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Marketing in the digital age has revolutionised how businesses engage, interact, and grow their customer base. This post explores content marketing vs digital marketing to help you decide which is right for your business.
Content marketing and digital marketing are two of the most popular and effective strategies businesses use to reach their target audience.
While most people use these terms interchangeably, there are key differences between the two, and knowing which is right for you is crucial to maximising your business's success.
Integrating content and digital marketing strategies can help your business reach its full potential. This expert guide from the Scribly team can help you make the right decision between content marketing vs digital marketing.
Content marketing vs digital marketing: understanding the terminology
Before we dive into content marketing vs digital marketing, let's first understand what each term means.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is creating and distributing content, usually in the form of blog posts, visuals, podcasts, or infographics.
Content marketing aims to engage and educate the audience and influence them toward a particular action or decision, like raising awareness of a brand or product. Content marketing is usually done through content creation, optimisation, syndication, promotion, and analytics.
What can content marketing do?
The primary focus of content marketing is to build relationships with potential customers.
Content helps businesses demonstrate their expertise, educate potential customers, and build trust. This can result in increased brand visibility, higher content engagement rates, more leads, and, eventually, more sales.
Benefits of content marketing
According to HubSpot, 82% of marketers are investing heavily in content marketing because of its many benefits, including:
- Establishing authority and trust: Google's E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Authority) algorithm has content at its core. High-quality content demonstrates your industry knowledge and expertise, positioning you as a credible, reliable authority.
- Creating brand awareness: Your brand sets you apart from your competitors. And branding is more than a logo. Your branding makes you unique and gives customers an emotional connection to your business. Content marketing helps increase brand visibility and recognition, building and strengthening relationships with potential customers.
- Fueling content engagement: Content that resonates with your target audience will encourage them to share, comment, and like your content, helping you build a loyal following. You can also turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors, further amplifying your reach.
- Boosting SEO rankings: Content marketing is a powerful tool to boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. Creating content around relevant keywords and phrases helps increase organic traffic to your website.
Content marketing considerations
Content marketing is incredibly powerful, but content creation is time-consuming and requires expertise. It's not a quick fix — it’s an effective long-term strategy.
And creating content without a plan or strategy likely won’t generate results. You need to know your target audience, what content they're interested in, and how to optimise content for SEO.
Proper keyword research, content optimisation, and content promotion are vital to achieving tangible results from content marketing. To succeed, you’ll need to develop a content calendar, align content with your marketing goals, and measure performance.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all online marketing efforts. It encompasses content marketing, SEO, social media, email, pay-per-click advertising, display ads, and other digital channels.
Digital marketing allows you to leverage different digital channels to reach your target audience, capture attention, nurture leads, and convert them into customers.
While all content marketing is digital marketing, not all digital marketing is content marketing. Digital marketing focuses mainly on sales, while content marketing is engagement-based.
What can digital marketing do?
Digital marketing aims to drive customers from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to the sales funnel. For example, you can run social media or display ads that link directly to landing pages on your site. When customers click on the ad, they are taken to a page where you can collect their contact information.
You can then use this information to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers.
Benefits of digital marketing
The advantages of leveraging digital marketing include:
- Saving money: Digital marketing is much more cost-effective than traditional methods and can be tailored to any budget. You can target specific audiences and track the results of your campaigns in real-time.
- Increasing reach: With over five billion people online, digital marketing can help you reach a broader, more diverse audience. You can target customers based on location, age, and interests across multiple devices.
- Improving measurability: Digital marketing provides real-time analytics and insights, letting you monitor and adjust your campaigns accordingly. This helps you tweak content according to customer preferences, ensuring the highest ROI for your content.
Digital marketing considerations
Digital marketing does have its drawbacks. Digital channels are volatile and change rapidly, requiring continual content updates. You may find yourself playing catch-up as new content trends and technologies emerge.
It's also susceptible to updates like ad-blockers, which can limit the effectiveness of your content. When customers install ad-blockers, they no longer see your content, and you lose engagement, affecting ROI.
So where does SEO fit in?
Search engine optimisation is relevant to both content and digital marketing. SEO involves optimising content for search engine rankings and targeting relevant keywords to reach potential customers.
In content marketing, we focus on valuable, well-researched, and keyword-rich content to rank high in SERPs and get your content in front of prospective customers when you can add value.
In digital marketing, we leverage SEO techniques, like placing keywords in Google ads to boost visibility in SERPs.
SEO technically falls under the digital marketing umbrella because it involves optimising content for faster loading times and improving content structure. Some aspects of on-page SEO, like site content, image optimisation, meta descriptions, and title tags, also form a core component of digital marketing.
Is Scribly a content marketing agency or a digital marketing agency?
Scribly is a content marketing agency focusing on content creation and optimisation to help brands increase visibility, drive more traffic, and convert leads. Our point of view is simple — good content drives results.
You can trust us to create content that resonates with your target audience, nurture leads through content marketing tactics, and leverage SEO to get you ranking in SERPs.
Our content writing services include:
- Blogs/articles
- Ebooks/whitepapers
- Landing pages and web copy
- Social media captions
- Emails
- … and other copywriting tasks like product descriptions.
We integrate content campaigns with digital marketing tactics to amplify your reach, drive more qualified leads, and improve ROI. Our experienced content strategists and marketing experts will also help you develop a custom content strategy that aligns with your brand goals and marketing objectives.
Content marketing vs digital marketing: which is right for you?
To decide between content marketing and digital marketing, you need to consider your content goals, target audience, budget, and existing content strategy.
The good news is you may not have to choose one or the other. You can use content marketing and digital marketing strategies together to achieve better results.
Hiring a reputable content marketing agency can help you assess your content needs, develop a strategy that suits your goals and budget, and integrate your content with digital marketing solutions.
At Scribly, we provide professional, collaborative content marketing solutions tailored to your individual objectives. We'll work with you to develop content that resonates with your target audience, addresses their pain points, and drives conversions.
Book a free strategy call with us today and gain a competitive edge with content marketing.
