B2B Monday Myth: Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing Are the Same Thing

The Myth: Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing Are the Same Thing.

The Truth: Content Marketing Expands Well Beyond Just Inbound.

One mistake marketers make fairly often is confusing Content Marketing with Inbound Marketing. They see them as one and the same, when in reality Inbound Marketing is just a child of Content Marketing. Let’s take a closer look.

First off, when we talk about content, here are some examples of what we’re referring to:

Blog Posts
Podcasts
White Papers
eBooks
Social Media Posts
Videos

Content Marketing is simply how you distribute content to your target audience. The way you do it can make or break your marketing campaign. Sometimes, Content Marketing takes the form of Inbound Marketing.

So, How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

Inbound marketing is a simple concept. It generates strong leads for B2B brands because it lets the buyer find you instead of you hunting them down as you would with Outbound Marketing. It is passive marketing – you leave your fishing hook in the water and wait for the fish to come and take your bait. So the goal is to make your bait as attractive as possible by optimizing the content on your website and social media sites. If your content is good, hopefully others will use them as inbound links on their sites. This gives you credibility, not only to prospects, but to Google, who will then be more likely to put you at the top of the search list.

The goal of Inbound Marketing, is once you draw a prospect to your content, you can capture their information, and they become a lead that you can now contact and (hopefully) convert.

But this is only one way to use content.

Okay, What About Content Marketing?

Content Marketing encompasses more than just Inbound. It’s been around much longer than you might think. John Deere started doing it back in 1895 by creating The Furrow, an agricultural magazine that would appeal to his customers and prospects (millions of them). Walt Disney was a master of Content Marketing as early as 1954. Both the Deere and Disney brands have been distributing their content to mass audiences since long before the Internet was even invented, never mind Inbound Marketing.

But we needn’t put the division line between Inbound and Offline. There are other ways to drive people to your content online that are not considered Inbound Marketing. Optimizing your content can get you hot leads who are searching for what you offer, but Outbound allows you to widen your net a bit. It’s basically marketing as you’ve always known it, but used to drive readers to content instead of to build awareness of your brand. With Outbound, you drive people to your content via:

Social Media Ads
Online Display Ads / Retargeting
Paid Search
E-blasts via Trade Publications
Webinars with Relevant Trade Publications
Email Campaigns (though there is debate as to whether this is considered Inbound or Out)

As you can see, Content Marketing is a wide umbrella, and Inbound a highly effective methodology that falls beneath it. Their goal is the same: to get prospects into your sales funnel. The key is to have good content that can increase the number of leads you get from both your Inbound and Outbound efforts. Try what you think will work best for your target audiences, measure the effectiveness of each piece of your campaign, and fine-tune it until you have a well-oiled Inbound and Outbound Content Marketing machine.