The difference between content marketing and content strategy

There’s a fundamental difference between content marketing and content strategy. However, most people use these terms interchangeably.

to understand the difference between content marketing and content strategy just imagine the difference between a military strategist and a military commander

Content Strategy and Content Marketing are not the same but closely related.

The amazing fact is that using these terms equivalent terms has led to neglecting the valuable concept of the strategy. So I decided to write a series of articles emphasizing the difference between content marketing and content strategy.

Most of the articles published on the content strategy have just focused on content marketing, and the core ideas of content strategy are lost in this negligence.

Some people believe that content marketing is the implementation of the content strategy. However, content marketing can be part of the content strategy execution.

Just imagine the public relations department of an organization. Sure they shall have the content strategy, but the product of their content strategy would not be necessarily a content marketing plan or anything similar unless we make such a broad definition of marketing that any organizational activity falls under this topic.

So we may describe the relationship between content marketing and content strategy in the following simple yet precise way:

content marketing is applying content strategy to marketing

So, many of the activities called content marketing today, are just efforts to sell something using content, and this is far simpler than the real content marketing that has deep roots in content strategy.

This was the reason that I made a list of the symptoms of the content marketing activities lacking a clear strategy:

In future articles, I will try to explain details of the content marketing process and its relationship with the content strategy.