Let’s discuss content marketing vs digital marketing. What are their differences and similarities?
In my previous posts, I discussed digital marketing. Anyway, I will still discuss it here with the same passion and openness.
I decided to dive into this topic because most people assume both marketing strategues are the same. Most people use the term content marketing and digital marketing interchangeably.
After reading this post, you’ll understand the difference between both and make an informed decision on which to deploy or hire for your business.
So, are you ready? If you’re, let’s dive in!
What Does Content Marketing Means?
If you have your business online, you have most likely heard of the term “content marketing.” You may have likely deployed this marketing strategy to grow your business.
Now, how important is content? Without content, your website would be like a vehicle without an engine. In a vehicle, the engine makes it possible for the car to move from one location to another.
So, if your website lacks content, know it is engineless. And because of this, it would remain in one position or fall further down the search engine result page.
Content is the engine your website needs to move from the 10th or so position it currently occupies on SERPs (search engine result pages) to the 1st or 2nd page.
The content on your web page will guide search engines during ranking. Visitors or potential customers may not want to spend more time on your website or visit if it doesn’t have content.
I want you to also have at the back of your mind that content helps brands build trust and credibility, enabling prospects to form an opinion about your business.
So, content marketing is crucial to your business. When executed by a professional, content marketing can boost your organic traffic, more leads, and sales.
Now, here’s the question.
What is content marketing? Content marketing involves drafting content (text or video) that tells stories, educates, solves problems, and proffers a solution.
This is what a well-drafted content should offer:
Tell a story – The story could be about your brand (product or service) or related. Ensure it captivates and keeps your readers on their toes.
Studies have shown that the average time readers spend on a web page is around 15 seconds. But if you can deliver stunning content, your visitors won’t have any reason to leave your website in a hurry.
Educate – Visitors surf the web and eventual land on your page in search of knowledge or solution. They’re not there to waste their precious time. So, your content must educate and meet your visitors’ needs.
A Pro Tip: If you’re writing content, you have to ensure it is top-notch. Don’t forget that readers will judge you based on the quality of your content. And the painful part is that you won’t be around to defend yourself if they decide to react negatively to your posts.
So, ensure your posts are simple to read and informative. If you have to use videos, infographics, or images, feel free to incorporate them. According to Moz, content that includes video is three times more likely to attract backlinks than a plain post.
The bottom line is to make sure your content is educating. Your readers should be enlightened when they leave your website.
Provide solutions to problems – People use the internet in search of solutions to their problems.
For example an entrepreneur searching for the “best content marketer” wants to hire or work with a professional to possibly grow a business.
So, if you’re targeting this keyword, your content should point the visitors to where they can find an expert content marketer that can meet their needs.
The Advantages Content Marketing Has
If you have a business and you want to get customers online and drive sales, investing in content marketing is a wise decision. Below are reasons to consider content marketing.
Drive Engagement: In content marketing, it’s so easy to drive engagement. In other words, several ways you can drive engagement exists. Let me share some of the techniques with you quickly:
- Surprise the audience
- Create controversy
- Draft interactive content
- Reward engagement
- Capture minds with videos
- Mention people’s names in social shares
- Ask your audience to share opinions and thoughts
- Take complete advantage of conversational marketing
- Address something that your targeted audience cares so much about
Finally, timing is everything. You must get the timing right or miss out on a huge opportunity to impress your targeted audience.
What I just shared now are ways you can boost content engagement for your unique brand. And you can see that there are numerous ways to go about it.
The bottom line is if you provide valuable content to your customers, you won’t have to struggle to drive engagement or build a healthy relationship.
The fact that you took the time to create such quality content shows that you value your customers. And you’ll likely enjoy the same treatment from them in return.
Build Brand Loyalty: Whenever people come across your brand, they’re likely to be loyal to your products or services when they resonate with your content marketing.
Now, how can you build brand loyalty via content marketing? Let me quickly share some of the ways you can achieve this.
- Do everything you can to ensure your content is informative and helpful.
- Encourage customers to sign-up for your newsletter and send your content directly to them.
- Promote your content actively on social media. This process is an easy way to get your content in front of customers who didn’t sign up for your newsletter.
So, these are some of the steps to build brand loyalty. They’re not that difficult to implement, and the result could be massive when implemented successfully.
Cost-effective: Another advantage of content marketing is that it is not expensive. According to Demand Metric, content marketing is 62% less costly than traditional marketing.
So, content marketing can generate three times the leads traditional marketing can generate for your business.
With content marketing, marketers can build a targeted and engaged audience. The audience is generated organically and not via advertisement.
Again, in content marketing, you’ll have access to a wide variety of low-cost marketing options to grow your business.
The Disadvantages You Will Encounter In Content Marketing
We have been discussing the advantages of content marketing, including how it can benefit your business.
I would also like you to know that content marketing has several disadvantages.
Let’s discuss them quickly.
You Need An Expert: If you’re not an expert, please don’t waste your time doing content marketing. Why? It is research-intensive. Additionally, you won’t achieve much success if you don’t target the right audience or create high-quality content.
In digital marketing, some strategies don’t necessarily require an expert. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case with content marketing.
The Strategy Is Long-Term: You might not see an immediate impact in your content marketing effort, but if you deploy the right strategy, the result could be massive in the long term.
