Often content marketing and inbound marketing get tangled in people’s minds. It is much the same way that SEO and inbound marketing get confused.
However the key to remember is that inbound marketing is an overall marketing strategy. Whereas content marketing and SEO are tactics.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing is the creation and production of various items that are hosted online. The content can be e-books, white papers, videos, infographics. Pretty much any content that you can create and publish online.
Benefits: So what are some of the benefits of content marketing? As people and companies build more and more walls around getting to decision makers, you need a way to engage those people from an inbound (new marketing) way vs outbound (traditional sales and business development) . That is the key behind content marketing. You offer something of value that your prospects want and need. That brings them into your website.
Objective of Content Marketing
This content functions in a couple of different ways.
Nectar: Bees don’t visit flowers because they like the smell, it is because they want to get something of value. Bees go to flowers to collect the nectar.
Content is the same way, it is the nectar of your website. This is value that you are giving to your customers (usually for free) that will help them in their jobs or lives. Let’s say you are an industrial company. In this scenario you sell industrial tubing. You could create an ebook on how to find the best sort of industrial tubing for different applications.
Contact: The goal for the content marketing is to get downloads. In order to get your valuable content, visitors have to provide an email address and name. What you do with that information varies depending on your goals.
Informational: The best content is always informational. It should not be sales-y. You are offering this to help your audience. Yes the long term goal is to acquire customers, but it is also to build a reputation. A reputation as knowledgeable and helpful!
Useful: Creating content that gets downloaded is only part of the task of content marketing. In addition you need to create content that not only appears to be useful for your clients on your offer or landing page, but actually useful.
Imagine the feeling of submitting your information to get a piece of content that you think will be great, only to find out it is cobbled together and basically worthless. What is the chance you interact with the company that produced that sub-par content?
Goals: Creating content without specific goals is not going to do a lot. Trust me, I tried to do it that way for years. Content by itself is ok, content with a plan is great! You need to go in with goals of what you want to accomplish from your content.
Ideally your goals should be S.M.A.R.T.
- Specific
- Measuable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
Content Marketing vs Inbound Marketing
So now that we know what content marketing is, how does it work in inbound marketing? As we discussed content marketing is a tactic of inbound marketing.
With inbound marketing you are going to use software automation, and other smart elements on your website in order to maximize your content. Content marketing is only a piece of your inbound marketing strategy. However it is a very important part.
You are going to nurture your contacts so that the leads you send over to sales are “sales ready”. The time of marketing throwing every random lead over to sales and saying “Figure it out” is over.
With inbound marketing you are developing legitimate qualified marketing leads.
If you are interested in learning more about inbound marketing you can download our guide to inbound marketing here.