I just finished reading the new book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs.
Halligan and Shah are the founders of Hubspot. If you are a Hubspot client, this book will reinforce a lot of concepts used by the Hubspot Methodology. If you are not a Hubspot customer, here is your chance to learn the secrets behind Hubspot’s success.
This step-by-step guide to Inbound Marketing is broken into 4 parts:
Part 1: Inbound Marketing
This section of the book explains why traditional marketing is broken and how the rules have changed. I found the concept of your website as a central “hub” with outside forces driving people to your site an interesting analogy, which also explains how they came up with the name Hubspot.
Part 2: Get Found by Prospects
The key is to create remarkable content – content that people want to read and share. Remarkable content can be blog articles, white papers, videos, webinars, etc. Shah and Halligan go into detail on how to optimize your content for the search engines, how to promote your content in the blogosphere and how to use social media to interact with current and potential customers.
Part 3: Converting Customers
Once you’ve created content worth sharing, you need to create compelling calls-to-action that send visitors to a landing page, collect their contact information, and then nurture these leads with the hopes of turning them into paying customers.
Part 4: Make Better Decisions
Track your progress to see what’s working and what’s not. Watch your competition to see what you can learn from them. Hire the right people. These are some of the recommendations Shah and Halligan suggest to help you make better decisions
I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it. If you are a perpetual list maker like me, you will love the format of the book. At the end of each chapter the authors provide you with a “to do” list which summarizes the key points in the chapter. Of course, it is up to you to follow through and implement these recommendations.
On a final note, I would like to quote my favorite line from the book:
“Don’t Forget the Humans!”
As funny as it sounds, sometimes people can get so worked up about keywords and SEO that they forget to keep the copy, title and descriptions “human readable.” As important as the search engines have become, ultimately it is the humans we are selling to.
Click here to order your copy of Inbound Marketing from Amazon today!