Is Content Marketing For Performance or Brand?

“Over the past 20 years, performance marketing has become the dominant approach , referring to paying third party channels to generate sales, leads, and click through direct mail, search engines, and social media sites,” a recent Harvard Business Review article states.. But, the authors question, “Is performance marketing crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer awareness of, attitudes towards, and affinity for their companies’ brands?” In fact, the authors relate, at the Cannes Lions Int’l Festival of Creativity, th authors relate, the issue most voted for as important to discuss was managing the tension between brand and performance marketing.

As content marketers at Say It For You, we work with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for the blogs we ghostwrite. In a very real sense, the very process of deciding what to include in a post is one of self-discovery, with the creation of content being part of the process of inventing and reinventing the business brand.

The performance marketing piece of the puzzle, meanwhile, involves the use of keyword phrases. SEO is the practice of optimizing content to clearly define what your webpage is and what information it is providing, explains Elena Terenteva in the SEMrush blog. Some areas that need to be optimized, Terenteva explains, include page titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, and internal links. But should blogs be built around these performance marketing tools? .Using keywords in a natural way in y our post is good for SEO, web influencer Neil Patel says, “but don’t overdo it”. “The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone.  Nowadays, quality content is king,” says Seattle freelance writer Carol Tice.

At Say It For You, we’ve found, our business owner or professional practitioner clients are interested in is spreading the word about what they know, what they know how to do, and what they sell. In that sense, the content writing effort is meant to “perform”. But, in content writing training sessions, I’m continuing to emphasize the verbal, not the viral. That means we’re writing marketing blogs not to attract the attention of gazillions of readers, but to attract prospects of the right kind. Blog posts are essentially about reaffirming the company’s or the practice’s brand.

On the other hand, customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a “brand story”; they want to tell themselves the story,” Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business authors Cooper and Gruntzner advise. The goal in blogging for business is creating loyal customers who have an emotional engagement with your brand.

Is content marketing performance or brand? It’s both.