According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

What’s the Difference between Content Marketing and Brand Journalism?

To be sure, content marketing and brand journalism both deliver relevant, engaging information, but the difference between them lies in their end goals.

The goal of brand journalism is to build brand awareness and affinity through the art of storytelling. By creating and sharing compelling stories around your brand, brand journalism helps to foster community engagement and ultimately customer loyalty. Kaiser Permanente’s Care Stories website does a wonderful job of sharing compelling stories about its patient communities to convey KP’s greater message that its brand is about more than just doctor visits – KP cares about your well-being and quality of life.

The goal of content marketing is lead generation. By creating valuable, educational information and giving it away, content marketing utilizes “pull” tactics to attract prospects and customers.

Types of content marketing include:

  • Blogs
  • Videos
  • News releases
  • Case studies
  • Email Campaigns
  • Whitepapers
  • Surveys
  • Social Media content

These types of content are long-lasting and naturally increase social shares, traffic and SEO. Content marketing sends the message to your prospects and customers that you are attuned to their needs and problems and are ready to help them. Ultimately, it builds your brand authority.     

A study by Kapost and Eloqua found that content marketing delivers three times the return on investment (ROI) of paid search. Business-to-business (B2B) companies that blog only 1-2 times per month generate 70 percent more leads that those who don’t’ blog.

Content marketing is an essential component to your communications strategy. It may be time-consuming, but the investment will pay dividends. An effective content marketing strategy must have clearly defined objectives. Second, you must understand the needs, pain points and interests of your audience.

For instance, SPR’s healthcare clients respond very well to case studies, whitepapers, and data-centric content such as surveys. Third, you must be consistent. Not only must you consistently generate relevant and value content, but the look, tone and writing style must be consistent across formats and platforms.

The above excerpt is from our new e-book which can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.  

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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