Inbound Marketing - Marketing Without Annoying People

Finally, a book about marketing in a manner that does not annoy people. Well, almost; some people will always get annoyed with marketing of any kind, despite wanting to know what's new. The book "Inbound Marketing - Get Found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs," by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah centres around getting your marketing message to people who are already looking for what you are offering. It starts with the premise that traditional (outbound) marketing, in which you interrupt people's lives with TV/radio/newspaper advertisements is either dead or dying because people are getting too good at filtering those unwanted messages out. Indeed, most of us get annoyed with the amount of ads that interrupt our TV viewing, and tune out, or use a DVR (e.g., TiVo) to skip them. Most of us also dump junk mail straight into the bin (preferably the recycling bin, we need to be environmentally conscious). Rather than try to bombard potential customers with even bigger, louder and more obnoxious advertisements in the hope that they get heard over everything else, Halligan and Shah present a method of using Google, social media, and blogs in order to get interested customers to come to you.

The easiest example of inbound marketing is advertising via Google (or any other search engine). How much more likely is it that someone will click on an ad for, say, digital cameras, when that person was already searching the internet for cameras? Much more likely than if you just threw that advertisement in front of random people, after all, someone searching for "digital cameras" is interested in them right now. This book includes a chapter on using Google AdWords in order to target people who are most likely to be interested in your products. However, it goes beyond this, and looks at using social media and blogs in order to connect to potential customers. Added to this, it describes how to measure the effectiveness of every dollar spent on marketing; providing a mechanism to optimize your marketing operation (as an engineer, I love optimization).

While this book contains a wealth of useful information, I do see a few smallish problems. The first is that the mantra "outbound marketing is dead" is repeated throughout the book to the point that it becomes annoying. Secondly, everything centres around creating "remarkable content." Some people can write stimulating/interesting content that others want to read; most people can't. Those who are not good at writing, need to hire someone who can. However, I do wonder what would happen if everyone reads this book, and start writing blogs in an attempt to come across as a (self-appointed) expert. Clearly, the internet would become even more saturated with content of questionable quality, making it harder for people to get their message across.

Regardless of any small reservations, the techniques described in this book are much more cost-effective than old fashioned outbound marketing. They allow small companies who don't have Coca Cola size marketing budgets to be heard. Moreover, the methods of optimizing your marketing process that it presents should be effective long after the effectiveness of marketing via Twitter and/or Facebook has dwindled. Those who read this book and start using inbound marketing now should have a good head start over everyone else. Finally, the idea of advertising to people without annoying them (and at lower cost), has to be one of the most appealing ideas in marketing today.

I have provided a list of online stores in various countries that sell this book; click on one of the links below:

Available online globally from the following stores:
New Zealand	thenile.co.nz
Australia	thenile.com.au
United States of America	amazon.com
Canada	amazon.ca
United Kingdom	amazon.co.uk
France	amazon.fr
Deutschland	amazon.de