This week I read Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. It was ironic that I was reading this while watching Don Draper and crew on TV’s Mad Men adjust to a whole new world of television advertising and other changes. Why is it ironic? Because we are undergoing a similarly huge shift in how we market, and the name that seems to have stuck is “Inbound Marketing.”
This book, Inbound Marketing, is meant for marketers. Some of the other books I’ve reviewed are a bit more theoretical and great for all senior management. This book is tactical and even includes checklists at the end of each chapter. The theory of the book is that the world is no longer limited to “outbound” marketing: i.e., direct-mail campaigns and advertisements. Instead you need to be out there attracting your customers and bringing them back to you via the internet– i.e., inbound marketing.
Admittedly the book is a bit of a “shill” for HubSpot.com, the authors’ company. However, this didn’t distract from the content, and since HubSpot is where the authors gained their expertise, it made sense. In addition, HubSpot does have some good products to help small-business owners with their inbound marketing, some of which is included in the following list of tips and tidbits that I found useful in the book.
Your Website Inbound Marketing Effectiveness
One useful tool promoted in the book is the free website.grader.com, which reviews your web page and rates it for “inbound marketing effectiveness.”
The authors emphasize that title tags are important for search engine optimization. Each page should have a unique title, and it should be about 70 words long with the most important term first.
Implementation Note: I immediately tested the website grader with the Downtown Women’s Club and was pleased to receive a 97/100 and a list of small tweaks I could do to improve it even more. While I didn’t agree with all of the recommendations (a quick Google answered my question as to whether paying to be listed in the Yahoo Directory was worth the cost; survey said = no), most made sense. Per website.grader.com, my title tags were too long. Will fix ASAP.
Your Blog Inbound Marketing Effectiveness
Incorporate your blog into your site because a blog will improve your search engine rankings by adding more pages to your site. The more pages Google has, the more your site shows up in search engine results pages for dozens of keywords.
Blog posts should not be more than one page.
Put important keywords in the titles to your blogs and links back to your main site within the blogs. They even recommend going back and putting links/keywords into old blog posts.
Implementation note: Per their suggestions, I moved our blog back under my main domain; it’s still the Women’s Dish, but you can get at it from http://blog.downtownwomensclub.com. And there, I just included a link back to my site! As for the one-page blogs, I break this rule all the time on this particular blog, but I figure I’m attracting a demographic that likes to read.
Your Google/Social Media Inbound Marketing Effectiveness
The section explaining how Google works is very helpful to the new website/blog/e-commerce entrepreneurs. As a more experienced social media user, I still picked up some great ideas. I really liked the way they presented the whole Google search/SEO discussion–they even explained Page Rank.
Implementation note: Via the tips in the book, I found that my Google Page Rank was 5, which was pretty good, but I really want to move it higher–time to work on more qualified links.
Basically it boils down to “Ranking = relevance + authority.”
- Relevance = how close of a match a given web page is to the term being searched.
- Authority = The measure of how important and authoritative that given page is in the eyes of Google (i.e. Page Rank).
Their discussion of “qualified links” and how many sites/blog comments are using “no follow” links to defeat the spammers was insightful.
And I thought the authors did a good job explaining how “tricking” Google with dubious SEO tactics is not going to be effective: “The purpose of inbound marketing is not just to get more traffic to your website, but to convert more of that traffic into qualified leads and customers.”
Note to readers: It’s no longer about the number of eyeballs that come to your page; it’s about actually engaging your visitors to join your mailing list, purchase a product or become a member. Much of this book focuses on getting “qualified” links and “interested” visitors to your website.
The sections on how to use social media for inbound marketing are all very good and, I believe, easy to understand for even the novice online marketer. They even included some good rules of thumb, i.e., a 1 percent conversion rate on untargeted traffic is a good baseline.
People often say that social media impact can’t be measured, but I think the authors present enough tools and baselines that you can actually measure an impact over the long run (see the chapter on “patience”).
Your Inbound Marketing Team’s Effectiveness
I particularly liked the section on hiring people both internally and for your external PR team based on their social media skills. If you are a marketer looking for a job, or in the PR and marketing consulting fields, you should read this section. If you are a company whose PR or marketing teams don’t measure up to these lists . . . you might need to rethink, rewire or rehire.
Why Now?
This is the question the authors answer very convincingly in the final chapter. Just as we watch the ad guys on Mad Men adjust to a new era of television and mass marketing, we are going through our own metamorphosis. Those who adapt will survive and thrive; those who continue to fight or ignore it, well . . . I’m really not sure what to tell you.
Top Shelf Bottom line: In the first chapter, where the authors describe this shift, they have the best title of any subsection: “Who moved my customers?” If you still think your customers are waiting at home by the mailbox for your next direct-mail piece or will read your ad in a magazine to which they no longer subscribe, you might want to pick up this book. Even if you are more experienced, there were lots of tweaks that can only help you improve your inbound marketing.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.9 Responses to “Inbound Marketing–What Would Don Draper Do?”
Leave a Reply
November 11th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Hello. I was reading someone elses blog and saw you on their blogroll. Would you be interested in exchanging blog roll links? If so, feel free to email me.
Thanks.
November 11th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Hi Diane, thanks for the great review of the book. I actually work at HubSpot and of course found your review through the typical social media channels
I wanted to point out that the recommendation by Website Grader probably wasn’t detailed enough to say “how” to move your blog under your own domain (vs. hosting it on BlogSpot or Wordpress etc). Google actually thinks blog.yourdomain.com is a different website than say http://www.yourdomain.com. So given the WSG recommendation, you should have moved your blog to http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/. This way, your whole domain gets credit for any external links to your blog posts.
If you want to know more about this, you can read up on “subdomains, canonicalization and 301 redirects”.
Thanks again for the good and authentic review,
Chris
November 11th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
One more thing I meant to add, there is no hard link to your blog anywhere on your front page. I see you have some kind of widget that shows a couple links to your blog, but Google can’t see that.
You need to make a link to your blog in the header or footer (or your most recent post) and hopefully at the my suggestion URL structure of http://www.downtownwomensclub.com/blog/post-title-here
Chris
November 11th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by coachdbrown: Soc Media Link: Entrepreneur.com – Blog Network – Top Shelf Reading Picks: This week I read Inbo.. http://bit.ly/2Rujbb…
November 11th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Chris – Thanks for the tips! Will forward this to my tech guys to straighten out. And, you just proved your point about engaging people talking about their brand.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Hi Diane,
Thanks for this post. I have checked out their website and they have lot’s of great tips. I’ll be sure to pick up the book.
Samantha
http://www.WinaFreeCustomWebsite.com
November 11th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Thanks for reviewing the book — glad you enjoyed it.
Brian and I were careful to not promote HubSpot in the book too much as we thought it would get in the way of the content and message.
Cheers,
Dharmesh (co-author, “Inbound Marketing”)
November 11th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Hi Dharmesh – Thanks for writing in! I thought you struck a great balance. I actually like the fact that it did refer back to hubspot because it helped establish your expertise. There are a lot of books out there by “social media” experts who don’t use the tools they preach about, let alone develop them. (Note – I won’t be donating my copy to my local library just yet … still have a few tips to implement!)
Diane
December 5th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
SERP Kid…
Great resources!…