The significance of Content Triplets in Marketing
If someone is not closely associated with the marketing and advertising world, then most likely the person cannot fathom the difference between the content triplets — copywriter, content writer and content marketer.
Yes, these three musketeers aren’t the same. Although these wordsmiths find deep meaning in helping business through their mighty words, the way they think (or imagine), operate within a business and the variety of content they produce are indeed quite different.
I’ve had the privilege of doing salsa with all these triplets during my multiple marketing avatars over the last decade. This post, particularly, aims at two things. One is to celebrate these out-of-the-spotlight word warriors, and the other is to help all non-marketing professionals appreciate the subtle difference between the specific roles of these writers so they can tap the right creative potential.
Copy Writers
All content professionals owe their strong foothold in the business world to this big brother — Copy Writer. These are a bunch of creative writers who were born in traditional advertising agencies before the internet era. Then, the marketing world was dominated by consumer brands aside manufacturing companies with a few exceptions in the likes of IBM, SAP, and Microsoft etc. Copywriters, as advertising partners, worked hand-in-hand with marketing teams to build brands and increase market presence. Their role was not just to create advertisements (or) churn out chirpy copy blocks for print ads and TVCs. Copywriters were ace scuba divers who dive deeper into consumers’ mind to find the emotional motive to buy a product. They uncover the ‘big insight’ as to which underlying human emotion — love, power, fear, aspiration etc. — would connect the product and the buyer. Keeping emotional appeal as the conduit, copywriters wrote sticky emotional stories to build great brands. In such sense, copywriters lent their creative muscles for brand managers to increase products’ market share. As with changing times, copywriters are now showering their love for B2B business too, although minimally.
Content Writers
Content writers (second bro!) emerged during and shortly after the dotcom era. Search engines (the Google god) sprouted and interrupted traditional business models. The ‘brick & mortar’ model was fast replaced by ‘browser & click’. Businesses, cut-across all industries, were forced to build an online presence to retain their market standing. It all started with creating information-filled websites, followed by an active social media presence to explain products and services. Thus the second set of writers were born, throughout the first ten years of the 2000s, to articulate product and service narratives to online consumers. Their role was to understand product (or) service, write crisp content and make it available to internet-savvy consumers. However, the writing horizon further expanded with the explosive surge of e-commerce and market place segments. Everyday business operations of these segments heavily relied on content. From writing flashy banner copies to managing social media community to pushing out exclusive newsletters, content writers worked on a variety of content to support business operations. This brilliant set of writers are super-efficient in supporting fast-paced, rapidly-evolving businesses.
Content Marketers
The one striking difference between content marketers compared to other content specialists is their substantial knowledge and exposure to software technology. A good content marketer should be able to well appreciate tech-specific topics such as how Cloud Computing is reshaping software product business, Data Center segment is rapidly growing due to data explosion, Artificial intelligence is the technology behind helpful chatbots and Cyber-security is an ever-evolving technology space etc. Content Marketers excel in identifying technology themes, researching and building useful content assets that help B2B marketing teams to attract potential customers. Content Marketers spend quite a time with the product, engineering, R&D teams to appreciate technology nuance and translate it into a consumable content in multiple forms — blogs, case studies, battle cards, white papers, product videos and more. In simple terms, Content Marketers are writers who build content for the Cloud computing, Agile-styled, SaaS-driven, Cybersecurity protected, Fintech pervasive, AI-backed technology business.
If you are a copywriter (or) content writer (or) content marketer (or) merely a writer without any labels who reading this post, then direct message the link of your proudest writeup in my LinkedIn account.
I will muse your creation and get inspired.
Hit my LinkedIn account.
