The Bigger Picture ‘Inbound Marketing’
Inbound Marketing is a methodology using digital marketing as a resource to attract prospects and convert them into customers. Make them draw towards your product or service through content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and branding. While content is an essential part of inbound marketing, that drives traffic through blogs, white papers, call to action emails, it is much more than that.
You must have observed Hubspot being frequently associated with the term inbound marketing, a fun fact, Hubspot’s CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan, coined the term “inbound marketing” in 2005.
How is content marketing ‘different’ from inbound marketing?
Content marketing strategies aim to create and send across content through various channels like: writing a long detailed guide or walkthrough, sharing it on social media, and ensuring that it is read, loved and shared by people who will find it applicable.
However, inbound marketing is a peek-through the all-around performance of the company. It focuses on creating a website, and curating quality content on it, the profile must be appealing to extract action by the visitor, irrespectove of whether it’s an impulsive purchase, filling up a form, or just a follow the company on social media.
Hence, both content marketing and inbound marketing are easy, trendy marketing methods but aren’t really the same. They conclude to the same end result, but the methods involved are quite distinctive.
Content marketing, a boon to Inbound Marketing
Traditional marketing or outbound marketing like television, and radio ads, spam, direct paper mail and sales fliers are approaches previously taken up by companies to attract the attention of the customer. Most often, these traditional approaches do not reach the target audience or are blocked by the people who are not actively searching for such products or services.
Every customer wants to have a seamless online experience, which is hindered by such traditional ads. According to Bizible marketing, “Way back in August 2015, Adobe and PageFair released their ad blocking report, which contained some startling statistics regarding the growth of ad blocking. It claimed that blocking had risen by 41% globally in the 12 preceding months - in the same time period it grew by a staggering 82% in the UK.”
Therefore, content marketing is one such medium that backs up the marketing game. So, other than creating content, then paying the advertising companies to make it visible, inbound marketing creates content that every potential customers want to see. If you publish content that provides the answers to the commonly asked questions, by the customer, you can increase traffic to your site and if the content adds value to the needs of the visitors, it is likely that visitors will keep visiting your website for more.
A good content marketing inbound strategy instigates prospective customers to react to a call to action. The inbound marketing methodology is:
Strangers > Visitors > Leads > Customers > Promoters
The right integration of content marketing along with inbound marketing system can form a unique branding perspective by increasing the number of touchpoints and also help you map customers’ journey in a clear and better way, helping you reach a broader audience.