While many brand owners fall into the trap of thinking that content marketing and inbound marketing are the same thing, what are some of the key differences?
Once upon a time, many bricks and mortar businesses relied on strategies like word of mouth and print advertising to attract new customers. However, there’s no denying that we now live in a digital world, and the importance of a strong presence on the internet has seen many owners scrambling to jump on the bandwagon.
Unfortunately, making your mark online requires so much more than a pretty website. Without strategies in place to attract new customers, retain the loyalty of existing ones and even adhering to the technical guidelines required by the likes of Google, it’s a bit like expecting your Ferrari to win the Formula One without any fuel in the tank.
In turn, many budding online stars quickly fall out of love with the skyrocketing costs associated with pay per click style marketing methods. However, navigating the alternatives can quickly see brands and businesses becoming confused with terms like content marketing and inbound marketing, and often mistakenly believe them to be one in the same.
The Distinctions Of Content Marketing And Inbound Marketing
In a nutshell, content marketing is a form of advertising that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online, such as SEO, blogs, videos and even social media posts – you’re making your own content, and you’re marketing that content.
The bread and butter of any good content marketing strategy with a focus on boosting a brand’s Google presence is your website’s blog. When properly optimised using keywords, titles and headers, meta description and the right length, a blog or an article can come in many different formats. If you’re stuck for ideas, try writing a piece that is list based, is a how to guide, or even interviews in news style editorial, but aim to write evergreen content that will last forever and won’t expire.
Not only does content marketing help to solidify your brand’s presence on search engine results, but it can also be distributed across social media channels as a way to supercharge traction. While content marketing is ultimately designed to beef your website up in all the right ways, this is often how the term gets confused with inbound marketing, with many brands and businesses believing that they are the same thing.
In reality, this isn’t quite true – technically speaking, content marketing is a form of inbound marketing. Under the umbrella of an inbound marketing program, expect to find content marketing working alongside website optimisation, SEO, email marketing, lead generation, analytics, social media, and more, all as a means to attract, nurture, close, and even entertain new and existing customers.
While content marketing is designed to captivate the attention of potential customers without pushing for a hard sell, inbound marketing inserts conversion boosting elements into the content as a means to drive leads and ideally conversions to a product or service. As an example of content marketing and inbound marketing working together, the former may be a blog, while the latter could be a call to action for an email sign up or discount code embedded into the blog’s text. When done well, inbound marketing is a more subtle advertising strategy than the often irritating and spam-like banners and pop up ads that most of us tend to loathe.
When trying to master an inbound marketing strategy that includes content marketing as one of the key pillars, understanding the technical side of business is often where ambitious brand owners come unstuck. A lack of time, energy or resources are often serial offenders as to why many brands ignore content marketing all together – but what if we told you that there was another way of making your mark online while minimising the workload?
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources – and you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that. Avoiding blogging for business altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice, but investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times. It also means that because you have a monthly credit, you are going to want to make sure you use these up – and so do we – meaning that your digital content is always consistent.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
