Inbound marketing. What exactly is it? Well, according to David Meerman Scott, it is changing the game in the marketing arena. Coined by Seth Godin, a marketing guru, inbound marketing is “advertising a company through blogs, podcasts, video eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing and other forms of content marketing”. Instead of buying attention through cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, and e-mail marketing, David Meerman Scott says that inbound marketers earn the attention of customers instead of “buy [ing], begg[ing], or bugg[ing] their way in” through these inbound sources, which brings me to his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR truly defines this emergence of how powerful inbound marketing is. To sum up this shift from outbound to inbound marketing, Scott puts it perfectly in his book about how the web is changing things:

“Prior to the web, organizations had only two significant choices to attract attention: Buy expensive advertising or get third-party ink from the media. But the web has changed the rules. The web is not TV. Organizations that understand the New Rules of Marketing and PR develop relationships directly with consumers like you and me” (821).

And that is exactly it: inbound marketing makes targeting specific buyers with individualized messages simpler. The old paradigms of traditional outbound marketing are the nontargeted advertising via newspapers, magazines, television and direct mail, which makes targeting extremely difficult. Scott says today, because every business and company has developed individualized niches, “traditional advertising is generally so wide and broad that it is ineffective”, while “the web has opened a tremendous opportunity to reach niche buyers directly with targeted information that costs a fraction of what big-budget advertising costs” (848).

Scott’s book does not stop there. In case you have not heard, David Meerman Scott also has a website www.webinknow.com. An article in which I believe captures the essence of someone recognizing the importance of inbound marketing from outbound marketing is CMO Brian Kardon of Lattice Engines. 

In this article, “The Journey from a Traditional Marketing Executive to a Modern CEO”, Kardon tells Scott about how he realized that it’s not about the arts and crafts of caring about brochures, direct mail, or the color on your website as he did before. Kardon realized that the world has gone digital, social, and mobile, where he and his company had to learn a completely new language of conversion rates, pay per click, search engine optimization, and authoritative inbound links. As he simply states, “it’s a whole new world”.

A brand which I believe really recognizes that the world is a completely new place as it used to be as Kardon said, is Amazon. Something I really thought was significant in his book was his section how “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, Please”. According to Scott, there are two ways in which people interact with web content on a broad level: they search and they browse because people want a site to tell them something they didn’t think to ask (1068).

Amazon understands this. Scott gives a perfect example about when he or people search for books on Amazon. If he searches “surfing for beginners”, he has over 100 title in the search results, which gives him the opportunity to browse as well as see customer ratings on each book. According to Scott, “the marketers at Amazon understand that when people browse the site, they may have a general idea of what they want but not the particular title…the site is designed to work for a major and often-ignored audience: people who do their own research and consider a decision over a period of time before making a commitment”. This is also seen through the e-mails Amazon sends its customers weeks or months later suggesting another book in which the customer may find useful. Brilliant (1094).

Works Cited

http://www.webinknow.com/2013/04/the-journey-from-a-traditional-marketing-executive-to-a-modern-cmo.html

Scott, David Meerman (2011). New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blog, New Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, NJ. 

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