The concept of permission marketing, as presented by Seth Godin in his 1999 book Permission Marketing, is very closely aligned with the best practices of content and inbound marketing.

As Godin explains, a company can engage a perspective customer by providing value in the form of information and by doing so can gain permission to send more marketing messages or informative content in the future.

The level of permission will vary from prospect to prospect. Of course, Godin makes it clear that the relationship between marketers and their prospects can be nurtured to greater levels of permission if marketing activities are carried out with the appropriate respect. Respect in this case is shown by operating within the amount of permission the prospect has granted the marketer.

By tuning into the specific needs, interests, and preferences of their prospects, through research or feedback, companies gain the opportunity to nurture their relationships with their client base. This opportunity can be realized in-full when marketers cater their efforts to providing relevant information – or content- to the individuals that make up their target market.

Through continued delivery of valuable content over time, through means and at frequencies that match the permission they’ve been granted, marketers are more likely to positively impact these relationships as compared to more traditional advertising tactics.

Godin refers to more traditional advertising as interruption marketing. In interruption marketing distraction is used to draw consumers’ attention away from something they actually want to be doing, be it watching a TV program, listening to music on the radio, ect.

In the interest of providing value through marketing messages, permission marketers often play a role in answering consumers’ questions. In turn, the marketing message is not a distraction from a receiver’s desired activity. Instead, the marketer’s message becomes part of a consumer’s search for information and therefore welcomed with open-arms. In that way Godin’s permission marketing is very similar to content marketing and inbound marketing.

What’s more, the goal of both marketing methods is to seamlessly establish a company as the perfect solution to a prospective customer’s problem just as they’ve reach a point in which they’ve realized they have a problem worth solving.

In this very succinct book Godin also gives insight to how he’s come to understand the power of permission marketing and how it can be successfully implement. In all, Godin has assembled yet another fantastic resource from which all communication professionals and business owners can gain perspective for bettering their current marketing strategy.

Read the book yourself: Permission Marketing: Turing Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.