Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah is a pretty decent marketing starter book that isn’t dry and dull like so many of them seem to be. It has plenty of anecdotes from the likes of Whole Foods, Zappos and Barack Obama, is well written and even has cartoons!
The premise is basically that the old marketing rules are dead or, at the very least dying. The days of throwing money at print or radio advertising and having some semblance of guaranteed success are in the past.
Today, companies need to engage their customers, which basically means getting them to the website and making sure it is sticky enough to entice multiple return visits. I like that it goes into detail about the essential components for being successful online, such as content marketing, search engine optimization and social media. Plus, it’s not just a bunch of high level stuff but includes some good strategy ideas and to-do lists to help get your started.
There were a few things I didn’t like or think held much relevancy. One would be a section on “Driving Traffic With Digg.” The other is the unabashed advertising for the author’s Hubspot Marketing Grader, which is too bad since it seems to bring into question the bias of the content as a whole.