Forbes recently reported that the Cambridge-based SaaS company HubSpot has completed a $35 million round, bringing their fundraising total to an impressive $100 million.

HubSpot’s founder Brian Halligan is credited with coining the term “inbound marketing,” which seems to have gained relatively widespread adoption (at least within the marketing sector).

According to Halligan, “Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.”

So, inbound marketing is just search engine optimization, right?  After all, the major difference between today and yesterday (when “outbound marketing” was the taste du jour) is that more people are using search engines to find products and services.

According to Halligan, it consists of three components:

(1) Content – Content creation is the core of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.

So according to Halligan, inbound marketing is based on content, SEO and social media.  It sort of makes sense although I’m still not convinced it is anything different than a holistic approach to SEO.

To see if I could gather a little more clarity around how inbound marketing is any different than SEO, I gathered the following definitions:

This is a process by which you build and distribute valuable content that enables new customers to find out about your business without direct involvement on your part. – Aj Kumar, Entrepreneur.com

This seems pretty similar to “SEO” (on a side note, isn’t creating and distributing valuable content is the very definition of “direct involvement”?)

Inbound marketing is about helping yourself get found by people who have made the choice to learn a little bit more about your industry. Permission marketing is based on content that attracts and nurtures prospects, as opposed to commercials, spam, billboards or phone calls that interrupt them. – Isaiah Adams, Inbound Marketing Blog

The definition of “inbound marketing” seems tantamount to SEO.  I’m not entirely sure about the second point: it seems as though “permission marketing” is synonymous with “interesting content.”

Inbound marketing involves getting found by your potential customers through search. – Some person on the WordStream blog

I sort of liked how this guy actually just admitted that inbound marketing is SEO.

After spending some time reading a variety of perspectives on “inbound marketing,” here are some things I think:

December 3, 2008

Using social sites for PR

Article from AllBusiness that was syndicated on the New York Times Web…

December 26, 2008

Link Building through Press Releases

March 12, 2012

The rumors of E-mail’s death have been greatly exaggerated
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