Everybody knows what content marketing means. Right? At least baed on our experiences, people still get confused between the terms – content strategy, content creation and content marketing, using these words interchangeably. In this article we are here to outline the differences so that you never get confused again.
What is Content Strategy? Content Strategy or Content Planning refers to the same thing, it is the process of creating a plan that outlines how the business can use content to achieve specific business objectives. It starts with asking the right questions and understanding the “Why” part of content creation. Why must this content exist? To what end and how might we go about creating and deploying it to achieve the objectives?
Content creation on the other hand is clearer to most people. It is the process of producing content, such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and social media posts in accordance to the strategy that has been defined. The goal of content creation is to provide valuable and engaging content that is relevant to the stage of customer journey.
Lastly the term Content Marketing is the term given to define the marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, retain, entertain or educate a clearly defined audience. The expectation is that the content marketing efforts will be aligned to the content strategy and the strategic objectives.
Let us dive deeper into Content Strategy?
Content strategy is the process of planning, creating, and distributing content in order to achieve specific business goals. It is the high-level vision that guides the development of content across all platforms and partnerships. It Content strategy is concerned with the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of content creation. This includes identifying the needs of the audience, deciding on the type of content to be created, setting the tone and style of the content, and determining how the content will be managed and updated over time. It’s about building a framework that ensures that all content is consistent, high-quality, and supports the overall business objectives.
But what are these goals or objectives?
These goals could be any of the below
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To drive revenues
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To drive website visits
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To generate brand awarenesss
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To generate leads and so on
We follow a five step content strategy process that we put together based on our experiences
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Define the Goal
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Conduct Persona Research & Map the Customer Journey
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Run a Content Audit
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Define Content Themes
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Map Content to Funnel
Let us look closely into Content Creation?
Content creation is the process of producing content that accomplishes certain goals for the target audience and is aligned to a specific channel and is adapated to the specifics of that channel.
These goals could be any of the below
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To inform and educate the audience
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To entertain the audience
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To generate leads
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To drive traffic to a website or blog
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To build brand awareness
The content that is created is based on the business need and the specifics of the channel. It could be
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Blog Posts for Education
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Linkedin Posts for quickly coneying an idea
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Shorts for Youtube or Instagram
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Content for Conversion of Educated audience and so on
And finally let us explain Content marketing and how it is different from Content Strategy.
Content Marketing is where the rubber meets the road.
In essence, content strategy is the master plan that ensures that the content is valuable, purposeful, and effective, while content marketing is the practical application of this strategy to attract and retain customers.
They overlap in the sense that the content created as part of the content strategy is used in content marketing to reach and engage the target audience.
Content Marketing is concerned with the tactical aspects of using content to attract, engage, and retain an audience, by offering them relevant and valuable content, with the ultimate aim of driving profitable customer action. Content marketing is more about the ‘who’ and ‘what’. It involves tactics such as SEO, social media promotion, email marketing, and more to distribute the content and attract the target audience.
These metrics that should be used to measure content marketing efforts could be
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Website traffic
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Leads generated
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Sales
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Brand awareness