Inbound Marketing: Click Me, I'm Exciting!

Brian Halligan’s “Inbound Marketing” is a piece on transforming the way you see marketing. It is a four-part marketing epic which begins by denouncing the classical ideas associated with marketing and then proceeds to reconstruct our understanding within the context of a new marketing era. His ideas are situated around the shift from a site being a place to convey information as a professional expert towards being more of a centralized hub for the audience. In part II he discusses the basics of developing the resources which customers are attracted to: content. Content can be in the form of entertainment or in the form of function. Blogging, social media, and the development of tools for consumers are some of the key points he states as critical to the acquisition of an audience. You need to provide value. In part III he takes us from acquiring an audience to acquiring customers, the conversion process, essentially. Finally, he discusses how to reshape the decision-making mindset in order to acclimate oneself to this new marketing environment.

Similarly to how we are using our blogs to create content and are aiming at making this content a final product for an audience rather than just for a class assignment, I believe his ideas are about thinking of everything in terms of the value it creates. If he was teaching this class, I think he would do it the same way

Probably the most important exercise that can be taken from the book to be used in the classroom would be to think of different ways to make an ordinary piece of content exciting. How do you create value is the question that assignment would answer, and it would actually be interesting to see if every student had the same prompt how they would turn it into something which creates value.

I think the biggest surprise, or at least the most interesting one to me, was the idea that companies should be building tools for their customers. Why would you make something free, don’t you want to make money off of it? But by making it free you essentially create relationships and build your brand identity, and with that you also create an environment where they can discuss questions and then be lead to more personalized solutions.