Inbound Marketing vs Content Marketing: What’s the Difference?

 

These days, promoting your business relies heavily on digital marketing. But, because there are multiple strategies to attract and engage an audience, it’s easy to get confused when it comes to modern marketing terminologies.

Two of the most obscure concepts in digital marketing are content marketing and inbound marketing, which focus on creating relationships with the customers to make a sale. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they are fundamentally different, though tightly intertwined.

If inbound marketing and content marketing are two different but related things, how do they fit together?

What is the Difference Between Inbound & Content Marketing?

Short answer: content marketing is a strategy that involves publishing and distributing valuable, relatable, and consistent content to attract a well-defined target audience—and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is an umbrella term for strategies that work together to target potential customers at different stages through multiple channels without being interruptive—which is the case for traditional and outbound marketing.

Now, content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing. It works alongside other strategies such as search engine optimization, email marketing, analytics, social media, and more. This explains why the two share the same goal of attracting, engaging, and converting leads into customers to boost sales.

Although one can exist without the other, as a digital marketing agency in the Philippines, we understand that content marketing forms the base of a successful inbound marketing strategy.

What is Content Marketing?

 

 

As today’s consumers tune out aggressive marketing methods and avoid sales pitches, content marketing offers an alternative route to reach out to them: valuable content that your target audience will find educational, useful, interesting, or even entertaining. This includes:

• Blog posts

• Videos

 

• Infographics

• Podcasts

 

• Newsletters

 

• Social media posts; and

 

 

• Other long-form content (e.g. ebooks, whitepaper, etc.)

When done right, your content can provide free value to your audience, which is a way to slowly build trust and relationships, generate leads and finally convert them into sales.

What is Inbound Marketing?

 

 

Again, under the premise of users actively blocking out business promotions, inbound marketing focuses on adding value that will attract prospects towards your brand. It engages the audience by providing solutions to their problems when they seek them.

Success in inbound marketing is knowing your target audiences and making it easy for them to find you through social media, search engines, or other relevant channels. This way, they are more likely to respond to a call to action, such as signing up for newsletters.

As mentioned above, inbound marketing involves content marketing, digital tools, mediums, and processes designed to help you match your strategies with the way consumers buy today:

 

• Content marketing

 

• Social media

 

• SEO

 

• Email marketing

 

 

• Case studies

 

• Lead nurturing

 

 

• Paid ads

 

 

• Analytics

 

 

• Web design

 

 

Inbound +  Content Marketing is Key to Delivering Qualified Leads 

In summary, you don’t have to pit inbound and content marketing against each other. Both strategies effectively draw in qualified leads and convert them into sales, and they perform to their utmost potential when used in conjunction.

Whereas content marketing lays the framework, inbound marketing does the rest of the work. It uses content to attract and convert prospects into leads and leads into sales.

There’s more to learn about content marketing and inbound marketing, and it’s okay if you don’t have the capacity yet to employ a full-scale strategy. At Createmoto, we can help you get started by fine-tuning each step to ensure that it would return the most results.

 

Get in touch with us today!