Difference Between Inbound and Content Marketing
A lot of companies use the terms inbound marketing and content marketing interchangeably, but they are different promotion techniques.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to attract potential customers who are already searching for your products, rather than promoting your solutions to random consumers.
Content marketing focuses on producing quality resources in the form of ebooks, blogs, and reports. These content-rich resources should deliver functional information to users, helping them solve a problem while showcasing your knowledge at the same time.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is an approach that focuses on attracting customers through content and interactions that are relevant and helpful – not interruptive.
Instead of the traditional style of blasting cold emails and calling prospects over the phone to pitch your product or service, inbound marketing uses value adding to pull prospects towards your brand.
Inbound marketing makes it easier for customers to find you through social media, search engines, and other relevant content because you are naturally providing answers that they are looking for.
Under the umbrella of an inbound program, you will find content marketing working alongside website optimization, SEO, email marketing, lead nurturing, analytics, social media, and more to attract, qualify, nurture, and close customers.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a defined audience to drive profitable customer action.
It centres on the creation of exceptional, highly-relevant, and useful content and encompasses distribution across different channels, both online and offline.
To make the most of inbound marketing, you need the right systems in place, such as marketing automation that talks to your CRM to help you qualify and nurture the right leads at scale and provide data your sales team can use to help improve your closing ratios.
You want content to drive results and help you achieve your goals. Because inbound marketing is a data and result-driven methodology, your content marketing is tightly integrated with your conversion strategy. Inbound produces results by using content to attract and convert prospects into leads, so the focus is on optimising the content and the conversion experience.
Quality content achieves these important goals:
- It grabs the attention of targeted audiences (It is creative)
- It helps companies establish relationships with B2B buyers (It is relevant)
- It is designed to be shared widely (It is valuable)
What are the Similarities Between Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing?
Both inbound marketing and content marketing observe the more customer-centric marketing approach that considers customer needs and satisfaction above everything else. Both depend on the slow but steady building of a relationship between a business and its target audience to generate leads and convert customers.
What is the Difference Between Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing?
Specific Buyer Persona Versus Broad Target Audience
Inbound marketing reaches out to specific buyer personas while content marketing focuses on the broad target audience.
Inbound Marketing Involves Other Strategies Not Included in Content Marketing.
Inbound marketing covers other strategies that help with organic SEO; building, maintaining, and optimising your website; running ads; and monitoring of online reputation, which are not included in content marketing.
