The days of traditional outbound marketing of TV, radio, telemarketing, direct mail, trade shows and emails have come to an end. People have the capability of fast-forwarding through TV commercials, paying for commercial free radio apps, filtering their emails and throwing out direct mail without glancing at it. Traditional marketing is no longer an effective way to reach your target market. The new internet era that we live in has flipped our idea of marketing. Marketers now can have almost limitless information about potential customers and use it to efficiently communicate their message. The best way to reach your target market today is to put an end to traditional outbound marketing and focus your energy on inbound marketing.
In “Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, they explore the transition from traditional outbound marketing to inbound and argue that inbound marketing cannot simply be a sales-oriented message. They explain that since the internet allows information to spread so easily, it makes traditional marketing that much more competitive. Most companies’ websites are solely one-way sales-oriented messages that they call a “megaphone” and they suggest that your website should instead be a collaborative “hub” that fosters two-way communication. However, they also encourage marketers to focus 75% of their time and energy outside of their website on their brand, industry and competitors, in general. This outside focus should drive customers to your site. The authors preach to the many marketers who feel the need to redesign their site, to instead “rethink it.” Moreover, they discuss adding a blog with compelling content, focusing on Google, industry blogs, and, of course, social media.
Halligan and Shah speak from experience as they begin to explain how to complete the transition from outbound to inbound marketing for a company of any size. The most important part, they claim, is having a “remarkable value proposition,” because only remarkable ideas spread quickly. They encourage out of the box thinking in order to think across traditional boundaries of your marketplace and ignore existing unwritten rules to become the best in your industry. If you can’t be the best in your industry, then they suggest that you redefine your market narrowly, with their example of a left-handed monkey wrench manufacturer, supplying only left-handed plumbers. After creating a remarkable value proposition, they suggest creating remarkable content. They explain that they refer to it as REMARKable because it should be “worthy of other people’s remarks.” Every marketer should consider themselves half marketer and half publisher these days and encourage other members of your company to also create remarkable content.
After reading their chapter “Get Found in the Blogosphere,” it’s hard to imagine why every company doesn’t already have a blog, considering how many benefits you can reap from it. Not only will a blog establish your company “as a thought leader in your market,” it will change your website from an “online brochure” to a collaborative “hub,” where customers are encouraged to engage with your company and ultimately improve the likelihood that customers will find your site via Google and other sites. Something that surprised me is that they claimed that the most successful bloggers recommend spending half of your time writing the blog and half of your time creating a title. Your title has to catch people’s attention in half a second, which seems like an almost impossible feat. The best part of blogs is that they continue to deliver value over and over again, whereas paid ads only deliver value while you pay for them.
As someone proficient in internet marketing, I found myself unimpressed with their chapters on social media and Google AdWords, however they would be helpful for someone entirely new to the internet marketing field. Halligan and Shah did impress me when they began talking about using free software and tools to bring customers to your site. In the earlier chapters they suggested going to grader.com to get a free report evaluating your website, which I did, twice over the course of reading their book. Of course, grader.com is Halligan and Shah’s free tool to get you to their site and on their HubSpot email list. Nicely done!
The whole process of inbound marketing is a trial and error process, which they assert, “the key to inbound marketing is to iterate and improve.” Trying out different compelling calls-to-action, such as webinars, white papers, ebooks, expert consultation, free demos and contests are a great way to find the most efficient strategy. Testing different landing pages until you find the one with the best conversion rate is another trial and error process. Additionally, they explain that the quality of leads is more important than the quantity of leads and that you should create a criteria and course of action to take with each kind you classify.
Halligan and Shah refer to John Wanamaker’s saying, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” to express how far marketing has come. Today, you know exactly what someone typed in Google to get to your website; there is no longer any guessing about which part of your marketing is successful and which is not. And the best part is that you have the ability to change it and measure the results instantly. In my opinion, the second best part is that, according to the authors, inbound marketing leads are about 60% less expensive than outbound marketing leads. They go in depth on how to hire inbound marketing savvy employees and how to watch your competition. They end the book with some motivation and a sense of urgency that you needed to start inbound marketing yesterday!
Overall, it was a good, quick read. The short and info-packed chapters with an example in each helped keep it interesting. It was a bit repetitive but got the message across. I would suggest that any businessperson read it, who is unfamiliar with internet marketing. It is less helpful if you already know a lot about the industry, but there is still a lot for most people to learn from it! The big picture is that it creates a sense of urgency that you need to go out and learn how to begin inbound marketing and it teaches you a lot about how to start and even advises you to be patient and perseverant until you see results.
Halligan, Brian, and Dharmesh Shah. Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Print.
Orion the Huntress 