The Connection Between Inbound Marketing And Authenticity
An argument in favor of amorphous free-flowing content creation and leveraging authenticity to create change
While I’m wont to say that I’ve been on a personal development kick for the past year, one area that I have certainly been heavily focused on is authenticity.
As a mysterious guest once told me at a wedding dinner: to succeed to the fullest extent that you can, you have to be one hundred percent authentic. Every single day of your life. And if you’re not authentic even for a day, you won’t get to that maximum potential. (I have no idea who this guy was, but this advice has been lodged in my brain ever since).
Developing authenticity — at least for me — is really about pulling down the masks that we hold up to ourselves and which prevent others from getting to know the true ‘us’.
Often, we begin this process of ‘masking’ as a defense mechanism. But sometimes we retain the habit long after it has ceased to serve our best interests. This has been the case for me. Unlearning my instincts towards privacy and away from sharing my true self has been a slow but transformative process (and one that, as a writer, I feel the need to go through).
Simultaneously, in the professional domain, I have begun, over the course of about the past year, to shift towards a fully inbound-led system for generating business leads.
Whereas 18 months ago I might have sent a round of cold emails to potential prospects, these days I’m leveraging content marketing — as I often do for clients — to try to trip leads into my marketing and sales funnels.
What’s the connection between these two things?
How Authenticity Creates Content That Resonates
The world — especially the internet — is drowning under a rising deluge of content.
Other writers have discussed the concept of content saturation — a dynamic that I think everybody who creates online writing for marketing purposes needs to pay attention to.
While authors naturally differ in their conclusions, most seem to arrive at some version of the following: While the market for readers’ attention has never been more competitive than it is today (think: over-supply), superlative content can still rise to the top and get seen, read, or heard.
And what’s the magic formula to creating superlative content?
Naturally there are plenty of ingredients that must go into the creation of successful business oriented content (brand messaging, SEO strategy, target persona targeting to name but a few).
But for personal writing — and those leveraging writing to build personal brands — I think that authenticity is the ‘X factor’ that can engross readers in your work.
Because in an internet brimming full of keyword-stuffed content — in which even robots can attempt to game organic search discoverability — the one factor that’s impossible to fake, or for robots to replicate, is authenticity.
Sharing from the heart. From true, lived experiences. And letting the masks that stand between you and your readers vanish away into nothingness.
Authentic Content — Rather Than Content Marketing — Can Kick-Start Relationships
Inbound marketing is sometimes also known as attraction marketing.
Its simple premise is that authors create content that resonates with the type of audience they’re trying to sell to.
The common visualization used to represent content marketing, and inbound, is a magnet that draws leads into some kind of funnel. Which basically describes how it’s intended to work.
That works well for businesses. In my day job, I help them with it almost every day of the week.
But I’d like to propose that you can leverage the same content for personal brand building and relationship development.
Look at it like this.
With content marketing — as used for lead generation or inbound which is typically what ‘content marketing’ means — we’re, in a sense, reverse engineering the type of free-flowing process that I believe can be used when you’re putting out content into the world solely to attract the kind of people that can take your life, and career, in new and interesting directions.
This second type of content creation doesn’t get discussed much — except perhaps in negative terms. It’s content created in a vacuum of strategy. But I’d like to suggest that it has its own merits, its own potential, and even its own methodology for success. Which is authenticity. The latter requires heaps of it. The former — traditional business content marketing — really doesn’t.
In corporate content marketing — at least if we’re doing it as the textbooks recommend — we don’t typically just sit down to hammer out content. Instead, we think strategically. Who do we want to attract with this content. What are they interested in. How would they like to receive it? As Joe Pullizi puts it, this strategy, and engaging in this thinking, is the difference between creating “content” and engaging in content marketing.
This is all well and good.
But here I’d like to suggest that it’s not compatible with sharing content with maximum authenticity.
Because instead of sharing what we really want to communicate into the world, we’re looking at what our target audience wants to hear and then working backwards. This is why I call it reverse-engineering.
But what if we discarded all that and intentionally did things the other way.
And we created this kind of content not to land ourselves business but rather to attract into our personal lives the kind of relationships that could create change.
Isn’t that essentially the same thing as inbound marketing but without the reverse engineering? Inbound centered around free-form content shared for personal reasons and leveraged to strike up relationships?
This is the kind of authenticity-led content marketing that I think serves its own purpose and which merits its own discussion whenever we’re talking about inbound. Its currency is the authenticity at its core much as that of business content marketing is creating valuable information and targeting it to the people who are likely to be attracted to it. With personal inbound marketing authenticity can be the catalyst that powers the results which it can achieve.
Those mightn’t be the kind of output that we want classical content marketing to predictably yield: well-qualified, neatly segmented prospects who are interested in our product or service.
But perhaps it can yield something inherently more powerful than that: Connections with people who are really on the same wavelength as us and who connected with the authenticity that we put out into the internet.
Lest the above be misunderstood:
I’m not suggesting for a minute that businesses abandon classical content marketing. Inbound is an amazingly powerful marketing strategy that’s also a lot more fun to engage in than cold calling and other disruptive forms of marketing.
Besides the fact that I’m unqualified to make such a recommendation, I think that — as a business activity — content marketing needs to be structured in a way that can yield predictable results and ROI. Which is why those undertaking it are, in my view, well-advised to go into the process strategically.
However the value of amorphous content creation — for non-businesses and businesses — shouldn’t be disregarded. Perhaps (for businesses) the two could even be employed in tandem.
With sheer authenticity as its driving force, this kind of writing, and content creation, can yield something more powerful than inbound business leads. It can lead to strong relationships; and those, in turn, can lead to much more.
