Concepts in conflict: Differences Between Content Marketing and Copywriting

Since the birth of content marketing, copywriting has always been a companion. The connection between content marketing and copywriting is so strong that many people, including marketers, cannot distinguish between content marketing and copywriting. However, content marketing and copywriting are two different marketing strategies. This article helps you to identify the fundamental differences between copywriting and content marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing tool specialised in creating, publishing, and distributing content to a targeted online audience. The aims of content marketing are to:

• Grab the attention of audiences and drive leads
• Expand potential customer pool
• Push online sales
• Increase brand recall and brand recognition
• Maintain customer loyalty

In short, content marketing uses attractive content to attract potential customers, convert them into customers, and maintain their loyalty. Content marketing can come in many formats, including blog, advertisement, social media post, video clip, news, infographics, newsletter, website, brochure, etc. Content marketing is a long-term strategy with the final goal is to maintain loyalty.

What is copywriting?

Copywriting is a form of creating text content and is a direct form of marketing. Unlike content marketing, copywriting is one-dimensional. In other words, copywriting does not concern other forms of content marketing such as visual, talents casting, etc. Rather, copywriting focuses only on written content. Copywriting aims to encourage immediate action from audiences. Straightforward and immediate are the two characteristics of copywriting.

Copywriting is utmost important and increasingly shows its power through content localisation with the growth of globalisation and the internet. Localising content through copywriting becomes the survival instinct for any business.

The relationship between copywriting and content marketing

First, let’s discuss the differences between copywriting and content marketing. Copywriting is one-dimensional while content marketing is multidimensional. Copywriting only focuses on text and writing. The final goal of copywriting is to encourage audiences to take action right away. Therefore, copywriting is straightforward. On the other hand, content marketing takes different formats including writing text, audio, video, visual, etc. Content marketing delivers longer-term value and does not push actions from audiences.

Despite these obvious differences, copywriting and content marketing go hand-in-hand and cannot be separated. Without copywriting, content marketing cannot convert prospects to sales. Without content marketing, copywriting lacks human-touch elements such as trust, excitement, emotion, etc. Therefore, copywriting alone cannot maintain brand loyalty. Therefore, the most effective marketing strategy seeks a balance between copywriting and content marketing.

We are here to help you

Both copywriting and content marketing can be daunting if you do not have the experience to integrate these two cousins. At elionetwork, we have more than 20 years experience in copywriting services in Singapore, South East Asia’s cultural hub, and worldwide. As a professional content creation and copywriting agency in Singapore, we provide full copywriting and content localisation services including localising content. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help you to develop your content marketing strategy and delivery top-notch copywriting service.