I finally finished Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, though the length of time it took me to finish doesn’t reflect at all on the quality of the book. Rather, my tendency to have 3 or 4 books going at any given time and my growing obsession with ultrarunning.
I’ve been following Hubspot as a company for a little over a year. I’m a fan of the work they are doing, the concepts they are teaching to small business owners and was privileged to do a guest post on their blog with Pete Caputa. Maybe more than any other company I know of, they eat their own dog food and as a result put out an incredible amount of content. Being a marketer myself who is 100% onboard with their philosophy (I’ve been called a DARC by my co-workers) and their willingness to share their content, I’m pretty sure I’ve consumed just about all of it (some of it multiple times).
This could be the reason that I was originally not that impressed as I read the first few chapters. I think I had set my own expectations that I’d learn something new and different from Inbound Marketing. This wasn’t the case as I started the book.
However, as I absorbed the content of Halligan and Shah I started to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes they profess. In the end, my opinion of the book was that if you are a DARC and familiar with the concepts of inbound marketing, the repitition of the material is helpful to sharpen your marketing sword.
Where is the big value? Their target audience – the business owner who has focused their efforts on outbound marketing efforts but now realize that their customer and the marketplace demands they must change. To this person, Inbound Marketing is a great resource to get not only the necessary foundation required to know the directional change that must happen in their business, but also the nitty gritty details that will set a business owner and their marketing team well on their way to, as the front cover of Inbound Marketing says: “get found using Google, Social Media and Blogs”.
Dave Criswell 