Content Marketing Institute

• http://www.twitter.com/pc4media Peter Caputa

  Thanks for doing this video, Joe.
  At HubSpot, we don’t see you as competition. There’s room for many different approaches and both content marketing and inbound marketing represent approaches that more marketers should embrace.
  Our approaches complement each other’s more than they compete.
  As you rightly pointed out, our core business focus is providing software and training to busineses to help them do inbound marketing.
  Where we might disagree is whether inbound marketing is a subset of content marketing. We might actually say it the other way around. As you know, there are more steps to our inbound marketing methodology than simply creating content, albeit content creation is probably the most critical. There’s optimizing it and promoting it. There’s repurposing of that content for compelling offers for lead generation. So, our services go beyond just content marketing. They cover landing page creation, website design, call to action button creation. Soon, we’ll launch services for lead nurturing, salesforce.com+HubSpot integration and social media marketing.
  But, your point is well taken about the fact that you offer content services beyond the “web”.
  Since you’ve been watching us for a long time, I’m sure you’re not surprised that we’re not encouraging ompanies to print on dead trees, so we only launched a blog writing service at this time. But, we understand that we haven’t convinced the world’s marketers to abandon what they’ve been doing for 50 years YET. The main reason we didn’t launch a “magazine writing” service or an event marketing service is because they are outside the scope of what our customers are asking for. We’ve built our different packages simply around what challenges and requests we get from our 2000+ customers.
  One other nit too…. we provide software and training for companies of ALL sizes. We started with SMBs, but we have added products and features for largers companies as well. If I had to guess, your customer base probably is larger companies and more b2c type companies whereas our customer base is more mid size companies and a bit more focused on b2b. But, we plan to continue expanding our capabilities for all different types of marketers, and we have a huge diversity amongst our customer base.
  Suited for your market with bigger b2c type ad bugets, your matching system is also lot more sophisiticated, whereas our is more of a directory. You’re playing the middle man, whereas we just want to play the connector.
  We look forward to seeing your continued success, Joe. Again, we don’t see it as competition. Let’s keep the dialog open as we have for the last few years. We’re all fighting the good fight and look forward to continuing to work with you to bring the “importance of content” more to the fore.

• http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

  Hi Peter…thanks for taking the time to respond.
  No, I don’t see us as direct competition. As I’ve been saying for months, 2010 is the year of content marketing “how”, meaning that people are starting to get the “brands as publishers” model we have both been evangelizing.
  RE: Your definition of content marketing, I do disagree with this though. Content marketing is not just content creation. It’s the entire brand storytelling process – Identifying the niche, developing measurable goals, creating the content strategy, finding where your customers are at in print, online in-person, executing on the content, setting up listening posts, distributing the content, so on and so forth.
  It sounds like, from what you are saying, that inbound marketing does the same thing, but just with an online focus.
  I do want to point out that Hubspot does not just do inbound marketing, but content marketing. You clearly leverage events as part of your content marketing strategy. You’ve also developed a book (printed on dead trees – which I have by the way) in addition to your videos, blogs, podcasts etc.
  So, from my standpoint, Hubspot does content marketing, not just inbound marketing. This may be semantics, but it’s important for Hubspot customers to realize that inbound marketing works MUCH MUCH better with an integrated content marketing strategy. Hubspot is a testament to that.
  Thanks again for commenting and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what you are doing.
  Cheers
  Joe

• http://www.twitter.com/pc4media Peter Caputa

  Hey Joe. Thanks for your response and for the clarification.
  The problem with all of these terms and movements is that we’re sort of “defining” them as we go. It sounds like we agree on everything other than some semantics.
  Good catch on the dead trees thing. And yes we do events. If you consider “webinars” events, we do a lot of them.
  Although we know speaking at events and publishing our book has helped our marketing tremendously, it’s important to note that the primary driver of our growth is online marketing. In fact, we limit the events we’re involved with because they are costly and the ROI is hard to quantify.
  So, we certainly wouldn’t advocate that a small or mid sized business write a book or spend a lot of time trying to book speaking gigs or producing events. It’s much harder to track the impact of those on customer acquisition and they tend to be a lot more expensive “experiments”. I’ve known plenty of authors who haven’t sold more than a few hundred copies of their books after spending a year+ writing it. And I know many people who spend months planning events, but generate few new leads and minimal new revenue out of them. (I’ve done this myself in a former life.)
  For the b2b marketer especially, our data suggests that blogging, social media, seo and ppc are much more efficient marketing activities that require much less time or $ investment, while being much more measurable.
  So, while we do other more traditional marketing activities, they are lower on the priority list and they’re successful because we’ve built an online reach that helps to promote our other activities.
  All that said, if you’re a b2c marketer trying to reach a massive audience and used to spending millions on radio, print and tv advertising, I’d say that switching some of that budget to event marketing or content marketing is probably a good idea. Although it’s hard to spend that kind of money on online content, I’d still start there. And then I’d spend even more of the budget on promoting the content and measuring the results.

