What Is The Difference Between Content Marketing And Content Writing?

Published on Wed Jul 08 2020

It's quite natural to assume that content marketing and content writing are the same, and many do get confused with both the terms. But there are fundamental differences between the two.

Content marketing is a slow build. It is a long term game that involves content writing at every step. If building a house is content marketing, setting up the bricks at every level is content writing. Let's understand the difference between the two in detail.

What Is Content Writing?

"Content writing is a long-form evergreen content that informs, educates and entertains customers where a content writer performs as a storyteller." Content writing is the key to the content strategy that assists businesses by inspiring users to take the expected action. Content writing takes place with the use of powerful words that communicate a brand's message to the users. These days the focus of every business is to bring organic traffic to their website. Therefore, a content writer builds his/her content more SEO friendly to rank higher on Google and increase the organic reach. It requires research and a deep understanding of business goals as content can strongly influence the customer to respond.

What Does Content Writing Include?

Content writing mainly consists of long-form of content. Following are a few examples:

  1. Blog Post
  2. Web content
  3. Newsletter
  4. Reviews
  5. Guides
  6. Customer Stories/Testimonials
  7. White Paper
  8. Case studies
  9. FAQs
  10. E-books

What Are the Essential Factors for Content Writing?

  1. Content writing requires creativity and the ability to come up with fresh content ideas.
  2. Extensive research is crucial to increase content credibility.
  3. Use of powerful words to keep the reader engaged.
  4. Avoiding grammar errors to improve content clarity.
  5. Use of relevant keywords to enhance search engine visibility.
  6. Proofreading content multiple times makes it better.

What Is Content Marketing?

"Content marketing is promoting a business through content. It involves planning, creating and distributing valuable content to attract and convert users and retain them." It is a long game of providing value to the user and slowly earning their trust and loyalty. Content marketing also requires the need to analyse the developed content and improve its performance for better results and to retain users. Other than content writing, content marketing can be done in any format like images, infographics, videos, memes, gifs, etc.

What Does Content Marketing Include?

Content marketing consists of almost all types of content forms, whether it's promotional or informational. Following are a few examples:

  1. Video
  2. Images
  3. Infographics
  4. Social Media update
  5. Ebook
  6. Landing page
  7. Newsletter
  8. Podcast
  9. Case study
  10. Webinar

Here is the list of 14 Free Content Marketing Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier.

What Are the Essential Factors for Content Marketing?

  1. Defining the target audience for the brand
  2. Building a content strategy to meet business goals.
  3. Set a content guideline and content tone for the brand.
  4. Research primary keywords
  5. Plan editorial calendars.
  6. Manage the team of content writers, designers and developers and promote collaboration to create different types of content.
  7. Analyse the content performance to maximize the ROI.
  8. Effectively distribute content across all channels.

Check out the Complete Guide to Content Marketing to learn how content can benefit your business in the long run.

Final Words on the Relationship Between Content Writing and Content Marketing

Effective content writing requires content marketing and content marketing cannot run efficiently without content writing. That's how dependent these two are on each other. Content marketing involves three simple steps:

  • Strategize
  • Create
  • Distribute

And content writing rules the second step, that is, to create. Both content writing and marketing work together to make each other strong and influential. And when it's done, we get a high-value content that educates, entertain and convert customers and benefit the business.