Inbound Marketing Vs Content Marketing

By Kelly Culver

With Inbound Marketing, it’s all about raising awareness of your company to bring potential customers in, convert them into leads, convincing them to become a paying customer and then keeping the customers happy. Inbound uses interactive tools like landing pages, call-to-action and SEO which makes a large impact on leads. In short, you want your customers to become brand ambassadors as essentially this is free marketing.

“Inbound marketing is creating great content to draw in your customers rather than buying email lists and not getting a response from many. The four actions Inbound Marketing companies take are Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.” 

Content Marketing is the creation and distribution of quality content that relates to your product or service. To be a great content marketer you need a clear understanding of your audiences interests. It’s all about engaging with the audience and getting replies or shares from your content. You can tell the difference between general content and the content in a marketing campaign, because the content will be relevant and not something that people are trying to avoid.

Research is a large part of the buying process today. If peopleare impressed with the content that a company produces then they could be convinced they want your product or service before they have already spoken to you. This means less sales efforts need to be put in as the customers are coming to you. Good content raises awareness of your brand as people are more likely to share and it helps with SEO. Content marketing is free and only takes up a few hours a week.

The difference between the two is that content marketing is a part of inbound marketing. By attracting and converting customers you are using content marketing. The end of the cycle is close and delight, which is where you can see inbound marketing is more extensive.

Overall I believe that content marketing is the better option for smaller businesses as you can do it free and there is a lot of proof out there that it works. Inbound Marketing requires a bit of a spend if you aren’t 100% tech savvy but it does get good results. Where possible, Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing should be considered as one.

So get writing those blogs, take those pictures and get yourself out there, what have you got to lose?