Often, the terms “inbound marketing” and “content marketing” are viewed as synonymous. What’s worse is that when you do a quick Google search to learn the difference, that’s all you get. A quick definition of each of the terms and then a brief explanation of how they’re different.
The reality is that inbound marketing is a mindset that impacts your entire organization. It's an effort to be helpful while creating a great online learning experience. Content, and content marketing, is the engine that drives inbound marketing efforts. In order to be successful, you need both.
You can see results like this, but they take time and dedication. And you need to know what you're doing.
This article is going to take you beyond just quick definitions and show you how to use both inbound and content marketing to increase your traffic, leads, and sales.
If you want a deeper dive into either, you can click below.
If you want to understand how the two terms relate, keep reading.
Inbound marketing is a sales and marketing strategy that attracts ideal customers to your business through helpful and informative content.
Instead, the effort of an organization revolves around drawing people in with a website, video, social media, and written content that educates and truly empowers a buyer to make a decision.
If you build something great online, your prospects will discover it and enter your funnel.
Content marketing is the primary driver of your inbound marketing efforts. The goal is to create honest, transparent, and educational content on a consistent basis for your ideal buyers.
The publication and promotion of content drives organic website traffic from search engines, gets you found on social media, increases your qualified lead pool, and empowers your sales team to close more deals faster.
At a high level, inbound marketing is the holistic strategy, and content marketing is the primary tactic.
Without content, inbound marketing efforts are fruitless.
Let’s say Taylor Swift decides to drop a new surprise album overnight... again. You wake up super excited to dive in and see how it stacks up against her other albums, while knowing in the back of your mind that its ceiling is fourth after Lover, Red, and the self-titled album — yes, in that order.
But when you go to Spotify, the album doesn’t have any songs on it. It’s just a designed album cover with a description of the idea for the album and information about the artist.
This is the exact same thing as having an inbound strategy, but no content.
Without a larger inbound strategy, content lacks the support to make an impact with your ideal buyers.
Imagine now that Jordan Peele just came out with a new movie. You’re dying to see it because, well it’s a Jordan Peele movie and you’re a human.
But when you go to watch the movie, every scene is in a random order and there’s no actual narrative at all. Now if you’re like me you’d sit there nodding with a pensive look on your face and act like you totally understand the artistic direction.
But in reality, the movie didn’t take you anywhere and it seemed accidental. This is what it’s like to create content without a larger inbound strategy.
Inbound marketing and content marketing have a symbiotic relationship. They also share the same goal: to educate potential customers so that when they’re ready to buy they come to you.
But that’s where the similarities end.
Inbound marketing will be owned by someone in your company that oversees your entire marketing department. This could be a CMO, a VP of marketing, or a marketing director.
The person in charge of your inbound marketing strategy should have a foundational understanding of all aspects, but not specialize in any per se. That means this person should be able to contribute to conversations about content marketing, social media, SEO, conversion rate optimization, lead nurturing, and sales enablement.
Depending on the depth and complexity of your team, however, that individual may not be the specialist who handles the ownership of those areas.
Content marketing responsibility will be owned by a content manager.
Content managers focus on building an editorial calendar, building content creation processes, distilling interviews with in-house SMEs into easy to understand thoughts, and exciting your entire team about using content in the sales process.
While a content manager should have a broad understanding of the entire inbound marketing strategy, they’re deep in the weeds writing, editing, publishing, and promoting content.
A true inbound marketing strategy will include written content, but also focuses on providing that same inbound mentality across others channels. Those might include paid advertising, building a transparent and user-friendly website, or building an online community.
Content marketing strategy has a narrower scope of deliverables, usually in the form of articles, videos, podcasts, and downloadable content offers.
While the overarching goal for both inbound and content marketing is to increase sales, there are some metrics that indicate success that are unique.
For inbound marketing, it might be things like website conversion rate, number of generated leads, percentage increase in sales, increase in average order size, and an increase in the quality of inbound leads.
While content marketers certainly need those metrics to show their efforts are working, success can be proven in other ways.
Content marketers focus on metrics like increasing the time that website visitors spend reading articles and watching videos, decreased bounce rates, increases in organic keywords and traffic, and the number of content pieces consumed by high-quality leads.
Here is how to properly implement both inbound and content marketing to increase sales.
After this priority recap meeting, use your next revenue team session to determine your next 90-day period priorities. Follow this structure from now until the end of time.
If you’re looking online for things like content marketing and inbound marketing, I’m going to guess that you’re at the point where you realize your sales process and results could stand to be improved. The inbound methodology isn’t going to net you results overnight, but we’ve seen so many success stories when companies commit and build inbound and content marketing strategies.
You can continue on the same path you’ve always gone down and hope for better results, but trying to grind harder with an outdated approach will only get you so far. Every day that you wait to make the shift is delaying the results you could be seeing.
Results like an increased close rate, a shorter sales cycle, increased average order size, and more leads and traffic to your website.
If you're ready, we’ve created a free video training course that will guide you toward implementing inbound in your organization.