27A – Reading Reflection No. 3 “Inbound Marketing,” Brian Halligan
The general theme of this book was how to use the internet
to get the most bang for the buck in advertising. How you can do most of your
advertising today without paying for a click or an ad. This was written in 2014
but is still pretty relevant today. It also points out how fast things change.
Things you expect to be around forever really cannot be. It reminds us to keep
up with the times in order to not get left behind.
He talks a lot about blogging as a free tool to gain
relevancy and therefore customers. Since we started and maintained a blog
during this class, it has taught us all a helpful tool that isn’t hard to do at
all and on a regular basis isn’t very cumbersome as I thought it would be. This
connects the book to this class in that same way, to save money as an
entrepreneur, to stay in touch with your audience, and to connect in ways that
are seen as valuable to your customers to keep them engaged.
If I had to design an exercise for the class based on this
book, I would at the beginning of class ask them to send out direct mail pieces
and email blasts to potential customers. I would also set up a blog and write
compelling content for my potential market to hear about. For my market of For Kid’s Sake, I would write about baby
safety etc. For the second part of the exercise,
at the end of the class I would have each student evaluate their efforts to see
which worked he best. It would point out that staying relevant and rolling with
new trends would be the way to go.
My ‘aha’ moment was reading about how Obama set up a blog
for people to see and engage in while Hillary was using the old style of direct
mail pieces and the like. How he didn’t have deep pockets and needed to play it
efficiently but effectively in order to succeed, which of course, he did.
I want to read more about what Brian Halligan has to say. I
have a marketing background and used Google Analytics, etc. I want to hear what
he thinks about keeping things relevant today, in 2019. Naturally, social media
is the way to go, but the tides will be changing again soon, or already are as
we speak. And we must all keep up or risk failure in our ventures.
It amazes me how easy it is today to get your name out there because of social media and internet marketing that can be relatively cheap. I imagine that before the internet it was much more expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to make a name for yourself or your company. I think blogs are something a lot of companies do nowadays to generate PR, etc.
ReplyDeleteHi Virginia, nice job with this assignment and blog post. It seems like this was an insightful book that would really help those who are interested in advertising or just in bettering their personal brand. I liked how you explained your aha moment in terms of how that worked for Obama's campaign. This assignment was great as it allowed me to see a little bit about so many books without having to read all of them.
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