Content Marketing vs Content Strategy: What’s the Difference?

Content marketing and content strategy are two approaches to content creation that have gained a lot of attention in recent years. It can sometimes be difficult to differentiate between the two, but understanding the differences is essential to achieving success with both.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to reach and engage your target audience. Content marketing focuses on understanding the needs and interests of your audience and creating content that meets those needs. Common content marketing tactics include creating blog posts, podcasts, webinars, videos, and eBooks.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is the process of strategizing, developing, and managing content to achieve a business goal. Content strategy looks at all aspects of content creation and development, from creating content goals to understanding your audience to evolving content based on performance. Content strategy involves developing content plans, testing various formats, and optimizing content for the highest performance.

Key Differences

  • Focus: Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to achieve business goals, while content strategy looks at the overall strategy of content creation.
  • Goals: Content marketing goals are usually to reach your target audience and engage them, while content strategy goals are to create content that meets business goals.
  • Tactics: Content marketing tactics often include creating blog posts, podcasts, webinars, videos, and eBooks, while content strategy tactics involve developing content plans, testing various formats, and optimizing content.

Understanding the differences between content marketing and content strategy is essential to achieving success with both. While both approaches involve content creation and distribution, content marketing focuses on delivering valuable and relevant content to reach and engage the target audience, and content strategy is more focused on how content is developed and managed to achieve business goals.