The Similarities Between Content and Inbound Marketing

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content that draws in and maintains a targeted audience and drives profitable customer actions. The goal is to reach your target market and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty. There are many different types of content marketing like online, social media, infographic, blog, podcast, video, or paid ad content marketing. By using these different types of content you can target your audience in different ways to help engage them the most.

Benefits Of Content Marketing:

• Educates your leads about the products and services you offer
• Boosts conversions
• Builds relationships with your customers which can increase their loyalty
• Shows how your products and services can solve the customer's problems
• Helps create a community around your brand

What Does Effective Content Marketing Look Like?

1. It will provide value beyond what your product or service offers. It should show the values of your company and provide customers with solutions to their current problems.
2. It should target the viewer's specific buyers stage. The content should target whether they are in the awareness stage where they are still looking into their issue, the consideration stage where they are looking for solutions, or the decision stage where they pick the product or service. You should be targeting and creating your content for each of those stages.
3. The content has a constant voice and image that matches the brand. No matter what type of content you are making the image and voice of it should match across all platforms.
4. The content is timely and engaging. The content should match what is happening in the world and the target market’s life. If you are selling ski gear you should be producing content that is put out in the late fall or early winter.

One example of well-done content marketing is REI. They don't have models or stock photos in their content and instead use members and their real stories. They produce many types of content and they make sure it works together to tell many different stories. This is a great way to get brand awareness and a relationship with the customers and the business. They show stories like a film about Brothers of Climbing to show how the organization helps increase diversity in the outdoors. REI tells stories of people and groups and how they help people and the outdoors and it creates awareness of REI in the process. REI shows how content can drive more than interest and engagement – it can drive action.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a way of creating and delivering content that focuses on bringing users to your website. Customers are looking for a product/ service that fulfills a need or solves a problem. This means that your interactive content should explain how your product/ service fulfills that need, answers key questions about that industry, or solves their problem. Your content should show how you are different from the competition and should target a specific customer. The content that a customer gets throughout their buyer's journey should be thoughtful but should change as they go through the process of buying. This is an all-encompassing strategy that is across multiple channels.

Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Benefits to help your company determine if this is right for you:

• Non-invasive: potential customers can use and view your content on their own time
• Educational Content: It is designed for each step of the buyer's funnel
• Quantifiable: You can connect each part of your strategy to a metric that gets reviewed over time

Since your website and content is updated all the time inbound marketing continues generating leads over time.

Difficulties Of Inbound Marketing

Challenges to help your company determine if this is not right for you:

• Requires continuous maintenance: Need to adapt and evolve to ensure the customers are getting content that targets their wants and needs
• Takes a good amount of time and effort: Coming up with new content and testing it to make sure it draws in the customers is a time-consuming process
• Demands a holistic strategy: You need to have tools that help with integration across cross-channel campaigns.

In Conclusion

These two types of marketing are very similar and using them together is a good way to improve your business. If you are resting good content then it should be driving users to your website and services. They both target your users in a way that is specific to their needs and desires. By using both inbound and content marketing you can solve customers' problems and create a relationship with them and your business.