Most people confuse content strategy with content marketing and treat those words interchangeably. However, these are two different terms altogether that mean different things and understanding this difference is the key to making your content production and distribution efforts far clearer both on paper and in practice.
Content Marketing
Content marketing can be considered an aspect of content strategy. Its definition can be summed up as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Typical content for content marketing techniques will serve the purpose of attracting customers and building meaningful relationships with them. This can include but not be limited to, email marketing, blog posts, social media content and more. All these are a part of one’s overall content marketing strategy.
Content Strategy
The content strategy basically refers to the overarching plan a business has for the content that it has created. In simple terms, it is the blueprint for the content, outlining the objectives and delivery of the content. Unlike traditional blueprints though, this blueprint is flexible, changing according to the evolving nature of the market and industry. To ensure that one’s strategy is on even keel, one needs to ask questions like, why the content is being created, who is the target audience, what do we want the reaction to this content to be, how do we promote it and more. Managing all these aspects may get confusing, which is why we have provided a handy checklist for your convenience.
So as is obvious, though there is a significant overlap between content strategy and content marketing efforts, they are different and serve separate purposes.