It appears as though few businesses actually comprehend the contrast between writing interesting ‘marketing content’ and composing great ‘copywriting’ which is in effect the equivalent of “sales in print”.
So, we need to clear a couple of things up in order for you to benefit from these two very important marketing activities in your business…
Firstly, ‘Marketing Content’ is about producing appealing subject matter for your business’s prospects and customers with the aim to nurture, educate and provide authoritative information (content) for them to read, hear, watch and learn from.
This can be used for what’s commonly known as a sales “pull” tactic to get your market’s attention and interest in various forms such as: offline newsletters, newspaper and magazine editorial articles, and brochures; and online by creating e-news, e-mags, e-books, e-reports, blogs, podcasts and video content.
Secondly, copywriting is explicitly intended to encourage B2B and/or B2C sales by utilising purposeful communication for what’s known as a “push” tactic to get people motivated to take action – hence the term, call to action (CTA) at the end of a sales letter, web page or video, where the aim is to get someone to either click on an action button or to go straight to purchasing a product and service.
In effect, what these two definitions mean …is that marketing content and copywriting are two altogether different sorts of marketing and sales customer communication activities and which require totally different skill ranges and capabilities.
To befuddle these two types of marketing outputs resembles say, comparing apples to lemons – similar categories of food which we label ‘fruit’ which grow on trees, but individually they offer very different tastes and flavours.
What all this boils down to, is figuring out which type of communication your business needs to attract a certain audience, when they should be used and in which media channel, and especially, who has the specific training, skills and abilities to compose each particular individual type of writing and copy style.
In other words, that while some people may claim to be marketing specialists, the fact is, both styles require a very different set of technical writing skills when it comes to promoting your business brand and products to educate and to sell to your various customer markets.
Which means in summary, while both marketing content and copywriting may seem at the outset to be similar forms of business communication, they are in effect, dissimilar and therefore require very different skillsets… One compiling and writing educational information verses the other producing stories and trigger points that elicit emotions and motivate a would-be customer to take action.
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