For the first time in a long time, I was asked what the difference is between inbound marketing and content marketing. My answer wasn’t as up-to-date as it could have been, so I did a little digging.
Gather round friends, it’s been a hot minute since we’ve talked about inbound marketing.
The state of inbound marketing
Truth be told, before I answered my colleague’s question, and started this article, I had to dig to understand the current state of inbound marketing. If I’m completely honest, I hadn’t heard much about it from my clients, which tend to be larger, more global organizations. It wasn’t on my radar.
A quick review of Google Trends seems to align with my experience. It shows the comparison of interest between the terms of inbound marketing (blue line) and content marketing (red line).
@GoogleTrends indicate less interest in #InboundMarketing and greater interest in #ContentMarketing over the decade via @Robert_Rose @CMIContent.
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Ten years ago, both terms were on comparable interest levels. Since then, the term content marketing has seen growing interest; inbound marketing has remained relatively static. Our 2022 research supports this: Content marketing has become more prioritized in an end-of-the-pandemic world.
A perceived difference between the two practices certainly appears from this data. But what is it?
Well, for what it’s worth, my take involves HubSpot’s concerted evolution (and perhaps some de-emphasis) of the term as it expanded its product suite. Put simply, as HubSpot launched everything from advertising campaign management, Salesforce automation, help desk applications, content management, and customer service, HubSpot no longer was just a tool to help with top-of-the-funnel lead generation. It is a full-on CRM suite, competing with many other enterprise marketing clouds. It only makes sense that their definition of inbound would evolve and be broader.
Inbound marketing has evolved from its original description in the seminal 2009 book of the same name by HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shaw. They observed traditional outbound marketing and sales being replaced by a buyer’s search online. Pulling those buyers into a website content “hub” was the key.
As was stated in the book, inbound marketing was “about getting found online, through search engines and on sites like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter …”
Now, in 2021, HubSpot has updated its definition:
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.
@HubSpot has expanded its definition of #InboundMarketing to something that sounds a whole lot like #ContentMarketing, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent.
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Well, that sounds a whole lot like CMI’s definition of content marketing.
But does it? Is there a difference?
The state of content marketing
No doubt, content marketing as a practice has evolved over the last decade as well.
To this day, we still define content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
But, again, that sounds almost exactly like how HubSpot now defines inbound, which is quite honestly even a bit more succinct.
We have always taught that content marketing was, in many ways, about a marketing practice within products and services companies operating more like a media company. And like a media company, we’ve asserted that building a subscribed, addressable audience is different than assembling a marketing database. While that objective wasn’t in our original definition – it has certainly evolved to be a core objective and differentiator for the practice.
As early as 2011, when Joe and I published Managing Content Marketing, we said that the “job of marketing is no longer to create customers, it is to create passionate subscribers to our brand.” In hindsight, I regret the hyperbole there – and the subtle diss of Peter Drucker. If I were to rewrite that sentence today, I’d say, “The job of marketing is to create customers and create passionate subscribers to our brand.”
In that sentence, we can see the trend of audience-building evolving and focusing on the practice of content marketing. Simultaneously, it also separates content marketing from the current incarnation of inbound marketing.
Put simply: The job of marketing in today’s more expansive, multi-channel, digitally transformed world is to create customers AND create audiences that subscribe to your brand. Both can create wealth for the business.
Difference in the content and its purpose
Further down in HubSpot’s methodology for inbound marketing, they cite examples of the inbound “flywheel” – attracting strangers, engaging prospects, and delighting customers and promoters. They say:
To reach your audience, start by creating and publishing content such as blog articles, content offers, and social media – that provide value. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.
They say the inbound marketer’s goal is to: “attract new prospects to your company, engage with them at scale, and delight them individually.”
That’s perfectly clear to me. The purpose of inbound has become to facilitate optimized marketing and sales – and, as Drucker said, create a customer.
In other words, as an inbound marketer, you deliver content to help a buyer buy something. It is content that speaks to your brand, your product, your service, and continually engenders trust in those things so that you acquire, keep, or grow customers.
Content marketing is, indeed, different. It’s not better than. It’s not worse than. It’s complementary to inbound marketing. As we’ve said many, many times, content marketing is a multiplier to traditional marketing and advertising. Content marketing:
- Led Frontline Software to exceed its goal and helped the marketing team generate 32% of the company’s new business.
- Helped AARP create loyalty with a differentiating and valuable experience through the nation’s largest consumer magazine.
- Aided com acquisition of new job seekers, maintaining their viability as a hot place for businesses to buy access to those job seekers.
It’s all just marketing
My favorite marketing definition is from Philip Kotler who said the practice is “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.”
That’s the perfect definition. It fits both inbound and content as a qualifier.
If I were to put my answer on a really, really long bumper sticker or in tiny print on a T-shirt, here’s what it would be:
Inbound is a modernized approach to marketing designed to use content across the buyer’s journey to transform prospects into loyal customers.
Content marketing is an approach to marketing designed to use content across the customer’s journey to transform engaged, subscribed audiences into a differentiating business asset.
They work side by side, hand in glove, together as part of the integrated marketing mix. They simply differ in the kind of content that is created, and how that content (and its impact on audiences) creates wealth for the business.
Side note: I purposely used “customer” over “audience” in this definition. Customers are both buyers of our products and services and audiences who engage with brands, recommend them, etc. I explain it more in this article.
For years, both practitioners of inbound marketing and content marketing have been guessing that at some point the terms may not matter. Conventional wisdom is that both practices would just be considered “good marketing.”
It may be that HubSpot’s evolution of inbound marketing into a broader practice has been successful; so successful in fact that it’s simply become the modern methodology for what we old-timers used to call “direct marketing.”
I will argue, however, that content marketing remains a still evolving practice in marketing departments everywhere. As we see media operations become embedded into marketing departments, monetizing audiences in ways beyond simply “creating a customer” is still a new muscle.
Owned media audiences are no doubt becoming a strategic move for organizations. We see:
- Salesforce acquire CMO Club.
- JP Morgan Chase acquire restaurant discover platform The Infatuation and college financial planning platform Frank.
- Stripe acquire Indie Hackers, a knowledge-sharing community for entrepreneurs.
- HubSpot purchases The Hustle newsletter to give them “more ways to offer its community of scaling companies valuable content.”
We see organic builds such as:
- Salesforce’s launch of a streaming service to rival Netflix
- Athleta’s launch a women’s wellness platform
- Old Spice and Neutrogena’s launch of in-house content studios
A movement is afoot that goes beyond marketing strategy simply being a way to facilitate a buying journey.
In 2021, marketing is expansive, ever-more important. Both inbound marketing and content marketing are incredibly important. Or, as my friend Joe, wrote 10 years ago:
(T)here is no black and white in marketing; it’s all gray. There are no silver bullets. Marketing objectives sometimes need to be solved with a combination of efforts, not by putting all your eggs in one basket.
The good news is, we can learn from both.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
