Inbound or Content Marketing? Call it anything but optional for SMB’s.

For more and more organizations, shifting consumer behavior has accelerated their awareness and interest in both Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing.

Ready or not, old-school marketing becomes irrelevant.

Because the internet has transformed the way consumers find solutions and interact with brands, buyers today have become much, much better at ignoring the messages they don’t want to hear and researching what they do want to learn about on their own.

The result has rendered many forms of traditional marketing a lot less effective than they used to be—think cold calling, Yellow Page ads, print ads in magazines or newspapers, direct mail, radio ads, etc. What’s changed here is the explosion of digitally constructed content and its universal accessibility and delivery online.

Inbound and Content Marketing face off | TeamworksCom

Time to attract. Not repel.

At their core, Inbound and Content Marketing is all about attraction. That means instead of pushing an unwanted, interruptive message at your prospects, you pull the people you want to reach towards you. This enhances the opportunity to foster a relationship that will influence and win new customers.

An Inbound or Content Marketing strategy includes content creation and distribution through techniques that integrate blogging, social media, and email marketing in order to generate, nurture, and close leads.

How a stranger can move through a buying journey from a suspect to an advocate of your solution or brand is simplified in the graphic below.

Definitive distinctions? Or irrelevant semantics?

Leading inbound and marketing automation software provider HubSpot defines Inbound marketing as the process of aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests. When this happens, you naturally attract online traffic that can then be converted, closed, and enhanced over time.

The Content Marketing Institute’s founder, Joe Pulizzi, defines Content marketing as a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience. All with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

While the distinctions between Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing may be narrow, there are plenty of statistics to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of both. In fact, the data supports why more and more companies and brands are adopting these methodologies to attract, convert and sustain relationships with new and existing customers.

A convincing story in numbers.

Below are a dozen recent statistics that suggest small and medium-sized businesses | SMB’s interested in realizing a lot more value from their website and online investments should seriously consider these marketing methods.

Emerging moves to mainstream.

According to a recent Content Marketing Institute | CMI survey of B2B small businesses, over 60 percent plan to increase their content marketing budget. That’s up 57% from the prior year.

The takeaway is that these once-emerging marketing methods are now mainstream. Although small B2B businesses disclose their top challenges as having enough time to create content and producing quality content that engages, it’s not an overreach to claim that Content Marketing is now the price of entry for any business that wants to market online.

Time to take your brand to the next level?

Are you ready to get serious about improving your online marketing? Talk some experts that are helping other leading organizations succeed with Content Marketing is the best place to start. We’re ready when you are.

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