As a small business owner or B2B professional focused on reaching out to your company or brand, you’ve probably heard “content marketing” and “inbound marketing” thrown around a lot. They’re seemingly synonymous terms, and you might even consider their differences to be unimportant. However, if you’re serious about growing your brand, it’s important to recognize the functions of inbound and content marketing as separate entities to ensure you’re getting the most out of each. Their ultimate goals are the same: attract customers by creating value, not by being intrusive. But what does each represent, and what’s so important about distinguishing them?
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing theory that tries to attract customers rather than seek them out. In other words, instead of the classic billboard or TV commercial that captures people in places and under circumstances that have nothing to say, inbound marketing allows customers to seek out the company on their own time while trying to gain something. People don’t really respond well to being interrupted or bombarded these days. They do, however, respond very well to being able to make decisions on their own terms and having their problems solved.
Inbound marketing is made up of several architects mailing list important aspects, all of which should be part of your inbound marketing approach. These aspects or tools include search engine optimization (SEO), interactive tools, marketing automations, and more. And you guessed it, content marketing is one of these tools. Some say it’s the most important aspect of inbound marketing of all.
There are different stages of inbound marketing, according to different sources. In general, the stages of inbound marketing are:
Attract – Use leads to drive the right people to your website.
Engage – Interact with customers as soon as they decide to visit.
Delight – Create lasting relationships by delivering the right information to the right person.
What is Content Marketing?
The key word in content marketing is “value.” People go online to learn, to find answers to problems, to relieve stress, and for many other, more benefit-centric reasons. Content marketing is a practical marketing technique that uses the consistent creation and distribution of informative, up-to-date information. Why? So that people who are looking for answers can find them in the right places and from the right sources and ultimately create connections with those sources.
Content marketing allows brands and businesses to establish themselves as resources for their specific audiences, thereby creating a connection in their minds between that subject and the company. As relationships progress, people will turn to the companies they connect with for their shopping needs time and time again simply because they have gained something valuable from them in the past.
Content marketing has the same stages as inbound marketing in general, albeit with a different scope. While inbound marketing attempts to attract, engage, and delight audiences with a combined variety of tools, content marketing uses content to reach each stage, in the form of blog posts, videos, email campaigns, and more. Sometimes, a single piece of content can reach each stage of a session, such as a blog post that hooks the audience with answers to their question, engages them with a CTA, and delights them by taking them to a viable page to fulfill their needs.
Is there really any difference?
While they share common goals and steps, content marketing is clearly a subset of inbound marketing. Content marketing is one piece, perhaps the most important piece, of an overall inbound plan to deliver quality, valuable content to the specific audience you want to reach. For a complete inbound marketing plan, it’s important to address other tools that contribute to the natural, holistic methods that customers respond best to. Check out the other inbound tools that will complement your content marketing plan.
Technical SEO
Writing all sorts of blogs on whatever topic piques your interest that day is great, but getting a little technical with your search engine optimization techniques is the best way to improve your inbound marketing results. You want to focus on the people who find you, but not just anyone, just the people who will convert. If your blog is full of travel tips, but you're a parts manufacturer, chances are most of the people who visit your site won't be interested in sticking around.
You can get technical about your SEO by focusing on optimizing keywords, metadata, alt text for images, titles, and most importantly, meeting the needs of your audience in your content.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is another field that, like content marketing, is often misunderstood as synonymous with its parent field, inbound marketing. While inbound marketing sounds “automatic” because leads start coming to you while you sleep, marketing automation is literally the use of automated software. Different inbound marketing tasks that marketing teams can automate include automatically sending personalized emails to the right people at the right times based on where they are in the inbound process, scheduling blogs and automatically publishing them on a set schedule, and optimizing SEO with automated tools that do it for you. Marketing automation is a valuable area of inbound marketing that will complement your content marketing plans nicely.
Interactive tools
Today’s audiences aren’t satisfied with static content. They want to engage with what’s being told, ask questions, and try to do things themselves. Using interactive tools is vital to inbound marketing because it’s based on the theory’s precedent—providing value to customers and letting them make decisions for themselves. Interactive tools are usually amazing software in the form of plugins for your website that allow customers to fill their carts by clicking on the items they want from an online catalog, chat with experts about their questions and concerns, and more.
Inbound marketing is really an umbrella that encompasses content marketing and all the other aspects that enhance the effectiveness of content. Once you have a solid content marketing plan, try out some of the other aspects of inbound marketing to get the most out of your content.