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No one would deny that content is one of the main factors that have an impact on business in the realities of the digital marketing world. An informative blog, a persuasive sales page, or a fascinating post on social media might drastically boost the amount of paying customers and attract the attention of the audience to your website.
Therefore, qualitative and well-thought-out content writing and content marketing are crucial factors in the online presence of your commercial website. But what does each term stand for? How do they relate? And, finally, what is the difference between content writing and content marketing services? Check out this article to find answers to the above-mentioned questions!
How to Define Content Marketing and Content Writing?
In order to grasp the difference between content marketing and writing, let us define what each term means. By going through the main peculiarities of both notions, we will be able to compare and contrast them.
What Is Content Marketing?
Firstly, let us define content marketing. It is a part of digital marketing that aims at the creation and distribution of relevant content in order to achieve business goals.
These goals, in their turn, might be the following ones:
- The rise of your website traffic;
- The engagement and education of your target audience;
- Etc.
The content strategy that is often employed in content marketing includes the planning and creation of such forms of content as:
- Blog posts;
- Social media articles;
- Newsletters;
- Podcasts;
- Videos;
- Etc.
No matter whether it is a blog post you write or a YouTube tutorial you create, each above-mentioned form of content is involved in a content marketing strategy in order to attract the attention of the audience to your product or service and turn it into your customers.
What Is Content Writing?
The term content writing, in its turn, is pretty self-explanatory. It can be defined as a process of writing content in accordance with your content strategy in order to encourage the readers to perform a specific action.
The nature of this specific action depends on your business needs. Most often, it might be:
- To buy something from you;
- To subscribe to your email newsletter;
- To call you;
- Etc.
The call to action is usually realized by creating content like:
- Sales pages;
- Advertisements;
- Email campaigns;
- Blog posts with a clearly defined aim;
- Etc.
Thus, writers publish different types of content in order to convince the audience that reads it to perform a concrete action.
An important note: One more essential differentiation that is worth being made is the one between content writing and copywriting. While the first one has a number of goals that are mentioned above, the latter one pursues purely selling aims. So, we might regard copywriting as a part of content writing but definitely differentiate between them.
How Is Content Marketing Related to Content Writing?
After checking the definitions of content marketing and content writing, you might probably notice that both notions are interrelated to a certain extent. So, how about drawing the connection between them and discussing the ways they are related?
Here is the list of similarities between content marketing and content writing:
- They both are dependent on a content strategy;
- The two pursue the goal of influencing the audience in a certain way;
- Just like content writing, content marketing involves SEO when creating content in order to cause an increase in the website’s search engine positions and, thus, generate more leads;
- Both content writers and content managers have to publish SEO-friendly and high-quality content in order to make it work.
An important note: If you are either a content writer or a copywriter, remember that only relevant, informative, engaging, and valuable content might assist you in achieving your goals. And vice versa, a poor-quality, unoriginal blog entry or social media post might have a negative impact on your website by increasing its bounce rate or discouraging the readers from becoming your customers.
Content Marketing vs Content Writing: An Alternative View
One more possible way to differentiate between the two notions is to look at content writing as a part of content marketing.
In such a case, we might define content marketing as a plan developed for a certain business in order to generate new leads and sales. It would include such elements as a content plan, SMM, and SEO. Content writing, in its turn, might be defined as a method to realize a content marketing strategy by means of actual content creation.
What Are the Differences Between Content Marketing and Content Writing?
Now, let us check out the differences between content writing and marketing. Cutting a long story short, the main polarities between the two notions are the areas they cover, their main aims, and their requirements.
Covered Areas. Speaking about content marketing areas of specialization, we might enumerate blogs, podcasts, email autoresponders, and other similar content. Content writing, in its turn, includes writing sales pages, advertisements, direct mails, and other impelling content types.
Aims. The main goal of content marketing is to create content that would engage, educate, or entertain website visitors. Successively, content writing aims at generating content that encourages readers to do something.
Requirements. One more difference between content writing and marketing is content requirements. For instance, the avoidance of plagiarism and errors is especially essential in content writing, while search engine optimization plays a crucial role in content marketing.
A Bottom Line
Summarizing all the above-mentioned information, content marketing is closely related to content writing. They share such similarities as dependency on content strategy, an impact on the audience, and involvement in achieving certain goals. As well, content writing is oftentimes regarded as an actual realization of content marketing strategy. On the other hand, however, both content marketing and writing have a number of differences in their covered areas, aims, and requirements.
In general, both notions are the required “ingredients” of digital marketing. The professionally-written articles, creatively-made videos, and well-thought-out advertisements might not only attract the attention of your potential customers but also raise the position of your website in a search engine like Google. So, work on a great content strategy that would help your business rise and shine!
