Book Review- Inbound Marketing: Getting Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs (The News Rules of Social Media)

Every once in a while, something or someone comes along to serve as a sign post signifying some major shift that’s occurring in business, culture or politics.  Inbound Marketing, the new book from the guys who started HubSpot may prove to be one of those sign posts.

To be fair, the business shift this book highlights has been happening for a little while now.  Maybe a year or two, at least.  But with this book, and more importantly with HubSpot the company, the pace of this shift happening should certainly get taken up a notch.

For decades, major brands have lead the way in marketing through buying the biggest megaphones our media culture had to offer.  TV, Print and Radio & Retail were the ways to reach a consumer base millions strong and terribly geographically distributed.  Well, we all knew the Internet would change that someday, but how exactly has not been abundantly clear until now.

Inbound Marketing does an excellent job of describing this transition and how to navigate Marketing’s  New World Order.

Anyone interested, eager or needing to succeed at marketing in a modern context should read this book.

It’s written to an audience with very little experience in Search Engine Optimization or any of that, so it should not be an intimidating read for the old school.  They did a great job on that front.  It’s a total reference book for the newby.

My only reservation came when they started talking about Sales and how to manage the Sales funnel.  The book is obviously best suited for marketers targeting large volumes of sales opportunities, and this large volume lends itself to more technical methods of managing the sales pipeline or funnel.  My reaction to the chapter or two in the book on Sales was based on the fact that a lot of large enterprise sales actually requires pretty deep personal relationships between the sales individual and their company accounts.  It’s really hard to figure out how to pursue the more sophisticated sales cycles using these more technical Funnel management methods because the Sales reps personal relationships are critical to understanding the stage of a sales cycle any account may be in.  Plus, in many cases the name of the game is penetrating accounts deeply moreso than pursuing as many accounts as possible.  So, I think a lot of the old school Sales Reps out there with serious rolodexes are probably still safe for now.

As for their old school Marketing colleagues, y’all better get on the band wagon.  It’s a whole new world and the folks at HubSpot seem poised to dominate!