To thrive your business online, you need to work on the strategies that give the best results to your business, content marketing and inbound are two of the prominent ones. Without understanding both, you can’t generate leads and growth of your business so let’s find out what are both and what’s the key difference in both of them.

What’s Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on growing your reach across the digital channels. It means creating content for the purpose of marketing. It’s also regarded as the subset of inbound marketing which is used to fuel your website’s organic growth through SEO-friendly articles, social media posts, infographics, or any write-up which helps to market your business.

In general, content marketing is the way of growing your brand through thought-provoking, captivating stories. The purpose of the content is to attract users’ attention through captions, memes, blogs, tutorials, and even videos.

To sum it up, without content marketing it’s impossible to grow your online business because either you write blogs on LinkedIn, create stories on Instagram or share blogs on Facebook, your marketing will always be incomplete without content. So, for your online business, you can need content writing services anytime to fuel traffic to your site.

Then, What’s Inbound Marketing?

Well, it can happen that you might be doing inbound marketing without getting familiar with the term because Inbound marketing starts with your website. The core of inbound marketing is to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. It provides the framework to do everything in your business from generating content strategies to generating leads, maintaining relationships with your customers and using SEO strategies for marketing and sales alignment.

According to Hubspot, the Inbound marketing work on three principles; attract, engage and delight.

Attract: The first stage is attracting which means connecting with the right audience by giving valuable messages to the people which gives them the chance to think for you. Once you attract the right audience, the second step is to engage them.

Engage: In this step, you give insights and solutions to your audience which let them engage with your brand. By aligning your product to the people’s pain and goals, you can grow your business better.

Delight: After engaging your audience, you provide them with support to find success with your product.

For example, if you own a digital library, you need to connect with readers first who are looking to grow with the power of books. In the second phase, you’ll need to engage them by recommending them books that better connect with their goals. And in the last stage, you need to keep empowering them whenever they need any resource or recommendation.

That’s the idea of inbound marketing! With inbound marketing, your strategies revolve around these three principles. It enhances the traditional sales funnel through a flywheel model, which connects your audience with the solution and raises your business growth.

Now, What’s the Difference?

After learning inbound and content marketing, we shouldn’t say Content vs Inbound but rather ‘Content and Inbound Marketing’ because they both go together. Your inbound marketing needs content to reach the audience, without the content how will you let people know about your business? So they both matter in different ways!

Although the content vs inbound has been a hot topic for us, they both are relevant and should be aligned together to reach your business goals. For example, if you take content as a part of the inbound, you will target people according to the inbound strategies using the power of content. But if you take both separately, your growth strategies will be divided into two parts and you also won’t be knowing where to lead.

Need more help to understand content vs inbound? Drop your queries in the comments and I’ll be happy to help you out.