Abby Buchan-Howard
What’s the difference between marketing and publishing? Are they the same thing, or too different to be compared?
In recent years, more and more companies have been adopting an inbound methodology into their marketing strategy. While it is not commonplace in the construction industry yet, we predict that it could have a major impact on the way businesses engage with the market.
Inbound marketing makes publishers of marketers. Using ideas such as content marketing to attract your customers, it can be a huge benefit to your company.
Read on to find out how you can turn your marketing efforts could become publishing opportunities for your building products company.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is all about putting the customer first. It is built on the principle of being:
- Helpful
- Human
- Holistic
Inbound is about putting the customer first. It is based on the principle of giving buyers the power, rather than the sellers. By giving the customer all the information on yourself, your product and your industry; they are empowered and more likely to purchase from you.
Inbound isn’t about shouting at the customer through noisy, interruptive adverts or getting in their way with cold calling.
Inbound is about getting in line with the way that buyers think about the purchases they make and meeting them where they are in the buyer’s journey by building relationships and drawing them in with positive experiences.
To be inbound you need to:
- Build trust with your potential customers and leads
- Create relationships with them to earn that trust
- Understand their needs and align yourself with them; be human!
So where does this fit into the idea of turning marketers into publishers?
Let’s look into this.
Build Marketers Into Publishers
A key principle of Inbound is content marketing. What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and sharing content that is both valuable and relevant to buyers needs. It is able attracting and retaining an audience that you have clearly defined to drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing consists of regularly creating:
- Blogs
- Pillar Pages
- Topic Clusters
- Buyer Personas
- Buyer Profiles
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
Producing this content is the most important part of an inbound marketing strategy. Planning, writing and editing this content to the highest possible standard will be the pivotal component in drawing in your potential leads, customers and buyers.
Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes, a guide to producing the highest standard of content, wrote that anybody who posts content online is a publisher.
She states that “most companies have adopted the ‘we’re-all-publishers-now’ mantra” but warns that the implication of this is often underestimated.
Ann Handley’s words are exactly right. As soon as you unleash a blog post or a web page onto the public you are a publisher of that content.
Thinking like a publisher and a marketer is all about making sure that your customers can build trust in your through the content you share with them. This means it can’t just be any old content, written and published in a short period of time for the sake of getting it out there as quickly as possible.
Poor quality content that is churned out without thought won’t look professional and won’t be up to the standard expected by potential clients. This is what Ann Headley is referring to; publishing for the sake of publishing is not the idea of content marketing; it has to be quality, not just a constant stream of inadequate content.
Publishing eBooks = Content Marketing
“Publishing” has the connotation of books and literature and this can be effectively applied to content marketing.
Including eBooks and whitepapers as part of your content marketing efforts is perhaps the most obvious way to turn marketers into publishers.
The production of eBooks and whitepapers, featured on websites as downloadable content, fulfil the idea of inbound marketing because the content becomes part of an exchange between you and the customer.
Think of it like this:
Your customer wants to download your eBook, an extensive piece of work published by your marketing team. They want to get something out of visiting your site. But you also want to get something out of them in return.
Make your downloadable content accessible via a form. Visitors fill it out, giving you their contact information and creating a lead, and in return, they are given access to the eBooks your marketers published.
eBooks and whitepapers may take longer to produce but they are a great way of turning marketers into publishers with content you can share with visitors in an exchange based conversation!
Conclusion
Publishing is part of inbound marketing. Using content marketing for construction is still a new idea that, as an industry, has not been fully accepted yet. But it is coming.
Turning your marketers into publishers by adopting an inbound approach is a great way to get ahead of your competitors and engage in an effective ongoing strategy to promote your building products company.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing consultancy based in Shifnal in the West Midlands. Insynth employ the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to help building product manufacturers grow their businesses by aggressively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.