What’s The Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?

Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing

Just do it.’ ‘Connecting people.’ ‘Because you’re worth it.’

These brands have succeeded in their marketing efforts if their name was the first thing that came to your mind when you read these taglines. From here you can very well guess the power of the giant that is “marketing”. Brands across the globe have to put in the effort and in many cases go the extra mile by hiring marketing agencies. Because if you fail to market your product/brand, you might as well get ready to leave the market. There are numerous ways to market your products. From offering COX bundle deals to customers to giveaways, all come under the umbrella of marketing. However, there are certain terms like digital marketing and inbound marketing that people tend to confuse with each other. Let us see the ways in which the two are similar and different.

Digital Marketing

Majority of the people have heard of this term, are familiar with it or have a thorough knowledge about it. Whatever the case may be, let us revisit the concept of digital marketing. Any brand, product, or service that is advertised or marketed using digital technologies is digital marketing. Digital technologies include the likes of mobile phones and display advertising. In other words, advertising your product/brand online or through any other digital channel is digital marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Well, to say the least, the tools of both digital as well as inbound marketing are the same but the methodology is not. Inbound marketing is a more detailed form of digital marketing where the emphasis is on how the tools attract, engage and convert the leads. The techniques employed to draw the attention of users and convert them to customers using the many elements of digital marketing is inbound marketing.

Elements of Digital and Inbound Marketing

The two forms of marketing further have many elements in them. Catering to each element makes for a good digital marketing campaign of a company/brand. The many elements that make up digital marketing are:

• Website marketing
• SEO
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• PPC advertising

Digital marketers, as well as inbound marketers, would be familiar with all these terms. For those of you who are new to the world of digital marketing, let us guide you through each of the above-mentioned term and how it applies to digital marketing.

Website Marketing

The website plays a very vital role in deciding the fate of your company. More often than not, this platform will convert your leads into paying customers. Hence, the way you design your website and the ease with which the viewers can scroll through it will decide whether the visitors want to stay or not. The main purpose of digital marketing is to attract the audience, engage them and convert them to buyers. For that, the users should have a thorough knowledge about your product. They should be well informed about your offerings. A website is a place that will serve this purpose. So, even if you need to spend extra bucks to hire an expert web designer, do not hesitate. The money invested in the beginning will prove to be beneficial in the long run.

SEO

Just designing a website and launching it on the web is not enough. Optimizing is for the search engine is the real deal. If your website fails to get a good rank, you have failed in the search engine optimization. And it is very important for your site to make it to the first 3-4 slots to get a handsome amount of leads. For this, the content of your website should please the search engine. Yes, in its literal sense, this is what search engine optimization implies. If the search engine likes the content of your site, it will rank it higher on the result page that means more organic traffic for your site.

Content Marketing

This is the tricky bit. You need to know your target audience to target content at them. You will need to come up with topics that your potential target market relates to. Topics that they are most attracted to. If you give your audience what they crave for, they will be more attracted to your brand/product. Your brand’s blog posts, website, social media accounts. Content marketing also means employing various tactics to reach out to your customers on a more personal level. This may include sending a short ‘Thank you’ e-mail to the people who have subscribed to your emails.

Social Media Marketing

Well, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Anyhow, social media marketing refers to the practice of engaging your customers and promoting your brand to them through social media websites. These include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Not to forget Pinterest and LinkedIn. Social media marketing aids brands in engaging more people and reaching out to more people as well. Anything and everything is done on the social media to increase target audiences’ engagement counts as social media marketing.

PPC Advertising

Although the aim of every business is to bring in more organic traffic, the power of PPC advertising should not be undermined. You will have to set aside a percentage of your marketing budget to pay the ad publisher like Google AdWords. It helps your brand/product make it to the first page of the search engine results. Once you are visible on the first page of the search engine results, half of your job is done!

Having talked about these differences, let’s take an example. For instance, Optimum Cable wants to advertise its Comcast Double Play Deals on its website and other social media platforms. These mediums form a part of digital marketing. Whereas the tactics that the company will use to attract people will be called inbound marketing. In other words, creating awareness is what we call digital marketing and that is a rather short-term goal. Ways to retain customers or convert leads to customers after creating awareness is inbound marketing pure and simple!