Reaching an audience through inbound content marketing is about targeted content rather than disruptive business promotions. It can be the strategy that makes you stand out in a crowded marketplace and delivers the most relevant content across various channels and stages in the sales funnel.

When talking about inbound content marketing, you’ll often hear the term inbound marketing mentioned. Inbound marketing refers to the overall grouping of activities – inbound content marketing, or content marketing as it is sometimes called, is a technique of this. This blog will be your new guide on how to spice up your content marketing strategy through inbound content.

What is inbound content marketing?

Inbound content marketing is a way of reaching your target audience through valuable content. Essentially, it attracts customers with strategic content and interactions that are helpful to them. Great content makes it easy for customers to find you through online searches or on social media. Customers come to you, rather than you continuously reaching out to them.

Examples of inbound content marketing:

Inbound content marketing can help to increase brand awareness and engagement and can work wonders when used in your lead generation strategy. To achieve your content goals, there are many inbound marketing tactics you can use

1. Social media campaigns

Social media marketing is an excellent way to create a regular conversation with your audience. When establishing yourself as an answer to your audience’s needs, social media marketing is a great way to ensure you have an open and interesting conversation that engages your customers.

2. Topical blogs

Blogs allow you to speak about many different topics and ideas. Marketing Insider Group writes that your content should follow an 80-20 rule. Only 20% of what you write should be about your product or service, and the other 80% is for engaging with your audience on other topics.

See how IR Magazine creates engaging digital documents such as blog posts, digital magazines, and research reports, using Turtl.

Click to read IR Magazine + Turtl | Case Study

3. Webinars

Webinars enable you to build topic authority, engage your audience, enhance your credibility, and develop connections – internationally.

4. Videos

Videos are an excellent way to reach customers. Product tutorials can be posted on YouTube customer testimonials are easily shared across social media platforms, and short-form videos like TikToks can be used to promote your brand.

5. Retargeting and remarketing 

Another proven way to generate inbound leads is through retargeting and remarketing. These terms are often used interchangeably, but there are important differences between them.

Most people think of remarketing as an email-driven tactic. Remarketing often means being sent an email reminder about an item you’ve left in a trolley without checking out or offering a discount on a product or service you browsed.

By contrast, retargeting always involves pay-per-click advertising based on user behavior. When someone has interacted with your website content and has shown an obvious interest in your product, you can serve them retargeted adverts. You will have noticed this happens when browsing, or using social media and large consumer websites.

Retargeting and remarketing are based on previous user behavior and intend to speed up conversion. Understanding your analytics is key for retargeting and remarketing. See how LeadFabric uses analytics to improve engagement.

Click to read Telenet + LeadFabric + Turtl | Case Study

All of the inbound content marketing tactics we’ve spoken about have followed one simple rule:

Interact, don’t disrupt.

Inbound content marketing can almost be seen as a synonym for conversation. Build a relationship with your audience by responding to their needs and answering their questions.

Learn how to build your B2B content strategy from your value proposition
Find out more about digital content creation
See why interactive content is such a big deal

Inbound vs outbound content marketing

An inbound marketing strategy allows your audience to choose you, which makes selling to them a lot easier.

Outbound marketing is the more traditional method. It is the cold calling, direct mail, cold email marketing, and pop-up ads style of marketing – essentially marketing that frustrates us all. This is because it’s the marketing that interrupts us: when we aren’t looking for help, we don’t want it. Think about being in a supermarket, it can be frustrating to have a shop assistant ask if you need something when you are happily going about your business. On the other hand, when you need something, you know who to go and ask.

This is the difference between outbound and inbound marketing strategies. As David Meerman Scott says:

He sums up the value of inbound content marketing perfectly. Inbound marketing is about branding yourself, and creating engaging content so that your audience knows you’re around, but feels in control and comfortable. The marketing world has shifted from pushing to patience. If you have the right kind of digital content in your marketing campaigns, then inbound lead generation becomes a breeze.

This is not to say that outbound marketing doesn’t have its uses. But it is your inbound content strategy that will develop a global audience you can target with specific messages.

Find out everything you need to know about B2B content marketing
Try these four B2B content marketing engagement methods
Read 6 steps to oversee your B2B content marketing strategy