Content Marketing vs. Content Strategy

Part 2 of The Digital Content Strategy Series on BusinessTown

Content marketing, at base, is just marketing—using content to form a connection with your customers. But it’s only one facet of a complete content strategy.

Content strategy, on the other hand, is taking all the content that you produce, being really efficient about it, making multiple uses of it, and building a “durable” business asset.

After all, content is why the user is here—to learn something from you, to be inspired, to be entertained. In a business context, that content can take a variety of forms. But it all has to start by providing distinct value to your audience. If you can achieve that, even in a small way, you’ve just built up a little bit of trust.

Now you just have to repeat that. Over and over again until the logical next move is for your audience to offer some trust back to you—in the form of becoming a paying customer. Obviously, this is not going to happen overnight. That means that you really have to work at it, sometimes over a long span.

This is why you need to have a strategy. The “long view” is critical. So many people jump in and start executing tactics before they have a strategy, which is a big mistake. Just like anything in business, you need a strategy before you go forward, you need to situate it in a strategy that serves your business goals.

This is why I always advise businesses to pause for a moment to indulge in the planning process. Come up with a clearly definable set of goals, all working towards an outcome or outcomes. Try to keep this as narrow as possible, so that 1) it’s achievable, and 2) it’s measurable.

Once you have a statement of your goals and an overall strategy, then you can start to construct the tactics to get there. Every tactic has an unmistakeable purpose. You’re not just creating and deploying content to “see what happens.” You’re progressing, step by step towards an outcome.

The effort up front is worth it because it can make you much more efficient. If you have a method or a system to create, collect, and capture the content you’re creating, it will be easier to make multiple uses of that content. We want to get a lot more out of each piece of content, which means building a repeatable process.

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Watch the video to learn more about how to do that. I wrote and recorded a seven-part series that covers the basics of content marketing for small businesses. It is produced by BusinessTown, which has hundreds of videos to help business owners of all types.

The second episode is called Content Marketing vs. Content Strategy. It’s about making the important distinction between the two so that you can go forward with a plan and be really efficient about it.

Here’s the whole set of episodes on BusinessTown:

1. Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Business?
   Content marketing is a big buzzword, but do you know what it really means? Michael Boezi defines content marketing and explains its impact on your business.
2. Content Marketing vs. Content Strategy
   In this episode, Michael Boezi explains the difference between content marketing and content strategy and how it impacts your business.
3. Content Strategy in the Modern Media Landscape
   In this episode, Michael Boezi explains what you need to do to optimize and promote your content in this modern digital media landscape.
4. Build Your Content Strategy with These Four Essential Platforms
   Web, Blog, Social, e-mail… Michael Boezi tells you how to build and optimize your content strategy using these 4 essential platforms.
5. How to Unlock the Power of Content Marketing
   Want to succeed in this competitive environment? Unlock the power of content marketing using Michael Boezi’s method!
6. How to Achieve Organic Business Growth
   Organic growth is valuable but it’s hard to achieve. In this episode, Michael Boezi talks about the benefits and challenges of organic growth.
7. Three Keys to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
   Michael Boezi tells you about about the 3 keys to a successful content marketing strategy: Consistency, persistence, and patience.