The Importance of Inbound and Content Marketing

What is Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that attempts to attract customers by creating valuable content and experiences which are tailored to them. Essentially, the goal of inbound marketing is to build lasting and meaningful relationships with consumers and customers through content.

What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing strategies?

Inbound marketing is all about bringing consumers into your brand and building lasting relationships with them. Outbound marketing on the other hand, is the more straight forward and traditional way of bringing consumers into your brand, such as obvious advertising

In other words, inbound marketing draws customers in, outbound marketing promotes your product or service out.

Why should you use inbound marketing strategies

There are numerous benefits to adapting an inbound marketing strategy for your business. Here are some of the most important and common ones:

• Establishes brand credibility
• Fosters a deeper connection with your audience than traditional advertising would
• Attracts the right audience to your brand
• Builds trust and credibility
• Very cost effective, as most of the content put out is created by yourself
• Increases brand awareness

All these benefits sound great, however before you can enjoy them, you first need to put out the correct styles of content for your brand.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more potential customers to your business.

You might think this sounds very similar to the goals of inbound marketing, and that is because the two are very tightly related!

How inbound and content marketing tie in together

The best way to draw customers in through inbound marketing, is by creating relevant and engaging content for your audience. Inbound marketing is all about being creative to serve the needs of your audience, and content is a great way of approaching this.

Content is a digital marketing tool, inbound strategies is what you are trying to accomplish.

Some of the more popular inbound marketing types are:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Social media
• E-books
• Infographics

Building these forms of content up will allow your business to generate leads and draw customers in organically.

Great example of inbound and content marketing

One of the best known photography blogs is Behind the shutter. Behind the shutter is a free education blog which draws customers in by giving them access to hundreds of free informational style blogs.

Within these blogs, there is every type of content that photography enthusiasts would love to search for. The have a clear and defined audience which their inbound marketing strategies are attempting to attract, through the use of content blogs.