Businesses thrive on lead generations to increase their customer base. However, it is impossible to generate leads if your business is incapable of grabbing its customers’ attention through its meaningful content. Regular publishing of content on the website generates more traffic. However, just doing so is not enough to increase your customer base. It is not very potent in converting your site visitors into your loyal customers.

A strategic framework is a prerequisite for impactful content creation. That’s where Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing comes into play. However, both of these terms often sound confusing to people. Moreover, their usage and applications also seem to confuse a lot of people. Well, with this guide, we are going to help you to differentiate between Inbound and Content marketing. Idea Usher experts will help you draw a detailed comparison between Inbound marketing vs. Content marketing, including their applications and benefits. So let us begin! 

What is Inbound Marketing?

Let us quickly understand what inbound marketing is. 

Inbound Marketing uses valuable information to attract target customers. This technique of marketing focuses on customers who are already aware of your brand or know about your brand. Furthermore, inbound marketing’s target audience already knows what you offer as a brand, your content resources and uses all this to address their queries and questions. 

Inbound marketing has always been there in the market, but it has only emerged as a preferred marketing technique in the past 8-10 years. The main reason for its growing popularity as a preferred marketing method is due to the fact that customers have started to ignore invasive sales messages. Thus, brands had to find new and innovative ways to reach potential customers and turn them into buyers. That’s when inbound marketing came into play and changed everything once and for all.

We can all admit that we don’t like interruptive and invasive sales calls while doing some important work. However, at the same time, when we are approached through an email or a newsletter about a brand, we are more interested in knowing about it. That is how inbound marketing works. It is a less invasive and more engaging way of marketing and reaching new customers.

Inbound marketing enables the customers to reach out to the brand themselves. Consequently increasing their chances of accepting the targeted offer. This is just like applying reverse psychology to make people respond to a call to action.

This way of marketing is all about providing the right customers with the right content at the right time. The different inbound methods to attract the target customers include

• Attracting 
• Engaging
• Delighting 

Necessary Skills for Effective Inbound Marketing

Some of the necessary skills required for efficient inbound marketing of your brands include

• Content development and creation
• SEO optimization
• Graphic Designing and Web Designing
• Social media Management
• Campaign Planning and Management
• Using digital tools like CRMs and Canva

All these skills will help you market your brand effectively and run it productively to gain substantial profits. Furthermore, these tools will help to create an impression on your prospective and current customers. Henceforth, it is essential that your team is well aware of all these skills and other digital tools.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

In the next part of our blog, let us see the different inbound marketing strategies that we can use to target our customers in an inbound way effectively.

Attracting Strategies

Content development and creation are the major inbound marketing strategies tied to attract customers to your brand. Henceforth it is essential that you must regularly post blogs and articles on your website and social media. However, it is also imperative that you must take care of the content that you are posting. It should be relevant to the brand and should provide some value to your customers. For example, guides, testimonials, product offers, and information about your services or products, etc.,

One can even use inbound marketing on a deeper level by SEO-optimized content to generate a more significant customer base. Using some targeted keywords, you can optimize your website content. This will help your webpage to rank better on search engines. Consequently helping your brand to attract more customers.

Engaging Strategies

It is essential to consider the way you are engaging with your customers. Make sure that it is in a way that your customers would want to associate with your brand for the long term. Engaging inbound marketing strategies should be practical so that you can communicate with your customers efficiently.

Furthermore, brands must find ways to manage and handle the inbound sales call effectively. It also includes how your customer care executive talks and engages with your customers. You can also market your business effectively by selling the story behind the brand rather than selling the services or products. Thus, find out what differentiates your brand from its peers and how it will help the prospective customers find solutions to their concerns. It will consequently lead to a mutually beneficial relationship for both you and your customers.

Delighting Strategies

Delighting inbound marketing strategies makes sure that your customers are happy and satisfied. One can implement this strategy by integrating chatbots and digital assistants on their brand websites and apps. This will improve the customer experience, thus enhancing your brand’s reputation. Another way of implementing this strategy is through surveys. By conducting brand surveys, you can improve your service by many folds. Consequently leading to a better customer base.

Social media listing is another inbound marketing strategy to delight your customers. Your customers can use your social media handles to provide reviews and ask questions that concern them.

To conclude, the sole purpose of delighting inbound marketing is to make your customers happy and satisfied with your services. 

Advantages of Inbound Marketing

There are innumerable benefits of inbound marketing. Let us have a quick look at some of these critical benefits –

• Inbound marketing is highly cost-effective.
• This approach of marketing your brands lasts longer than any other method because it is less invasive.
• Inbound marketing enables the prospective customers to reach the brand themselves. Thus, making it significantly more accessible for the customers to communicate with the brand.
• It helps the brand establish its proficiency better than its peers, thus allowing it to do better.
• Effectively converts visitors into leads and further leads into loyal customers.
• Inbound marketing is high;y effective and trustworthy. It provides users with the right content at the right time.
• Increase the traffic on your brand’s website, thus eventually increasing your customer base.

So these were some of the top advantages of implementing inbound marketing to advertise your brand in the market effectively and productively. Have an interesting read about Digital Marketing here.

What is Content Marketing?

The term “content marketing” coined around 2001 was used to describe the process of using the content developed by the brands to market themselves to their customers. These brands relied on magazines and books to introduce themselves to the audience. This was somewhat different from advertising using traditional methods such as print media, billboards, and commercials.

Content marketing generally deals with developing and creating content that the users of a particular product demographic or location will find helpful. Furthermore, it also deals with the content creation for the customers related to a specific field or niche. Content marketing has been used long before inbound marketing. It has always been there in the market. Furthermore, the content doesn’t always need to have a strong call for action or a sales pitch. It can be anything related to that brand niche. But it can always help the business to form a slow but intense relationship with its prospective customers. 

As the digital world is snowballing and businesses are opting for less invasive and interrupting marketing measures, content marketing holds an extraordinary place in this area. You can always ditch a monotonous sales tone and tune in to a more fun and engaging way of connecting to your customers using this marketing strategy.

To sum up, content marketing is a less invasive way of marketing your brand. It includes ditching the sales tone in your content and providing your customers with some relevant information about the subject. However, it is a slow method that will slowly but surely help you build your brand’s reputation and eventually increase your customer base.

Advantages of Content Marketing

Similar to inbound marketing, there are many benefits of using content marketing to market your brand. Let us dig in further to know some of the critical advantages of using content marketing and how it helps brands do better in the market. 

• Build brand reputation and awareness. Content marketing helps you to build a loyal customer base.
• It is a highly cost-effective way of successfully marketing your brand.
• Content marketing helps you to increase your website traffic, thus helping you to reach a wider audience.
• It assists you in reaching an audience who may avoid your ads. The more people will depend on your content, the more they will buy from you. 
• Content marketing supports other forms of marketing strategies such as social media marketing and public relations. 

Wrapping up – Is one of them better than the other?

Now to answer the question: Is one of them better than the other? Well, the truth is they both are equally beneficial in their ways. Brands should use both inbound marketing and content marketing for marketing their brand effectively. If used correctly and thoughtfully, they can help any business to bring up some fantastic results. 

Inbound marketing is essential because it helps you to personify your digital presence. The content you use, the digital tools you engage with to bring about remarkable changes on your website enables you to make an excellent website.

On the other hand, Content marketing helps you develop a solid and loyal relationship with your customers. It will make your website more resourceful and valuable for your prospective customers. It will help your site visitors to build that trust in your brand. 

Thus to conclude, none of them is better than the other. They both should be implemented simultaneously to attract more customers and build your brand.

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