Leading with Content

Where Trust Agents was about strategy and the stories behind the reasons why you should be involved in the social web on the internet, Inbound Marketing is a tactical manual for carrying out this involvement in a way that benefit your business. The book is an easy read, sprinkled with cartoons and short case studies, then enhanced with detailed "To Do" lists.

Tactical Goals

The beginning and end are still about strategy. The first section discusses how inbound marketing is a response to changes in the way customers shop. The final section brings people into the equation, both inside and outside your company, so you're not doing all the individual tasks yourself.

Getting Found by Prospects

The bulk of Inbound Marketing is about getting found through specific techniques such as blogging, search engines, and social media. It covers these in sufficient detail that you can get started without other resources, although each topic could, of course, have been expanded on into their own book. The foundation that supports all of these tactics is the creation and publication of remarkable content valuable to your target audience.

Converting Prospects to Customers

The book distills this process down to three principles, going into more detail about how to actually accomplish each one. Their viewpoint is that creating customers consists of:

• converting casual visitors into leads by using compelling calls to action on an easy to navigate website.
• converting targeted prospects into leads by building specific and single-minded landing pages with simple but effective forms to gather email addresses.
• converting leads into customers by sorting them based on their value and nurturing them over time with content.

Others Viewpoints

You might also enjoy seeing the review by Chris Brogan (co-author of Trust Agents) and the 10 Key Insights that Ben Yoskovitz pulled from the book.