It takes time to build quality content and start guiding customers through one’s sales funnel. Other marketing methods might give instant results. An example is paid advertisement.
Types of Content Marketing
The primary focus of marketers in content marketing should be how to produce the most valuable and mind-blowing content in their niches. Below are the types of content that you can generate.
- Blog posts/articles
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- How-To Guides
- Email Newsletters
- Social Media Posts
- Ebooks, White Papers, and Reports
Content Marketing Stats You Should Know
Content marketing is crucial for businesses seeking ways to generate more leads, organic traffic and drive sales. Your website can also rank high when you deploy effective content marketing strategies.
Many marketers understand the impact content marketing can have on a business. But, unfortunately, some don’t.
In this post, I have handpicked stats that shows content marketing is still relevant and can have a massive impact on a business.
- B2B companies that blogs generate 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog. [Hubspot]
- 99% of email users check their emails daily. Some check their emails as much as 20 times daily. [OptinMonster]
- 60% of consumers have made purchases after receiving a marketing message via email. [OptinMonster]
- Articles that contain images receive 94% more total views. [Jeff Bullas]
- 60% of consumers may contact or consider a business when an image pops up in local search results. [Jeff Bullas]
- Brands that deploy infographics get 12% more traffic than those that don’t. [Unbounce].
- 9 in 10 organizations market their products and services with content marketing. [Content Marketing Institute]
- Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than outbound marketing. [Hubspot]
- 70% of users prefer to know more about a company via articles than ads. [Content Marketing Institute]
- 92% of companies see content as a business asset. [Content Marketing Institute]
- 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. [Hubspot]
What Is Digital Marketing?
We have discussed what content marketing is. Now, let’s do the same for digital marketing.
What’s digital marketing? Digital marketing refers to all marketing efforts done online. The aim is to let potential customers know about your products or services.
A digital marketer must know how to use diverse digital channels to create brand awareness and improve organic and paid traffic, ranking, and sales.
Here is the list of digital channels marketers use:
- SEO – Organic search
- SEM – Paid search
- Social Media
- Website
You won’t be wrong to classify content marketing as a part of digital marketing. As you can see, digital marketing strategies involve content creation.
However, there’s a difference between digital marketing and content marketing. In content marketing, all your strategies must involve informational content, but that’s not the case with digital marketing.
Advantages You Will Encounter In Digital Marketing
Now, let’s discuss the benefits and challenges of deploying digital marketing to grow your business.
Local Reach: Digital marketing boosts local visibility. Locally targeted ads and local SEO can benefit companies interested in bringing more paying customers to their doorsteps.
Lower Cost / Positive ROI: If you want to promote your business internationally or locally, digital marketing has a cost-effective solution for you. A professional digital marketer can generate $2 or more from every $1 you invest.
Digital marketing also allows smaller businesses to compete with larger companies in the same niche.
Effective Target: Digital marketing offers different ways to target your audience, and you can optimize your marketing campaigns around them.
You can target your audience via keywords (SEO), pay-per-click, social media, etc.
Highly adaptable: Adaptability is one factor that sets digital marketing apart. You can adapt your strategy to your business needs.
In digital marketing, it is easier to test different strategies until you find one that works for you and stick to it. The result will be massive when you discover a marketing strategy that works and focus more attention on it.
Unfortunately, you can’t try such with other forms of traditional marketing.
Disadvantages You Will Encounter In Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can significantly impact your business, but you should know it also has drawbacks.
So, what are the disadvantages of digital marketing?
The first I am going to point out is resistance from potential customers. You may face opposition from people when you try to capture their attention via paid advertisement.
Furthermore, don’t forget many internet users have an ad blocker installed on their devices. And for such a user, your ads won’t have any impact.
The intrusiveness of these ads gives many users an easy decision to make. It’s one of the reasons many users are installing ad blockers on their devices.
Unless we abolish the idea that ads must be intrusive to get people’s attention, people will continue to devise means to avoid them.
Excitingly, you can build brand loyalty and authority via content marketing. You can leap to the first search engine result page with effective content marketing.
Content Marketing vs Digital Marketing: What Is The Key Difference?
The first thing I would say differentiates content marketing from digital marketing is the conversion intentions. Both strategies have the same aim but the way they approach marketing differs.
Content marketing uses an indirect marketing approach. In other words, the content marketer does not try to sell the product to the customers directly. Instead, the focus is on creating awareness and building trust.
This explains why content marketing takes time. But in the end, you’ll discover that it is worth it.
However, the fact that I said content marketing is indirect marketing doesn’t mean marketers don’t incorporate links in the content that direct prospects to products or services. Some include links, while some don’t.
Furthermore, content marketing is less intrusive and builds value.
Now, let’s focus on digital marketing. While content marketing uses an indirect approach, digital marketing uses a combination of direct and indirect approaches.
The indirect approach includes running pay-per-click ads and sending personalized emails to customers when they sign up for your newsletter.
Conclusion
This content marketing vs digital marketing post shows that both marketing strategies are different. So, it is wrong to use both terms interchangeably
However, content and digital marketing are powerful strategies that can take your business to another level, growth-wise. A combination of both strategies will benefit your business immensely.
Every business needs a content marketing and digital marketing strategy. In today’s digital world, both marketing strategies are necessary to help businesses achieve success online.
