You're already doing inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing (sometimes called content marketing) is kind of trendy right now. But it isn't actually new. In other forms-direct, database, curriculum, permission marketing-it's been around for forty years or more.

What is new is the digital technology and cultural norms that enable marketers to send content, consumers to respond to that content, and marketers to respond back...all in real time. Some of the best opportunities are in industries that already do business in a way that involves a deep, information-rich conversation.

Inbound marketing for banks:

Banks in general, and community banks in particular tend to act in ways that ARE content marketing in slow motion. As part of your normal marketing routine, you:

• position yourself on the basis of offers and expertise
• support your position with information of value
• develop deep, long-term relationships with customers and prospective customers based on connecting their need with your knowledge
• build customer loyalty and expand cross sell ration by by using customer information and bank knowledge (accounts and services) in community bank onboarding strategies.

By the standards of top branding agencies, you could make the case that you are doing "inbound for banks" already. You just may not be using the technology.

• When you encourage someone to stop by a branch and pick up a brochure about the benefits of your various checking accounts, you're issuing what content marketers call a CTA (Call to Action).
• When someone comes by and picks up a brochure, and a banker meets them in the office, gathers their contact information, hands them a business card, and asks them a few questions to qualify them for a dda (and perhaps some other products), your bank is filling a "landing page" function, common to content marketing.
• When you design a followup campaign, based on the information you've gathered, you're implementing what a content marketer would call a "workflow."
• When you ask yourself how to build loyalty for my community bank, and then use what you know about current customers to cross sell, you are employing data-rich, content-marketing thinking.

So, you are probably already a content marketer. You just may not be getting the benefit of the rapid technology or thorough data gathering capability.

Inbound for hospitals:

Same with community hospital branding and communication. Your differential advantage lies in your care strategy, your patient experience, your community standing, and your status as the region's healthcare eyes, ears, and voice. Part of serving a healthy community and establishing yourself as a thought leader is build into how you use information:

• current wellness trends
• urgent epidemiology data
• advances in treatments and new procedures
• rumor controlling and myth busting
• helping patient experience stories go viral

These sorts of activities are more than just marketing. Many of them are central to a community hospital's function. And every one of these activities can be turbo-charged with technology and thinking-offers, CTA, landing page/data collection/followup/workflows-that is foundational to content marketing.

Community hospital and bank branding best practices are just a couple of examples of people who are already doing the things content marketing does. Yet, very few are taking advantage of the speed and accuracy current technology affords. Our Greenville branding agency and advertising agency has always recognized that technology is an important part of how brands build communities.

Never has this been more true (or more necessary) than today. For the core industries we serve, the opportunity is huge:

• You're already doing these strategic tasks.
• You're already investing (unnecessarily) in printing, production, and labor, money that could be ported to digital technology.
• You're likely missing out on the data advantages, because of the waste and fissures in paper-and-pencil systems.

You are already doing inbound marketing. You just don't know it yet!