Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (Top 100 Business Book Summaries)
Kelly Ryan-Brown MAICD
Founder | Director @ Recovery Partners Australia | Strategy and Culture
?Similar to Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, the premise of this book is that the old ways of marketing – advertising and mass marketing, for example –?are dead. Now, you need a remarkable product or service that attracts people. Hence, the name, inbound marketing – instead of looking outwards for your customers, your customers look in to find you.
?A summary of the inbound marketing philosophy:
1.????Create content
2.????Optimise it for channels
3.????Publish
4.????Market
5.????Measure
?Here are the key takeaways:
?1. Why Inbound Marketing?
Most businesses want more leads, while most people want less spam, cold calls and DMs. People don’t want to be interrupted – they want someone to solve their problems. Inbound marketing offers a solution to both.
Your website’s functions and reach are more important than how it looks. It should be a ‘hub, not a megaphone’ ?where people can come, learn and collaborate. Marketing is the great equaliser – you can win with less money if you market yourself well.
Ask yourself this: what makes you remarkable? If you don’t know the answer, go back to the drawing board. It’s often more profitable to be narrow and deep, than broad and shallow. See a perfect example of this, courtesy of the Grateful Dead, at the end of this article.
?2. Get Found By Prospects
Create remarkable content for your company for two reasons:
?Once you have produced remarkable content, share it wide and far. Encourage feedback and comments to spark engagement. The book contains several practical suggestions to drive traffic. I have listed them below, but as you probably know, things change rapidly in this space, so you are best to sign up to a trusted source to keep your knowledge up to date. HubSpot has a great blog covering lots of topics. Many of these suggestions, however, are simply good practice:
3. Converting Customers
Once you have attracted prospects with your remarkable content, you need to convert them into customers. The initial method is to use a Call To Action (CTA) to gather prospect details and continue the relationship. A CTA is an exchange – ‘I will give you this piece of content in exchange for your contact information’. A CTA typically lives on a landing page.
?Once you have a lead, you need to grade and nurture it. At Recovery Partners, we get a lot of traffic from students. They actually come from this blog that I wrote about a decade ago that gets thousands of hits per month, consistently. We have set up our system to capture them as ‘students’ and we do not follow them up at all. Conversely, any lead who completes a request for a quote is graded high and treated with urgency. We nurture leads through automated workflows to maintain the relationship so that when they are ready to buy, they come to us.
?4. Make Better Decisions
Making better decisions starts with better data. You must measure everything you do, by campaign, by channel, or by some other way that suits your business. Use your competitors as a benchmark and strive to beat them. Achieving marketing success will require the right people with the right skills. You need digitally savvy people who can create remarkable content and analyse the data to make any necessary changes.
?Conclusion
The good news is that the barriers to marketing are low. You can publish content today across a multitude of platforms for free. The hard part is being consistent, creative and developing some know-how. The authors of this book suggest you dedicate two hours a day for the next three months to getting found, converting, and making better decisions. Good luck.
?NB: the authors are the co-founders of HubSpot, a marketing platform that I use across several businesses. After reading the book and changing our strategy from an outbound to an inbound strategy, we investigated available marking platforms. We compared HubSpot against other platforms, and it definitely meets our needs best. We have stayed with it for many years, due to its exceptional technical and customer support and the ease of the platform. I have no affiliation with the company and pay full rates for the platform.
Did You Know?
The band, Grateful Dead, are considered one of the best live bands ever, and have amassed a fanatical base that is both enduring and profitable. I had never heard of them until I read Inbound Marketing as their marketing prowess is used a case study. Their sound was different to other bands and although it appealed to less people, those who liked it, really liked it. The authors term this ‘narrow and deep’ as opposed to ‘broad and shallow’. They recommend you do this with your product or service too. They relied on concert income rather than album sales to drive revenue, unlike every other band. Given the significant changes to the business model in music – an artist makes only $3,500 per one million streams on Spotify – this was genius. Interestingly, Apple has enlisted Martin Scorsese’s to direct and produce a film about the iconic band.?
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Favourite Quotes
?“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Victor Hugo
?“What gets us in trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
?“Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them.”
Arnoldo Hax
?“Either write something worth reading about or do something worth writing about.”
Ben Franklin
?“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Peter F. Drucker
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“In God we trust, all others bring data.”
W. Edwards Deming
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Glossary
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Content ???????????????????1. Blogs, white paper, videos, webinars, podcasts, webcasts, visuals and free tools such as calculators that attract people to your company
?
Inbound ???????????????????1. Getting found by your target market
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Outbound ????????????????1. Interrupting your target market
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Remarkable ????????????1. Unique and valuable