These moving parts often cross over, for example social media marketing and blogging go hand-in-hand as any content written in a new blog can be shared directly to social media and encourage followers to engage.
Content marketing is carried out by nearly all digital marketing professionals in today’s world, especially those focusing on inbound strategies. Producing high quality engaging content on a regular basis helps improve organic search rankings and grow your online presence, however content marketing may not explicitly promote the brand itself.
Brand marketing on the other hand, focuses on the brand as a whole, aiming to increase brand awareness. Here we’ll take a deep dive into the overlap that exists between content marketing and brand marketing, and how they potentially benefit each other.
Brand marketing
Brand marketing for most businesses is all about building brand awareness; it’s about the wider view of a business and how it is perceived. Having a brand that both customers and competitors will recognise is important for growth and building authority within a specific industry. When competitors and customers become aware of your business, it becomes easier to network and adapt to any potential market changes.
Brand marketing doesn’t focus on specific products and services, it’s all about the overarching vision of a company. Attributes of a business are components of a business that people can see and connect with. The name, slogan, logo, and colours are all examples of these attributes. It’s essentially the feel of a business that customers have, and it’s a major aspect of brand marketing to get right.
Of course, the nature of these attributes and their goals depends greatly on the industry. A local independent coffee shop may want their attributes to be warm and inviting, signalling a welcoming environment.
Content marketing
Content marketing, similarly to brand marketing, involves different channels and techniques that can be used together in order to increase traffic, generate leads and improve profits. However, content marketing is a more targeted strategy.
Content marketing firstly involves identifying typical customers. Through research, creating buyer personas and carrying out surveys, a clearly defined target audience is formed. The focus is then on creating consistent, engaging content that is aimed directly at this audience in order to generate leads and conversions.
Essentially, the goal of content marketing is sales driven. It helps to find the right customers at the right stage of their buying journey. As with most marketing strategies, it’s a building block to greater business success. The best content marketing is consistent, using content plans and calendars, which can ensure new content is posted on time to the right audience. You can find out more about the importance of planning content in a blog we recently wrote here.
The content itself then has to be of high quality, relevant to your audience, and convey your voice. All of this will help to encourage communication with your audience and generate leads.
The overlap
While brand marketing and content marketing have their own definitions and objectives, there is certainly some degree of overlap. Brand marketing is like the umbrella above content marketing. It builds awareness, as well as bringing cohesion and structure to the business in the form of consistent attributes. Content marketing then embeds these attributes and produces content that is targeted towards potential customers.
If the content produced was inconsistent in terms of its tone, visuals and themes, there’d be no cohesion. Furthermore, brand marketing and content marketing both use the same channels, whether its social media, email marketing or blogging.
While having different objectives, the ways in which brand marketing and content marketing meet these goals are undoubtedly connected.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing. Whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
To be notified when we post another article, follow us on social media!
