What is
Content Marketing & Inbound Marketing?
Content marketing means different things to different marketing teams.
What is Content Marketing?
In
the broadest sense, content marketing is using content to market products
and services. Content can be designed for online use, such as blog posts,
infographics, videos, and SlideShares. Content can also be designed for offline
brochures and print media.
When
most people say 'content marketing', they're thinking of content that's created
for online use to drive website traffic for marketing. Sometimes it goes a
little further extending into downloadable content offers such as
whitepapers or ebooks.
Many
inbound marketing agencies - ours included - do content
marketing projects for their clients. We create great content that's optimized
for SEO, targeted to the correct audience, visually compelling, and highly
shareable. That content then gets plugged into an inbound marketing process.
To
maximize your success in attracting visitors, converting those visitors to
leads, and nurturing them through the funnel to become customers,
content must be part of a larger inbound marketing process. Content
alone can generate traffic, but it can't capture leads, or
move leads down your sales funnel qualifying them, and eventually turn them
into paying customers. That's what inbound marketing does.
What
is Inbound Marketing?
I'll
say it again; inbound marketing is a set of tools, technologies, and processes
that work together to drive traffic to a website, capture leads, and work to
convert those leads into customers. Content is an essential part of that - your
content is what drives traffic to your blog, social sites, or other pages.
The
difference is in the tools, technologies, and process - to work well, inbound
marketing requires much more than content. It also requires the following:
·
Contact capture - To capture contacts, either by
tracking visitors to your website, or by capturing contact information in
website forms (or both).
·
Content offer delivery - To deliver special content offers
like ebooks, whitepapers, step-by-step guides, or even discount coupons from
your website or blog to capture contact information with those forms.
·
Calls-to-action - Images, buttons, that are
integrated with your website, blog, and are even embedded into blog posts that
visitors can click on to get one of your content offers.
·
Landing pages - Nice looking, well organized, SEO
optimized web pages that visitors are directed to once they click a
call-to-action so that they can learn more about, and sign up for your content
offers.
·
Contact management (CRM) integration - A place to store,
access, and share contact information once it's captured.
·
Email marketing integration - Content is used to build awareness
and make visitors aware of content offers, but converting those leads to
customers is often better handled through email. Email marketing integration is
a must so that you can stay in touch with visitors who have opted into your
content offers or subscribed to your blog. It lets you stay in touch
with them and move them down the sale funnel to, hopefully, turn them into a
customer.
·
Marketing automation - Those email follow ups can be very
time-consuming. Strong marketing automation tools that enable you to
create workflows, and send personalized emails from templates can help
marketing and sales team maintain engagement and move more leads down the
funnel.
·
Social publishing - This goes without saying: If you're
publishing content, you need a tool to help get that content onto your social
channels at the right time to the right audience.
Great inbound marketing tools have strong extras like the following:
- · On-page SEO optimization tools for your web pages and content.
- · Keyword discovery and optimization tools.
- · Social monitoring ranging from keyword to brand monitoring capabilities to make sure you stay on top of mentions of interest.
- · Analytics to show you how your website and content are performing.
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