Content Marketing vs. Blogging – What’s Right For You?

Are you looking to pull in more customers? How about boosting your views or increasing your subscriptions?

If any of this interests you, you’ve probably been doing a lot of research about marketing. In particular, you may have come across content marketing and blogging. These are two of the most common tactics for bringing in more customers.

However, before you get started making content, you need to find the perfect fit for you: content marketing vs blogging.

To learn a little bit more about each of these terms and how to choose between the two, keep reading. This decision is important when it comes to establishing your brand and marketing to your target audience.

Content Marketing vs Blogging

Often, the two terms are interchanged. A company will claim that they’re doing content marketing, but they’re really blogging. Likewise, the opposite mixup happens.

To help you distinguish the two terms and their differences, we’ve composed the three rules that you need to know.

1. Content Marketing Is an Umbrella Term

Content marketing is a phrase that includes a bunch of different things. In fact, the actual definition of the phrase includes all sharable content. This means that anything that a business is sharing with its customers can count as content marketing.

Here are some examples of ways that you and other business owners may have used content marketing in the past:

• Social media posts
• Videos
• eBooks
• Newsletters
• Podcasts
• Advertisements
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Press releases
• Blogs

Hopefully, you caught that last bullet point.

2. Blogging Falls Under Content Marketing

That’s right! Blogging is a form of content marketing.

Writing and sharing blogs is a way to entertain, inform, and sell to an audience. Most important of all, it’s a kind of shareable content. Therefore, it falls under the umbrella of content marketing.

A strong blogging plan can do a lot for your business in terms of bringing in new leads and increasing their conversion. These positive results are why we encourage all business owners to start a blog.

3. Each Marketing Style Offers Its Own Benefits

Content marketing is a broad term that relates to an all-inclusive marketing strategy. On the other hand, blogging offers specific results under the content marketing umbrella.

Understanding each one individually is the key to determining which one is right for your company.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is extremely effective at boosting your brand’s popularity. It’s also an effective way to meet customers online.

Content marketing is generating content on your website, see WordPress SEO services, or it can be the taking over social media pages as they’re are very effective platforms when it comes to meeting and interacting with the right target audience. In fact, being present on social media will make your brand more trustworthy to your target audience.

Overall, content marketing can help you establish visibility by using a variety of different forms of content to reach people online. If you can provide your audience with tangible things to learn, you’re going to create a credible reputation. At the same time, providing this content for free on your website or social media platforms will make your business more valuable to customers.

Blogging

Alternatively, blogging is a kind of content marketing that helps businesses create specific results. For example, a business may want to use blogging to help their website rank high on search engines. By using methods of search engine optimization in their blogs, they can help other pages on their website rank higher.

If you’re going to have a blog, you need to make sure that you’re paying attention to keywords and other SEO techniques. These methods will help search engines recognize your website as a credible source and rank you higher because of it.

Blogging can also help your business build a link strategy. By including links to high-authority sites, you may be able to encourage those sites to link to your website as well. Linking to one another’s websites can help bring a larger audience to each site.

Another option is guest posting. If you write a guest post for another site, you can encourage that blog’s readers to come over to your site to check out your content. It’s a win-win situation. You get to entice new readers while the site that you’re posting on gets content for their blog.

Guest posting is another way to boost your site’s search engine rankings. Similar to link-building, guest posting shows search engines that other websites are linking to your content. This boosts your credibility and authority.

Choose Content Marketing or Blogging

Now that you understand how content marketing and blogging are interrelated, it’s time for you to choose which one you’d like to take on.

Content marketing can seem like a lot to handle because of all of the different kinds of content. However, the structure of content marketing also gives you the freedom to create any kind of content you want in any kind of format you want.

Content marketing is great for businesses that need to reach a wide audience and increase visibility. It’s also a faster way to generate attention for your business over social media.

Blogging is a great starting point for smaller businesses. It doesn’t require too much of a commitment, and it allows you to create a schedule of posts.

Each blog may follow a general format and flow which will make it easier to generate blogs over time. Then, as your business grows, you can branch out into different kinds of content marketing that fall outside of the realm of blogging.

Preparing Your Content Marketing Strategy

In the battle of content marketing vs blogging, we have one last point to make. Why not do both?

If blogging falls under content marketing and content marketing allows you to reach a wider audience, why not add blogging to your content marketing strategy?

A strong content marketing plan that includes building and maintaining a blog is bound to pull in more leads and convert more customers. You don’t have to choose between them, because they can work together to give you the best of both worlds.

If you’re new to content marketing, you can depend on our team at David Taylor Digital. Check out our search engine optimization services today to get started with your new strategy.