Copywriting vs. Content Writing: What They Are and How to Leverage Each in Your Brand’s Marketing Efforts
Copywriting and content writing are two valuable tools in any marketer’s toolkit. Although sometimes confused for one another, these unique and often complimentary messaging strategies can support the same marketing campaigns.
The easiest way to distinguish them is to think of their different goals. The goal of copywriting is persuasion, while content writing provides (relatively) unbiased information that educates the reader on a topic. While they achieve different goals, there are a lot of synergies between the two for a savvy marketer who knows how to employ them properly.
So, how can you use both disciplines to your advantage in your brand’s marketing? Here’s a look at the differences between copywriting and content writing and how you can leverage them to achieve your marketing goals.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting refers to creating short-form sales copy to advertise or increase brand awareness among your target customer audience. Copywriting typically incorporates exciting product features, specific promotional offers, and compelling calls to action (CTA) that target prospective clients and convert them to paying customers.
A copywriter’s primary responsibility is to compose attention-grabbing editorial content that aligns with a business goal. The copy presents the highlights of the product, service, or other information in an interesting and memorable manner while being succinct and convincing. Their job might involve ideating on the concept of the ad or advertorial, writing sales copy aligning with a business goal, iterating and incorporating feedback from stakeholders, and editing and proofreading sales copy for accuracy.
Copywriting is explicitly “sales-y” to persuade a potential customer to complete an immediate action that moves them one step further through the sales funnel. They may click a button, subscribe to a newsletter or join an email list, open a landing page, download a resource or, of course, make a purchase. But copywriters also write more passive brand copy, like taglines, direct mail, sales emails, social media posts, or video scripts.
Ultimately, the copywriter is the avenue through which the brand’s value proposition reaches a prospective customer.
What is Content Writing?
Content writing is a style of long-form content creation that aims to inform, educate, instruct, or even entertain readers, with the primary goals of increasing customer engagement, lead generation, and conversion rates for your business.
Contrary to the brand-mention-heavy style of copywriting, content writing involves planning, writing, editing, and publishing long-form content. It is often used online to attract organic traffic to the website through keyword-optimized content. Unlike copywriting, content writing is light on brand mentions and sometimes completely brand-agnostic.
Though there are many types of content writing, the most common these days is SEO-focused. SEO content educates the reader and signals to Google (and other search engines) that the article and website are reliable sources of information. Since it is a more long-form style (like articles, web pages, white papers, case studies, or e-books) and less focused on the brand, content writing may require a great deal of research or industry-specific expertise.
A content writer must start by researching relevant information to become familiar with the subject matter and be able to speak intelligently about it. They may need to engage with the brand’s marketing or PR team to collect additional information and context about how the article fits in with the overall content marketing strategy. Then, the writer must outline and write the article in a clear, concise, and informative way. They should include an intriguing headline to spark the reader’s interest and encourage a click-through from the SERP (search engine results page).
The writer must compose the article in the brand’s voice to align with other messaging across the brand’s paid and earned platforms. It must be carefully edited and proofread for grammatical correctness and factual accuracy. Only then can it be published.
And to think that some brands publish one or more articles per week, every week – it’s no wonder they need the help of a professional content writer or maybe even a team!
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: 6 Key Differences
Copywriting and content writing are different yet complementary ways of producing marketing copy. Though we’ve discussed each discipline individually, let’s compare these two marketing tactics side-by-side.
1. Goal
Perhaps the most distinct difference between copywriting and content writing is the goal of each.
In copywriting, the goal is to compel a prospective client to take immediate action, like buying a product or clicking on a button. Therefore, copywriting usually ends with a CTA that increases sales and drives organic traffic for your business.
Content writing, on the other hand, aims to inform, educate, instruct, or entertain readers about a particular topic. This may drive sales by informing you about a product with high-quality and valuable content.
However, an increase in sales is not the main goal. Content writers create content with a clear purpose, a brand’s voice, and engaging thoughts.
Businesses use content writers to build customer relationships with their target audiences. This leads to customer engagement with their products, increasing conversion rates and customer loyalty in the long run.
2. Length
Copywriting mostly produces short-form content, while content writing is for long-form content.
Copywriting needs to be concise and to the point, keeping the sales copy enticing and memorable.
Content writers, on the other hand, need anywhere between 500 and 2,500 words to effectively educate readers about a topic in an as in-depth and interesting way as possible.
3. Time Frame
In a similar vein, copywriting is usually created for one-time marketing campaigns meant to prompt a timely response. Data on the results of a campaign can be collected and analyzed within days or weeks. Campaigns are often short-lived, ending before the next launches.
However, content writing is a longer-term strategy meant to engage a particular target audience over time, which makes it more challenging to gauge the ROI of this investment.
4. Tone
The tone in copywriting is emotional, tapping into universal human feelings of fear, gratitude, happiness, trust, or superiority.
Content writing, however, appeals more to the rational mind. Since its goal is to educate its target audience, this style usually employs a more conversational, formal, or friendly tone to establish credibility and trust with the reader.
5. SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of creating content that offers information that people are searching for online. Google (and other search engines) look for robust, well-researched answers from long-established sources when deciding what articles to rank in the top search results.
Because short, uninformative, brand-mention-heavy content – like that which copywriters typically produce – is the opposite of what Google is looking for, these web pages very rarely will rank and are not worth optimizing for SEO.
A longer-form, brand-agnostic piece of content like that which content writers compose, on the other hand, will quickly catch Google’s attention – provided it is a high-quality article. That’s why content writing is an ideal format for increasing your brand’s site rankings.
6. Writer’s Experience
Copywriters are professionals in the marketing or advertising industry who have to understand the broader marketing strategy, business goals, consumer pain points, and competitor analysis to do their job well. They’re generally closer to the brand and may even work in-house.
Content writers are more often subject matter experts hired on a freelance basis because of their knowledge of the article’s topic. They may have some marketing expertise – especially in the field of SEO – but that’s unlikely to be their primary area of expertise. Instead, in order to do their job well, they need to be skilled long-form writers who can capture the brand voice and are adept at presenting complex information in a digestible way.
Both copywriting and content writing are important for any business to succeed.
Whether you’re a startup company or have more experience with digital marketing, you’ll need copywriters to drive sales and organic traffic at the start of the customer journey and content writers to convert those leads into loyal customers for future sales.
Leveraging Copy and Content Writing for Your Business
It’s easy to use copywriting and content writing interchangeably when developing digital marketing strategies for your business. And while the two domains occasionally overlap, these two types of writing are entirely different.
Copywriting is short-form content that compels a prospective client to perform a particular action, like buying a product or signing up for a newsletter. The goal of copywriting is to drive sales and increase brand awareness for your business.
On the other hand, content writing employs long-form pieces of content that inform, educate, instruct, or entertain readers about a particular topic.
Content writing aims to build a long-term customer relationship that encourages customer engagement with your business and customer loyalty to your brand.
Overall, your business will need both digital marketing strategies to succeed from the near term to the foreseeable future.
At Growth Machine, long-form content writing is our specialty. If you want to outsource your content writing (and content strategy!) to a team of professionals you can trust, reach out to us to learn how we can implement a customized content strategy and help grow your business.
If you’re more interested in taking a DIY approach to your content marketing and copywriting efforts, check out our sister company, The Writer Finder, where you can hire and manage experienced content and copywriters directly.
