Your content strategy should help you create customer-centric content that drives engagement and conversion.
Remember that a great content strategy should be :
- Consistent with your company’s brand, mission, and vision
- Audience-focused at all times
- Based on a solid understanding of the end goals you want to achieve and how you will do it.
If you need help with your content marketing or SEO content strategy, Myndset is here to help! Get in touch with us!
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