What is the difference between brand marketing and content marketing?

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing utilizes direct communication to capture the attention of your target audience with the goal of establishing brand awareness. Brand strategy may implement traditional advertising methods, social media interactions, and email campaigns to reach a target market.

The most effective brand marketing leads to a company’s logo or tagline becoming instantly recognizable around the world. For instance, if you read the phrase “The Happiest Place on Earth,” what company immediately comes to mind for you? If you thought Disney, then brand marketing has been successful here.

In order to create household recognition, your brand marketing strategy should include brand guidelines that are studied and followed by your entire company:

• How to describe your brand
• Style guide (on-brand writing and principles)
• Visual guidelines
• Logos
• Graphics
• Icons
• Customer materials
• Patterns, textures, colors
• Sales outreach rules

Brand marketing needs to be above all, consistent. Everyone needs to be aligned and send out the same brand messaging. Your brand marketing strategy should focus on building a positive emotional connection with your target audience. A good brand story will emotionally engage new customers, and build brand loyalty for your company’s brand.

For information about the value of investing in B2B brand awareness, here are 5 cost-effective tactics you can use to ensure the success of your campaigns while supporting pipeline growth in 2023.

Content Marketing

Content marketing focuses on the creation and distribution of material that will build upon and reinforce your brand marketing efforts. A content marketing strategy focuses on generating high-quality leads from target audiences, rather than activating initial awareness of your product or brand.  Content marketing tends to utilize indirect methods like podcasts, webinars, and blogs, to reach potential customers. A content marketing campaign often offers valuable content via whitepapers or best practices guides from subject matter experts.

Content marketing should also be consistent with the brand positioning established by your brand marketing team. Brand identity and branded content should be threaded throughout all marketing campaigns. Read this article to learn what a Content Marketer does..

For information on content marketing for B2B campaigns, take a look at B2B Content Marketing Trends and read Why Content Marketing is important for B2B.

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