Content Marketing. Inbound Marketing. Are These Terms Synonymous?

OK, so I am going to admit something that I may not normally admit. Why? I need your help. You see, I’m a bit confused. It started the other day when a colleague asked me, “What is the difference between content marketing and inbound marketing?” After a moment or two of pause, I simply said, great question, let me get back to you.

It was the first time that I really had considered the question and these two terms together. I hear them and see them used all the time. We even just hosted our Twitter #B2Bbookclub on Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) with Dharmesh Shah. But I still felt unsure how to respond appropriately to the question. So I set out to find some data to clarify my understanding.

The first place I turned was Wikipedia. Here are the definitions as found on Wikipedia:

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context. One pair of definitions are:

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy their way in” (via paid advertisements). Next best action marketing can also be applied.

Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and Godin’s term interruption marketing.

Both definitions specifically state that content marketing and inbound marketing are “in contrast” to traditional or outbound marketing methods. So on the surface when I looked at these two definitions, I was learning toward an answer of yes, they are synonyms.

Then I read. And read some more. A couple of articles that were most intriging were The Inbound Marketing / Marketing Content Management Crowd – A Fourth Camp? by Adam Needles and What Is Inbound Marketing? by Clay Schossow. But then I found another article that was really helpful in solidifying my conclusion. It was written in Nov 2008 by Rick Burnes of Hubspot titled, Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web. Again it mentions the contrast to traditional marketing, but a core differentiator appeared in the form of a chart.

As you can see illustrated in the chart, inbound marketing has three components. As Burnes states in the article, “The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components: content, seo, and social media.” While all along I have thought about SEO and social media with content, I had not put the three together in this way to holistically define inbound marketing.

That said, I am concluding that content marketing and inbound marketing are NOT synonyms. What do you think?

Remember, I started this article by telling you I need your help, are they synonymous? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments.