As a marketer or business owner, you're tasked with understanding a variety of marketing approaches and techniques and determining which can and will apply in your business.
Since the late 2000's, two compelling schools of thought have gained significant attention among marketing circles, in large part due to their key focus of using educational and informative content to attract and retain customer eyeballs as opposed to the interruptive advertising techniques that have been the mainstay for decades.
My intention with this post is to help you get more familiar with the definition of each approach while comparing the origins of the terms.
Both Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing have one key thing in common - each approach is the brainchild of a high-growth, start-up company.
While each approach is aligned with the above philosophy of attracting and retaining attention from customers and converting it into buying actions, it's important to understand the origins and differences between the two.
Each of these companies recognized that in order to successfully compete, they would need to drive the creation of new segments within the marketing industry.
By defining the new approach and lighting the path for marketers through education, inspiration and interaction, each company could also drive sales of their various products and services.
The term Inbound Marketing can trace it's origins to roughly align with HubSpot's founding at MIT in 2006.
Founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan needed a way to describe the antithesis of outbound advertisements, cold calls and direct mail.
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By HubSpot's definition, "inbound" refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention. This inbound method earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.
As typical of companies working to carve out an industry segment, HubSpot released their State of Inbound Report - a series of annual reports that would track the inbound movement as it grew, advanced and expanded into global reach.
Download the Complete Collection of State of Inbound Annual Reports
HubSpot's VP of Content, Joe Chernov, recently published a post that cites results from the 2014-2015 Annual State of Inbound survey that suggest that many marketers view content marketing as a subset of inbound marketing. While the recent data is compelling, it's hardly conclusive.
The State of Inbound reports on approximately 3500 sales and marketing professionals. The data set relies heavily on a high concentration of respondents also being current HubSpot customers. These particular sales and marketing individuals are well-versed the full set of terms, definitions and other propaganda surrounding HubSpot's positioning around the inbound methodology.
It's fair to question whether the interpretation of the survey data could be replicated in a different survey sample that contained fewer current HubSpot customers.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, has been the driving evangelist behind the global movement towards re-invigorating this approach to marketing.
CMI defines content marketing as the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
In similar fashion to HubSpot and the inbound approach, CMI produces an annual report entitled The State of Content Marketing, which reports on budgets, trends, attitudes and expansion of content as a marketing strategy among enterprise companies.
CMI was founded in 2007 and operates in similar fashion to a trade association, regularly distributing online and offline content that is designed to educate and connect marketers who buy into the broader philosophy. CMI also produces multiple educational events each year that include globally-held executive retreats as well as their flagship conference, Content Marketing World.
More recently, CMI has produced and released the industry's first feature-length documentary entitled The Story of Content: Rise of the New Marketing.
From spending the last few years teaching these two approaches to College of Business students at Ohio University, I have had to do my own research and comparison as to all the differences and similarities between content and inbound marketing.
This short list represents some top-line observations that I am continuing to research. Feel free to bookmark it or debate it with me or internally as you as you explore on your own.
In the end, both approaches are relevant and well worth the investment, as long as the approach is a good fit with your organization.
It's a big decision when choosing on which side of the camp you will place your focus. In the end, each side cannot exist without the other.
I encourage you to start by subscribing to the top news and content sources for each camp. Read both CMI's blog as well as HubSpot's bogs for daily updates and education on each approach.
Get familiar. Get inspired. And feel free to reach out to me if you want to chat about either approach or leave your question in the comments below.