Content marketing, inbound marketing and digital marketing: These three phrases are often used interchangeably, but they don’t refer to the same thing. This can create confusion when implementing your brand’s marketing plan.
These strategies do share some things in common. They’re all designed to grab user attention, build your brand, increase traffic, attract qualified leads and ultimately convert casual users into paying customers. However, they are individual concepts, each with its own sets of advantages and drawbacks. Here’s how they work together to cover all your online marketing basics.
Content marketing: It’s all about the content
Content marketing is the strategic use of valuable information, conveyed in text, graphics, video, audio or a combination of these, designed to build brand awareness and attract a prequalified audience of users who are interested in your products and services. Longer text-based content tends to rank well in organic search results but shorter, snack-sized content also works well.
Examples of content marketing include:
Advantages of content marketing
Drawbacks of content marketing
Digital marketing: A variety of channels
Digital marketing refers to tactics of promotional marketing and advertising that use purely digital channels. In some contexts, certain aspects of content marketing also qualify as digital marketing. For example, performing SEO on a written blog post or creating an explainer video could be categorized as either content marketing or digital marketing, or both.
Examples of digital marketing include:
Advantages of digital marketing
Drawbacks of digital marketing
Inbound marketing: Based on user opt-in
Inbound marketing comprises those methods and tactics that require the prospect’s permission before landing in their sphere of awareness. As a phrase, it’s used to distinguish permission-based marketing techniques from more advertising efforts.
Outbound marketing demands attention and is intrusive. Think of brochures hung from your doorknob or tucked under your windshield wipers, for example, or billboards that hug the side of the highway as you drive by. The user didn’t ask for any of those experiences. Rather, the brand pushed the message out to a wide audience.
By contrast, inbound marketing is inviting and nonintrusive. It puts the user in control by opting in to receive content from your brand.
Advantages of inbound marketing
Drawbacks of inbound marketing
What’s the right choice for your brand?
The short answer is that most brands can benefit from all three strategies, plus a few outbound methods — they’re not necessarily a bad thing, and they definitely can be effective.
Take radio for example. Loud, catchy radio ads may feel at first like an intrusive bit of outbound marketing. But, as many people who enjoy radio will tell you, they know they’re getting the music, sports, news, or other programming for free. Ads are just an accepted part of the experience, and almost become a form of inbound marketing. That’s because people give their permission to receive the ads just by listening.
Overall, when properly implemented, the combination of digital marketing with content marketing tactics is greater than the sum of those valuable parts. When you frame that approach with an inbound strategy, you appeal to a varied assortment of user personas. Round out that plan with a few targeted outbound techniques, and you’ll make the biggest, deepest impact possible on your prospects.
Putting it all together
Now that we have a fuller understanding of how these three strategies differ, as well as what they share in common, we can begin to sketch out how they work together in support of a single brand.
As an example, let’s use a hypothetical B2C company that sells skincare to women with sensitive skin. The company’s goals include raising brand awareness and ultimately increasing sales of its core three-product starter kit. To accomplish these goals, the company has embraced an inbound strategy, including both content marketing and other forms of paid and organic digital marketing. It’s created a basic marketing funnel that includes a free two-week trial of its products.
How can our hypothetical business put all the pieces together in a cogent, practical way that moves it closer to its goals?
This sequence helps fill the marketing funnel and move prospects along the path towards a purchase. It uses an inbound methodology and incorporates content marketing that’s then promoted and built upon by digital marketing strategies. While it’s a simplified path, you can borrow it as a template. Build on it by expanding the tactics to reach your brand’s specific audience.
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