Content Strategy vs Content Marketing

Author: Nicole Hess / Source: Business 2 Community

While the roles of content strategy and content marketing can overlap, their differences are significant. Yet, if Google has it confused, it’s no wonder other people are getting it wrong, especially if they haven’t worked in or with both fields.

So does it matter if they get confused? I believe it does. Here’s my case as to why.

When I’m requested to join a meeting to discuss “content strategy” I prepare by researching the tone of the content, the journey, and content organization among other things. Yet, when I arrive at the meeting and am asked, “What content should we create to have other sites share it?” – well that knocks all that preparedness out the window. I don’t want to waste time. I don’t want there to be confusion. So clarifying the differences for everyone with examples that relate to our industry seems to be in order.

So, while this isn’t a comprehensive list, I wanted to share some of the clearer differences between them.

1. Strategy vs Marketing

One might guess that the words in the titles themselves tell us that they represent different practices. But unfortunately, the word change isn’t enough. Personally, I blame the famous ‘Sanitation Engineer’ and ‘Trash Man’ dichotomy for this confusion (thanks to Maddie for the great example).

So, I want to shout it from the rooftops that these titles are not interchangeable. Here’s the main difference:

Content Strategy focuses in delivering strategy and recommended actions to implement on a site and for the site’s contributors.

Content Marketing focuses in marketing content – determining what assets to have, creating them and marketing them to other websites and online presences (social profiles and other variations).

Ready for the details? Let’s get to it.

2. Inbound vs Outbound

Cold calls go out to make a sale, as does a pitch email to get a backlink to content. Whereas a sales center takes calls from potential customers, as does a website ready to service a visitor. Does everything come back to sales? Maybe not, but this is an easy analogy that most of the industry understands. Here’s the breakdown without the sales lingo:

Content Strategy focuses on the visitors who are coming to the website. It’s enhancing the site’s experience for the traffic it receives.

Content Marketing focuses most on the online profiles of others. The content they share, write about and link to, and how to create something that those other profiles will share.