Content is crucial for a successful online presence. It increases brand awareness and can generate 9X more leads than outbound marketing. But you must use it properly and choose the right type of content to see the results...
If you fail to do so, it can harm your business.
But how dp you know if you are using content properly? And should you opt for content marketing or content brand marketing in order to fuel company growth?
In this article, we’ll take a look at the two types of content marketing and determine which is most suitable for different companies right now, as well as for different customer needs. You’ll learn the differences between the two and best practices to apply them to your business correctly.
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What Is Content Brand Marketing?
Content brand marketing is directly linked with a brand. Its primary purpose is to build brand awareness and a rapport with potential customers.
Content brand marketing is not necessarily a promotion of a specific product. Instead, it focuses on the brand’s mission and answers questions like why the company is on the market.
An excellent example of content brand marketing is Red Bull’s supersonic freefall video.
If you watch the video, you’ll see they aren’t promoting any product. In fact, they don’t even mention the Red Bull energy drink throughout the whole video.
But they highlight the brand’s mission — sports and love for risk.
It shows their uniqueness and love of adventure, as well as provides better insights into the brand’s personality and who it's for. The campaign is also very catchy and engaging, which appeals to customers' emotions. If you love sports and risk, you’ll definitely want to be associated with Red Bull.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing doesn’t focus on deepening customers’ rapport with a brand. Instead, it focuses on building trust by solving customer’s problems.
In most cases, you’re identifying customer’s problems and solving them with your product. You basically provide your customers with valuable content and promote your products, increasing customer loyalty and conversions at the same time.
Let’s look at a real-life example:
Your customers are teachers who want to start teaching via online courses. But they don’t know which platform to pick — the problem. You can quickly solve that by providing them with a guide featuring the best learning platforms online - the products.
They can read your guide, choose the platform that best suits their needs, and use it to begin teaching online. It’s not as entertaining as content brand marketing, but will definitely lead to more sales.
Content Brand Marketing vs. Content Marketing: What’s The Difference?
Not knowing the difference between content brand marketing and content marketing can lead to fatal errors. In fact, it can harm your strategy and hurt your brand image. This is mainly because your content isn’t relevant and personalized to your audience if you use these two interchangeably.
And they’ll get frustrated...
It will also make your efforts useless. Understandably, people who don’t know what a CRM platform is are not in the position to choose a solution right now. They're at the top of the funnel looking for more information.
What you need to do at this stage is engage them with content brand marketing, where they can learn more about the CRM platform and your brand’s mission.
Differentiating between the two will lead to more personalized content and will drive the results you desire.
Essentially, content marketing has only one purpose - increase conversions and generate leads.
That’s far from content brand marketing, where the main goal is to increase brand awareness and build a rapport with your target audience.
Understandably, it can feel confusing when so many similar terms are thrown around: content marketing, branding, brand marketing, etc. So, let's take a look at how can you apply each one to your business, and which strategy is more suitable for you.
Content Marketing Is About Driving Leads & Sales
Content marketing focuses on driving leads and conversions by strategically using a brand’s products to solve its customers’ problems.
An excellent example of that is Chill Reptile’s Blogging Bootcamp.
They have in-depth blog posts about blogging online and producing engaging blogs. They show expertise, which promotes trust and helps customers solve their problems. They also advertise their products at the end of each post to generate more leads.
It’s somewhat subtle and non-disturbing, yet a very effective way to get more leads and sales. Did you learn more about their brand and what’s its mission is? Of course not. You don’t care. You just want to learn more information about the topic. Using content brand marketing in this instance would only bore the reader.
Content Brand Marketing Is A Storytelling Master
Content brand marketing is about building rapport and conveying a brand’s values. The easiest (and the most fun) way to do that is to publish stories that will help you get closer to your customers and deepen your rapport with them.
One of the best examples of that is the Lego Movie.
In this example, it’s the combination of storytelling and product placement that works.
The story concentrates on the main character Emmet, which is “The Chosen One.” It’s a thrilling movie that keeps the watchers engaged all time. The whole world in the movie is built from LEGO, but you barely even realize that. It’s not solving any problems nor promoting LEGO as a product directly. Instead, it focuses on entertaining viewers and building an emotional attachment.
And the results?
It’s considered the biggest, most high-profile content brand marketing created — and it supercharged Lego’s brand awareness which indirectly led to more sales.
So why not follow suit and create a short movie or a trailer about your brand?
Content Marketing Is Less Flexible
Content brand marketing is mainly interested in brand awareness. You can put it anywhere, whether it’s a big publication or a social media platform.
However, content marketing is more about conversions, and that makes it a lot less flexible.
For instance, if you create a content marketing post about apps for freelancers, you won’t be able to target everyone as with content brand marketing. Instead, you’ll be targeting only a small segment of prospects that are within your niche. That makes it a lot more challenging to promote and less flexible.
But if you find the right place, it can do wonders for your brand, especially in terms of sales and conversions.
Content Brand Marketing Drives Fast Results
If you’re trying to build trust and rapport with your audience, it’ll take a lot of time. You need to convert strangers into leads, gain their trust, and start slowly promoting your products to them.
The whole sales cycle is a long and complex process that takes a lot of time.
But meeting the goal of content brand marketing is a much easier task to do. You are only interested in brand awareness, which is at the top of the sales funnel. Plus, your prospects also don’t need to pull out their wallets and consider a purchase. Instead, all they need to do is sit down and enjoy the engaging content you provide.
You also don’t need to worry about following any SEO best practices, sales tactics, and staying on top of the digital marketing trends. You just publish content, share it online with everyone, and build better brand awareness.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing and content brand marketing may seem similar. But there are major differences you should know about. On the one hand, content brand marketing focuses on building brand awareness and engaging customers. It focuses on creating an emotional attachment to the brand.
On the other hand, content marketing is about lead generation and conversions. It uses your product as a solution to your readers’ problems, which increases sales.
The four major differences we discussed in this article will help you choose the right type of content for your site that meets all your needs and drives better results.
