Brand Marketing and Content Marketing: Meaning, Strategies, Different Concepts

Brand and content marketing are two sides of the same coin that work towards a common goal. While brand marketing is a business function to strengthen a brand’s market presence, content marketing is used to draw the audience by providing relevant and valuable information through articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

In this article, we will discuss brand and content marketing in detail, from meaning to benefits.

What is Content Marketing?

Experts define content marketing as developing and distributing relevant and helpful content for the target audience. It has the potential to establish and nurture a fruitful relationship between the audience and the brand when done right.

Simply put, from a health article to a podcast you regularly listen to, any form of content on the internet can be a part ofcontent marketing.

Here are a few examples of content marketing:

• Blogs
• Whitepapers
• Social media posts
• Emailers
• Videos

What’s the Importance of Content Marketing?

• Helps gain a competitive advantage
• Increases audience engagement and the quality of leads
• Effective way to convince customers to purchase a product or service
• Increases online visibility of a brand
• Boosts loyalty of customers

Here are different content marketing strategies:

• Web content

Web content strategy is the process of creating, delivering, and managing content through digital platform. It is a strategy that gets the right people to right content at the right time by taking a user-centric approach.

• Email marketing

Email marketing uses emails to keep customers informed about a company’s news, offers, product updates, and more. Email marketing is an effective way of communicating directly with the target audience.

A great example of email marketing would be weekly newsletters that brands send to their loyal customers, informing them about offers, new product launches, etc.

• Video marketing

Video marketing involves using videos to promote a brand’s message and its products or services. It is considered one of the most effective and powerful ways of connecting with potentialcustomers. According to an online portal, 93% of customers make buying decisions based on video ads.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Here is a step-by-step guide to creating content marketing.

1. Defining a goal is the first step in developing a content strategy. Knowing your objectives or reasons for developing content can reduce the time spent on choosing different aspects (like medium, market, etc.) for your strategy.
2. Conduct personal research about the audience, competitors, and market. This will help in producing more relevant and valuable content that the audience will want to read.
3. Run a content audit to analyse the top-performing and low-performing content. This is helpful information while formulating a content strategy; it helps brands know what’s performing and what’s not performing.
4. Choose a content management system to enhance the content creation, publication, and analytical process. Invest in a content management system that automates your content production and management process.
5. Determine the type of content you want to create.
6. Identify content ideas that match the likes of your target audience.
7. Publish and manage your content. Monitoring your content strategy’s performance is a critical function that helps understand the effectiveness of the content and identify marketing strategies that can increase traffic.

What Is Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing is a long-term process of boosting a brand’s recognition and reputation by developing products or services that match their business objectives and needs of the target customer. The aim of brand marketing is to create an ever-growing base of loyal customers.

Brand marketing also enhances a brand’s identity, improves its recall value among customers, and communicates its brand purpose to potential audiences.

What’s the Importance of Brand Marketing?

• Drives successful customer acquisition
• Improves brand awareness
• Increases brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, which ensures that when customers go to the market, they buy your products

Here are popular concepts associated with brand marketing:

• Brand awareness

Brand awareness describes how memorable and recognisable a brand is to its target audience. It also measures the familiarity of a brand in its target market.

• Brand positioning

Brand positioning is the unique place a brand holds in the minds of its customers. It (brand positioning)helps create a special bond between the customer and the brand – an intangible bond that reaps benefits in the long run.

• Branded content

Branded content is the amalgamation of brand strategy and content marketing. It is linked to a brand and helps develop a strong bond between a brand and its audience.

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FAQs

1. What’s the difference between brand marketing and content marketing?

2. What is the difference between marketing and branding, and what comes first?

Marketing refers to advertising products and services. Meanwhile, branding is an approach to reach your target audience. It (branding) is the primary building block of your marketing strategy. Therefore, branding comes first.

3. What are the goals of brand marketing?

The goals are as follows:

• Create a strong brand identity
• Raise brand awareness
• Brand positioning
• Increase customer loyalty

4. How does branding influence marketing?

Branding is the backbone of marketing. Branding creates a unique logo, tagline, colour scheme, and message that becomes part of all marketing campaigns, making it easy for the audience to identify the brand.

5. What are the steps of brand marketing?

Step 1: Understand the brand’s purpose.

Step 2: Research your target market

Step 3: Define and sell your brand’s story

Step 4: Get to know your competitors

Step 5: Create brand guidelines