Today’s digital landscape allows brands to communicate directly with their audiences and engage with them through various marketing techniques. While content marketing and brand journalism seem similar, given that they both involve creating content, the difference lies in their approach and intended goals. Virtucom Group, a digital content and data solutions firm that has been providing top-quality, strategic content to businesses for over 15 years, discusses these marketing strategies further and why they’re essential for any retailer or business’ ecommerce strategy.
What Is Content Marketing?
The strategic approach of content marketing focuses on creating and distributing relevant and informative content to a defined audience. Consistently utilizing this marketing strategy will help a brand establish and nurture relationships with their existing and prospective customers. Steps to a successful content marketing strategy include:
- Identifying your target audience
- Determining the right copy that best showcases your company’s values and offerings
- Choosing the right resource to create the content
- Deciding where your content will be posted (blogs, landing pages, etc.)
- Creating a sustainable schedule for new content
- Ensuring content includes the right keywords and other search engine optimization (SEO) tactics
All in all, the purpose of content marketing is to drive improved audience behavior through publishing useful and informative content.
Defining Brand Journalism
Taking a different approach, brand journalism tosses aside traditional marketing methods and instead focuses on building stories and other content to highlight a company’s values. Through a journalistic approach that focuses on facts and details, this marketing technique uses interviews and article-based websites that provide information to support the brand’s point of view. This style of writing encourages customers to learn more about the company and their goods or services, while offering a different marketing perspective.
The goal of brand journalism is to tell engaging stories that convey a positive image of the company, offering insights into their values while building brand awareness and affinity. At Virtucom Group, for example, we assist clients in creating content for sponsored articles, which are paid advertorials that appear across a variety of online and print news platforms.
The Importance of an Effective Marketing Strategy
Businesses that establish a content marketing and brand journalism strategy give themselves a competitive advantage. These tactics provide brands with a way to gain web traffic, build trust with their audience, and become an authority within their industry. Advantages of content marketing and brand journalism include:
- Greater visibility for your brand: These efforts go a long way in your brand being seen by new people, as its benefits can be felt from your social media channels to rankings on the search engine results page (SERP).
- Increased loyalty with customers: Opposed to the outdated selling mentality, these strategies aim to assist in increasing consumer trust, turning them into loyal, repeat customers.
- Allow for new channels of communication: Content marketing gives companies the opportunity to connect with their customers through various social platforms.
At Virtucom Group, our team of trained writers specializes in creating quality content for businesses and retailers across all industries. For more information about our content writing services, please contact us today.
