To Sell or to Nurture? Choosing the Right Writer for Your Marketing Needs

Hiring writers isn’t easy, but it’s critically important to hire the right writer to help you meet your organizational goals.

While many different labels get thrown around for the writers behind the scenes developing the content for your company, there are actually stark differences between the writing experts needed for different marketing endeavors. Pam Berg and Katie Rottner, senior writers with BSTRO digital marketing agency, break down the role of a copywriter versus a content writer on the MarketingProfs blog—and the differences between the two couldn’t be greater!

In many ways, the roles played by copywriters and content writers within the marketing sphere are near polar opposites.

Content Writing Drives Content Marketing

Content writing is all “about strategic writing for content marketing,” Berg explains, and involves “authoritative, strategic, meaty copy…that answers every one of the visitor’s questions.” Content writers develop the long-form, thought-leadership pieces (blog articles, white papers, guest posts, etc.) that educate current and potential customers and keep them engaged with your brand as industry leaders.

Copywriting Drives Customer Actions

In contrast, copywriting involves crafting words that “appear on ads, websites, product packaging, social media posts, gifs, videos, and any kind of marketing material you can think of” to drive readers to take specific actions—like signing up for a webinar or purchasing a product. Sales copy is the text that appears in any sort of advertisement, from a Facebook ad to an event flier, with the key being brevity.

Working Together to Move the Sales Cycle Forward

These two types of writing come at different points in the sales cycle. Typically, copywriting reaches a customer at the beginning of the cycle and can be their first or second touch with your brand, while content marketing often reaches a customer in the middle to the end of the cycle—which is why content marketing is also a great tool for nurturing relationships with existing clients. If you're looking for help, you can hire someone skilled in marketing strategy to help you utilize the marketing tools.

The Upstart Group team thinks of the marriage between content writing and copywriting like this: content marketing is crucial to help drive sales by providing valuable content that speaks to your customers, answers their questions, and helps them in some way without being salesy. In order to get that valuable content into the hands of your targeted audience to help push them through the sales cycle, you need a copywriter who is focused on selling—selling the value of your expertise and offering your content as a solution to your audience’s problem so that they’ll go read it.

Like everything else in marketing, it’s all about teamwork: a good copywriter needs a good content writer—and vice versa.

Read the full MarketingProfs article for more helpful insights into copywriting versus content writing.