Copywriting Vs. Content Marketing

I recently had a colleague ask me if copywriting is just content marketing. In a way, it can be, but to pigeon hole copywriting to just content marketing can be a bit limiting, since you’ll be needing copy for more than just marketing purposes. Consider this more of a brief than anything, but basically we’ll discuss these two items, what joins them together, and how they might be different.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is typically the creation of various content and media types for the purpose of supporting various business sales goals, or the dissemination of information to build awareness online (typically). This is my definition, not that of

Key Types of Content for Consumer Digestion

Most of those are quite obvious, but organizational might be a bit different. Organizational content is typically focused education and the goal of leading users to eventual goals. For me, they are diversified or gamified content types. You need to users to perform a series of tasks to get to the goal.

I’m sure there are other types, but typically they fulfill the role of some element of marketing, even if they are simply to propagate an idea.

What is copywriting?

Copywriting is nearly self-defined, but it can be more than a marketing tool. You’ll need these types of resources when it comes to providing more information outside of spreading awareness and even education. Copywriting can be informational purely to provide information about an already known condition. Often times they produce the copy to support features of the content marketing agenda, but are not deliberately there for that sole purpose. To me, the copywriter is the core of creating an online base of knowledge.

Copywriting is a core part of what creates the online world. While many people see it as a function of creating a web page or blog and article content, but in reality they draft disclaimers, company information and deeper descriptions of products that serve users in different ways than for marketing or growing awareness. The key differentiation is that they provide informational support for items that may not need any other purpose than to provide additional context.

These are core difference, but you really can’t have any content marketing without copywriting and the source of copywriting is really motivated in almost all instances by the needs of content marketing. They are symbiotic.

Learn more with us at eightfold.io!