• http://www.HubSpot.com Dharmesh Shah

  Joe: Thanks for the article. Many of us at HubSpot are fans of you and Junta42.
  We fundamentally agree with the importance you place on content. We’re on the same mission and what little differences are far outshadowed by the things we agree on and jointly believe in.
  I also think we are attacking different parts of a massive opportunity and really don’t see us as competitive either.
  Wish you continued success.

• http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

  Thanks Dharmesh…I agree, different, but same – and lots of opportunity.
  Congratulations on all the success.

• http://www.kunocreative.com John McTigue

  It really shouldn’t matter whether you guys are competitors or not. Marketing is a huge space with lots of competitors, and presumably as content marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing – all the “new media marketing” types gain prominence, there will be many more competitors (and partners). In other words, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s important to know that you guys are out there and how your approaches may differ. Personally, I don’t think it matters what you call your approach – it’s what you deliver to your clients that counts and how well it fits their strategy for success. Without that you have nothing.

• http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

  Hi John…spot on.

• http://www.superiorpromos.com Promotional Products

  Joe,
  Thanks for sharing. And thanks for the review of the video. Always a bonus!

• http://www.interactmedia.com Steve Lazuka

  Hi Joe, Pete, and Dharmesh -
  I think that, fundamentally, content marketing and inbound marketing are the same.
  In order to do either successfuly, you need to develop lots of great content, but both concepts also include the following:
  - developing a content strategy
  - researching keywords and topics to write about
  - incorporating seo naturaly into the content
  - designing optimized landing pages
  - submitting content to other top sites on the web
  - promoting content using social media
  - testing everything with detailed analytics
  - and plenty more…
  Joe – you’re the master at creating high quality content that is interesting, engaging, and helpful to people. As a recovering outbound marketer (bad word), i’m still learning from you what it means to create quality over quantity.
  Pete and Dharmesh – your Hubspot software is actually an incredible content marketing tool that gives people the ability to DO content marketing (outboung marketing) successfuly. Brilliant.
  Content is at the heart of Inbound Marketing… and great content draws people INBOUND from search engines and social media to your site.
  different, but the same

• http://www.findandconvert.com/blog/ Bernie Borges

  Hey Joe,
  Here’s my 2 cents. I’m of the opinion that inbound marketing is an “umbrella” phrase. It’s anything and everything that a marketer does to attract its target audience to its front door. These tactics may include such things as SEO, SEM, print advertising, speaking engagements, etc. It can also include offline tactics that create word of mouth. Content marketing is a component of inbound marketing. In my opinion it’s the most important component of inbound marketing.
  For example, when you produce a video like the one tied to this blog post, you’ve created content. The purpose of that content is to attract your community to your front door and spread the word about Junta42. This video and this blog is part of your inbound marketing strategy.
  I don’t think it’s a semantic issue. You know me and you know I’m a content marketing fanatic. I believe however (and we may disagree here) that content marketing is a strategic aspect of inbound marketing.
  Where I know we agree is that without content marketing, inbound marketing has severe limitations. How effective would HubSpot be if they weren’t great at content marketing? Same question for Junta42 and Joe Pulizzi.
  Cheers,
  Bernie Borges

• http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

  Bernie and Steve…this is great.
  Bernie…I’ve never looked at inbound marketing as anything outside of online…maybe I should.
  I agree we are all talking about the same thing, but if we all get on the same page it will be easier for more people to adopt. Thanks for helping the conversation on this.

• http://www.truebridge.com Luke Owen

  Joe, very interesting post and a topic that I myself have always wondered what the differences are b/w these two approaches to marketing. We’re a b2b company that works in the financial industry and your approach of keeping the traditional marketing alive but tweaking it a bit to include content marketing techniques is exactly how we describe this whole new outlook on marketing to both prospects and existing clients. The “online” only approach that HubSpot focuses on doesn’t resonate within certain industries like the financial world where print and other traditional media such as TV or radio will not be going away anytime soon – nor do they have to. But I too respect what they’re doing and have found their tools helpful despite having to be on their up and down CMS software. But the latter is not their focus any way.