Inbound Marketing is still a relatively new and quickly trending marketing strategy that was coined a few years ago by HubSpot. While it has fast become a high priority for companies looking to increase their awareness, traffic, and revenues via the Web, Inbound Marketing is often confused with search engine optimization.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Wikipedia defines Inbound Marketing as:
Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that essentially focuses on getting found by customers. Marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).
In short, Inbound Marketing is a way to ”get found online” by publishing information on the web and customers finding your published content. This allows your company, website and brand to earn credibility as the customer finds your content (provided they also find value in that content), making them more likely to trust your information, buy your products, recommend you to peers, etc. Put another way… Inbound Marketing = Getting Found by Customers
There is a bit of a Field of Dreams “if you build it, they will come” assumption with
inbound marketing. Just because you are publishing articles, white papers and blog posts does not mean customers will ever find your content. Why? Because publishing content, even great content, does not mean that search engines will find you, rank you high enough to drive meaningful traffic or that websites will link to you and promote your content. To do all that, you need search engine optimization (SEO).
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEOMoz, a hugely popular search engine optimization company and online community, define SEO as the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.
In short, SEO is a marketing strategy that is the complex process of creating, publishing, promoting and optimizing your web site to maximize your ability to “get found” by search engines that will potentially drive traffic and customers to your site. Put another way… SEO = Getting Found by Search Engines
Within the internet marketing and SEO communities, Inbound Marketing is simply thought of as accessibility and content creation, along with the hundreds of other factors taken into account by SEO rankings.
SEO + Inbound Marketing = Getting Found (by search engines AND customers)
SEO not only encompasses publishing content to get found by customers, but the underlying process that inbound marketing assumes – making sure that your content can be found by search engines so that it can in turn be found by customers.
As you contemplate your Inbound Marketing strategy, take into account this classic quote: “great content is no substitute for great marketing.” A strong advertising, promotional, social media, inbound selling and/or SEO campaign has the ability to attract far more attention than the content may “deserve”. Seemingly unfair, it’s a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable – just look at the world of politics.
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May 18, 2010 at 11:33 am
Inbound Marketing and SEO: If You Build It, Will They Come … ‹ Hilium
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May 18, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Eric Goldman
This is a really good article which does a great job of explaining the difference between Inbound Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. As you stated up front, two topics which many people confuse with each other.
It may help readers to think of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation, what we call Inbound Marketing Automation, as a Process and not merely a suite of tools and techniques for using them. Apart from making the whole more than the sum of its parts, Processes are subject to the Continuous Process Improvements mantra of: Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat and by using this approach, you really do get better and better over time. When trying to come to grips with the Process of Inbound Marketing Automation (IMA), it helps to think of the process as consisting of 4 sub-processes:
1) Attract more visitors to the website through Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Pay Per Click advertising.
2) Engage those visitors’ attention with industry leading content (website copy, white papers, videos, podcasts). Match the content to the prospect’s buying cycle to ensure you can nurture them around the cycle (see below).
3) Qualify these visitors by grading their profiles and using their digital footprints to rack up a score and hence “know” their quality. And then, nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects with multi-touch drip email campaigns. emails which send just the “right” piece of information to the prospect to help move him or her to the next stage of their buying cycle.
4) Automatically feed these hot sales ready prospects directly into your CRM and automatically notify the assigned sales rep (based on product or territory or whatever…).
Our website contains a Resource Library of white papers, tools, videos and an extensive glossary, all covering Inbound Marketing Automation in more detail.
May 19, 2010 at 5:39 am
RM - InBoundmarketingpr
This is a great article which does two things.. Explains inbound marketing but it also shows that you must do both in conjunction in order to attract your targeted audience..
You must also market! Once you write that great blog or have that live website, you must tell people where you are at.. SEO, inbound links and marketing, all done at the same time, is a very powerful tool to getting found.
Thanks for the article! Great job!
May 19, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Smith
You’re allowed a collection of books from one author only for the rest of your life and no access to any others. Which author do you choose?
May 19, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Inbound Marketing and SEO: If You Build It, Will They Come … « Social Computing Technology
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May 20, 2010 at 10:25 am
Richard Zwicky
Interesting article, thanks!
You are correct in that SEO is a component of a holistic Inbound Marketing Strategy. SEO itself is often a term mis-applied to just being about customer acquisition. In reality, it involves User Experience, conversion optimization, branding, messaging, and off course on-page and off-page optimization,
Inbound Marketing includes all the various channels of SEO, PPC, Links, etc…, and also the Social Marketing strategies of getting your message out where customers are looking, not always where you expect them to find you. Inbound marketing means communicating with the individual, not out to the masses.
Richard
May 20, 2010 at 1:28 pm
insideviewblog
@Eric – Little confused by the efficiency in your #3. Qualifying through digital footprints to “know” their quality and nurture through email campaigns seems a little too complicated. Through the use of registration forms, lead applications, click2call and a number of other conversion methods, you can just as easily get your visitors into your CRM already as hot leads.
@RM – Agreed, thanks for the kind words.
@Richard – I agree that SEO gets mis-applied as just customer acquisition, but User Experience and Branding are two aspects, that while related, should be considered separate from the definition of SEO. User Experience is more of function of the creative department, although highly related to information architecture and conversion optimization, it isn’t a job of an SEO.
May 24, 2010 at 6:30 am
5 Myths About Online Marketing Success « Sales Intelligence Blog by InsideView
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August 4, 2010 at 12:39 pm
20 SEO Terms Every Good Inbound Marketer Should Know « Sales Intelligence Blog by InsideView
[...] SEO + Inbound Marketing = Getting Found (by search engines AND customers) [...]
March 9, 2011 at 1:28 am
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With Internet connections becoming as common as phone lines, today almost every business, whether big or small, needs an online presence. The increase in demand for a share in online marketing has resulted in search engine optimization (SEO) becoming the most preferred method for businesses to promote their products or services. A recently conducted research revealed that about 95% of consumers, prior to rushing to local high street stores, will go online first to learn more about a product or service they may need. This truly staggering percentage is quite an eloquent evidence of the importance of an enhanced web visibility for any business out there, whether online or offline.
April 17, 2011 at 10:02 pm
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July 30, 2011 at 10:29 am
Jason
SEO really is the #1 thing you need for driving sales. There is a reason it’s has the highest ROI for pretty much every company out there. Unfortunately the SEO industry is filled with bad apples, so if you are going to get a quote, it’s best to get it from places like http://seoagencies.com that prescreen the companies for you.