Inbound Marketing and Content Creators in the era of social media

Inbound Marketing, as defined by HubSpot, is the growing of your organization through the building of meaningful relationships with your customers. As the world continues to place higher importance on existing in the digital world, aka the internet, companies would be wise to do that as well. By having a strong online presence, specifically through creative, valuable content, companies can use this to form strong bonds and relationships with their customers. The best way to solidify these relationships is through content marketing. 

Content Marketing ties directly into inbound marketing because it is what drives this inbound traffic to your site. Content marketing is the focus of creating value through relevant content that you use to attract an audience. Without marketing, you cannot create content that has value. Content Marketing is what allows companies to connect with customers; it is the voice of the organization. However, content can also be negative. In order to create valuable content that attracts customers, it is important to ensure that the content is directly tied to the goals of the company. Your content must create engagement and value for the customer, you want to begin the meaningful relationships via the content you provide towards customers. 

Why to invest in Inbound Marketing. 

The era we are currently living in is inherently rooted in a digitalized world; everything happens on social media, and you can find things out quicker than ever before. Companies can use this to their advantage. By creating successful content marketing strategies companies can engage with audiences and provide them with valuable content, that will lead them to become loyal customers. These strategies focus about creating relationships with customers in order to create that trust, so that the customer will feel safe to come to your company with their needs and problems. This is where the inbound methodology comes into play. This methodology is fueled by content, and is composed of 3 stages: attract, engage, and delight. 

Strategies can be derived from any 3 of these stages, and it is important to remember the way in which they call tie into content creation. Each of these stages places a large emphasis on the relationships you are building with the customer, and your content must reflect that. In the attract stage, you want content that sparks the customers interest and provides them with value. Moving to the engaging stage, this is where you communicate more with those you’ve began to build relationships with. In the delight stage, it is important to keep the customer satisfied and continue the relationship that was built. 

Who else is successfully implementing Inbound Marketing into their strategy? 

An example of successfully Inbound Marketing done by another company is Glossier. Glossier is a brand that focuses on producing high quality makeup and skincare products at a low price-point in order to attract teens and young adults to their brand. They successfully create content that drives inbound traffic and allows customer to develop a relationship based on trust through the brand. Into the Gloss is Glossier’s blog where they create content all about skincare tips, makeup trends, and interviews with all types of influencers. This blog feels as if it’s the perfect place for anyone to receive information on anything in the beauty world. 

By having a blog like this, Glossier is able to successfully build trust and credibility with their customers. They are able to earn people’s attention and offer engaging content, in the hopes that those reading the blogs will soon turn into leads. Glossier is doing this successfully because they place such a heavy focus on their content, and making it appeal to their target market. They also rarely promote their own products on the blog, this being something that actually increased credibility because people will see a push of promoting your own products on your blog as simply a ploy to increase sales. What Glossier is doing is creating meaningful value through the content they are pushing out, which then naturally drives customers to their brand to purchase products.