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).
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:
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.
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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 acquires CMO Club.
JP Morgan Chase acquires the restaurant discover platform The Infatuation and college financial planning platform Frank.
Stripe acquires 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:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
