If you own a business or brand, you should know details about copywriting vs. content writing. How do they differ, and which should you use for your brand?
Your brand won’t get discovered unless you create content. Content creation is a crucial part of marketing. It is an integral aspect of your SEO and marketing campaigns. However, not all forms of content creation are the same. If you use digital marketing to promote your business, by now, you must have heard people used the terms “copywriting” and “content writing.”
While both copywriting and content writing are used in digital marketing, they have different purposes. And most people don’t know the differences between them.
In this piece, I’ll talk about copywriting vs content writing and how you should use them for your brand.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting involves mainly text design to get the reader to take a specific action related to your brand’s sales process. Copywriting is your sales pitch. You want the reader to continue reading, subscribe to your email list, or buy a product or service.
The goal of any copywriting product is to get the reader to take an action toward the organization.
Examples of copywriting are:
- Landing page
- Sales emails
- Product pages
- Social media ads
What is Content Writing?
Content writing, on the other hand, is creating and sharing valuable and useful content that is largely non-promotional to attract and engage your target audience.
You want to inform, entertain, or engage your readers with content writing. Although you can drive sales with content writing, that is not its primary purpose.
Examples of content writing are:
- Blog posts
- White papers
- E-books
- Case studies
- Email newspaper
- Social media posts
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: The Differences
Copywriting and content writing are closely related, yet so different. You can think of content writing as the appetizer to copywriting.
With content writing, you are trying to attract, educate, and keep your customers engage. While copywriting is all about the art of persuasion. You want to persuade and convince your readers to take a specific action. In other words, you want to convince your audience to do something the copywriting content suggests.
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: Length
When it comes to length, copywriting is generally of shorter length than content writing. Because content writing focuses on educating and entertaining, it needs more details.
Copywriting is usually straight to the point. You can persuade a reader to take action with few lines.
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: Grammar
For both copywriting and content writing, you should try to minimize grammatical errors. But it is especially important in content writing. Grammatical errors can interrupt the flow of the content. As such, some readers may abandon the piece.
On the other hand, copywriting doesn’t require perfect grammar. At times, an incomplete sentence or grammatically incorrect content may dissuade your readers from trusting your position. However, to engage with younger generations and popular phrases (particularly with social media ads), you can be flexible with grammar rules in copywriting as long as your copy is simple and easy to read.
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: SEO
Any piece of content can rank high in search results whether it is produced by copywriting or content writing. However, content writing outperforms copywriting when it comes to SEO.
Content writing offers high value to the readers without commercial intent. Besides, it is generally longer and attracts more views and engagement from your audience. These reasons make content writing better for SEO.
Copywriting vs. Content Writing: Emotional Response
Copywriting often invokes several emotional responses from readers. Copywriting content is used to appeal to certain emotions like fear, comfort, greed, and security in the readers. Copywriters often leverage these emotions through writing to compel readers to take desired actions.
On the other hand, content writing engages readers. Content writing is to inform, educate, or entertain. It doesn’t require writing to leverage emotions.
Which Should You Use for Your Brand?
You should use both copywriting and content writing for your brand. Your brand should have the best of both worlds: valuable and informative content with strong CTAs. This quote from Copyblogger describes it perfectly: “Content without copywriting is a waste of good content, and copywriting without content is a waste of good copy.”
Copywriting without engaging content writing will sound too sales-focused, which often puts readers off. However, valuable content without copywriting content will make you lose potential leads because you are not telling your audience what to do.
There is a fine line between content writing and copywriting. To get the most for your brand, you should combine them. According to Dan Lok, “Don’t decide between copywriting vs. content writing. They enhance each other and create synergy.”