I am Inbound Marketing and So Can You – Book Review of "Inbound Marketing"

Last fall, the co-founders of Hubspot and InboundMarketing.com put out a book which is the core of what their company does, measure inbound marketing efforts and success. For many, the term was a bit nebulous and hard to define. Ken Yeung over at Solutions Are Power has a great overview of Inbound Marketing and explains Inbound Marketing as essentially “marketing focused on getting found by customers.”

Basically this means that whether it’s through tools like search engine optimization, social media, etc. as opposed to anything outbound where you are paying to get people’s attention. David Meerman Scott says that it’s akin to “earning your way in” and I think that inbound marketing is a pretty good thing to work on.

David did the forward for this book and it is a solid read with all the fundamentals you need to understand and execute an inbound marketing program.

Inbound Marketing Mantra – Get Found, Convert, Analyze and Improve

There are four sections in this book – Basics, Getting Found by Prospects, Converting Customers and Make Better Decisions. The basics are well, the basics. Tells you what this whole inbound marketing thing is, asks you a hard question if your web site is a marketing hub and not a megaphone.

Getting Found by Prospects discusses content, search and social media tools. Converting customers is about how you use those tools I just mentioned and turn those visitors to your marketing hub to real leads and then to customers. They continue with the process by analyzing campaigns and other metrics from the various tools to understand success. They also define the various people that need to be a part of this team and contribute to the overall success of the inbound marketing program.

Overall, a Solid Application Book with great case studies

It is a quick read (I finished it in about 3 hours) but it provides what you really need to know along with the tools and HOW TO USE THEM. Almost all business books can be separate into two groups – theory or application. This is about 5% theory explaining the concepts and 95% application with the tools and how this fits into the inbound marketing campaign.

If you are a marketing practitioner or in a small business where marketing is one of the hats you wear, you need this book.

You can find out more about the writers at Hubspot.com and InboundMarketing.com and the book is over at Amazon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Email marketing, Marketing, Search Marketing, small business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.