The terms ‘inbound marketing’ and ‘content marketing’ are often uttered within the same breath, and are sometimes used almost interchangeably. Is this true, or are inbound marketing and content marketing distinct strategies? The best way of looking at them is as two sides of the same success coin. Inbound marketing pulls together digital strategies across various channels to create a unified buyer journey, while content marketing delivers the value that fuels each stage.
In this article, we unpick the similarities and differences between inbound and content marketing and how the two work hand-in-hand to drive results for your business.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is less of an individual strategy than a multifaceted approach to marketing that aims to create a tailored marketing ecosystem to drive traffic organically to your business and convert visitors into long-term customers. To do so, inbound marketing uses tactics such as search engine optimisation to help your content rank higher in Google search results, for example, landing pages and forms to capture leads, and email marketing automation to nurture leads down the sales funnel.
What About Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the ‘what’ of your marketing strategy, while inbound is the ‘how and why. Content marketing focuses on developing blogs, videos, podcasts, social media posts, downloadable e-books, case studies, and other materials to engage your buyers and build trust at every touch point. Content marketing provides the fuel that powers your inbound campaigns.
Similarities
As inbound marketing and content marketing are fully aligned in their goals and methods, there are several key similarities between the approaches. Inbound and content marketing both aim to attract and engage your customers by providing value throughout the customer life-cycle, and both are customer-centric strategies built around the pain points, challenges, and questions faced by your customers. They use this to attract or ‘pull’ the audience to your business by being helpful rather than interrupting customers through traditional hard-sell tactics.
Key Differences
Despite overlapping goals, inbound marketing and content marketing do differ in notable ways. For example:
Scope
Inbound marketing encompasses multiple tactics and channels, one of which is content marketing. Content marketing, on the other hand, focuses more narrowly on content creation and distribution.
Focus
Inbound marketing covers your entire marketing funnel, from awareness through consideration to decision, while content marketing is primarily (but not exclusively) concerned with the awareness and consideration stages.
Tactics
Inbound integrates a variety of tools and techniques such as lead nurturing, automation, and CRM management to track and manage all your customer interactions. It’s essentially pragmatic – if a tool is useful, Inbound will use it. The content marketing playbook is more limited, using blog articles, e-books, and other digital assets to engage your buyers.
Inbound And Content Marketing Working Together
Taken together, inbound and content marketing are the ‘dynamic duo’ of digital prosperity. Which one is Batman and which one Robin is up to you, but essentially, content builds the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy, and inbound gives your content the structure and systems to turn creative assets into measurable revenues. Used in tandem, content-driven inbound marketing will help you to attract the right buyers to your business, nurture qualified leads through personalised messaging and targeted campaigns, convert prospects through lead scoring tools and the right marketing collateral (landing pages, case studies etc) to give customers the confidence to commit, and finally, helps you retain customers through ongoing content to keep customers engaged and loyal.
Find Out More
Investing in both content marketing and inbound marketing is the best approach for SMEs serious about extending their reach, nurturing long-term relationships with customers, and driving more revenues online. To find out more and to discuss the benefits for your business, please click here to contact the team at JDR today.
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