Copywriting vs. Content Writing What’s the Difference

What is Copywriting?

Copywriting is a sales tool used in advertising and marketing. Copywriters create content that convinces and encourages the sale of products or services by persuading users to take action. This can include advertising on television, radio, billboards and print advertisements. A successful advertisement will move the consumer to do something; call a phone number for more information, visit a store location or click through and buy online within an ad’s website.

What is Content Writing?

Content writers create articles for your blog or website that provide consumers with helpful information related to your product or service without directly selling it. These articles describe features and benefits of your product but don’t come right out and say “buy this.” Content writers don’t focus on persuading buyers to take action. Instead, they create valuable resources that prove themselves as trustworthy and knowledgeable, encouraging users to purchase.

Difference between Copywriting vs. Content Writing

What is the difference between copywriting vs. content writing? Copywriting is used in advertising and marketing while content writing is more of an all-inclusive term for articles written for blogs or online publishing. Content writers use their words to subtly push readers toward taking action without directly selling them anything, like a call-to-action at the end of an article. Copywriters use their words to sell products or services by convincing users to take some kind of immediate action, like clicking through to buy online or visiting store locations directly from an ad’s website.

When it comes to content writing, most people think that you can achieve the same results by writing less. This is not true.

Copywriting and content writing both aim at their own goals and require different strategies to achieve them. When we talk about copywriting, we refer to a text that has a very specific purpose which is selling your personas on your brand or product. Content writing, on the other hand, subtly tells your audience about your brand while providing them with valuable information.

The common misconception among marketers is that they can be replaced with each other but this isn’t exactly how it works in real life. While copywriters are focused only on persuading their reader into buying something, content writers rely more on storytelling techniques to engage their readers.

In order to provide the best results as a content writer, you have to know how to use your words and effectively convince your reader into buying something or engaging with other parts of your site. Copywriting requires a lot more creativity and knowing how to sell seamlessly whereas content writing can also be used as a technique to steer people towards another medium for example an eBook or a Podcast.

There are other factors which should be taken into consideration, such as SEO vs. brand building, but that’s not what we plan on talking about today. Instead, we will focus on the main difference between copywriting and content writing: their purpose. While copywriters aim at persuading their reader into buying something through different persuasive phrases and words, content writers aim at providing the best value while subtly telling their audience about a specific topic.

Copywriting vs. Content Writing: Which one is better?

Content writing vs. copywriting is often a debate among writers because these words are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same.

Content writing is considered an umbrella term by most people. It encompasses all forms of copywriting at its core, which includes sales pages, blog posts, SEO-rich articles and more that have been written to sell or promote a product or service for either B2B or B2C businesses. Content can be shared on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, news sites and via email. Copywriters write content for print materials, direct mail campaigns, billboard ads, TV commercials etc., if your brand needs to communicate with various audiences about its products or services through text.

Copywriting, on the other hand, is more of a subset of content writing and refers to the actual written words that are used to sell products or services. It may not always include visuals like infographics, charts and images, but it does focus mainly on text as its main medium of connecting with audiences through advertising messages. Content may be written by copywriters, but copywriting is not necessarily considered content by everyone in the industry. In fact, some argue “copy” is what’s actually being sold instead of product or service itself which differentiates it from other forms of writing.

Conclusion

Content writing focuses on the actual written words that are used to sell products or services while Copywriting refers to the sales messages written in order sell a product or service. Different types of writers are used to perform each service, and your end goals will determine which ones you hire.