Outside-In Marketing

Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing

by James Mathewson and Mike Moran
First Edition: ISBN-13: 978-0133375565, © 2016, 208 pages

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Watch the video of the Biznology webinar by James Mathewson about some of the techniques mentioned in the book. You can read the first chapter free here. Listen to an interview with me about the book on FIR B2B. Here is another FIR B2B interview with James Mathewson.

Marketing has always been about “me”: my brand, my product, my company. But “inside-out” marketing no longer works: your customers simply won’t tolerate it anymore. You need to transform your marketing to “outside in.” Every message you deliver must engage, fascinate, and motivate the right audiences, because you start and finish with what they already care about. Your marketing itself must provide value to customers — whether they buy today, next month, or far into the future. How do you know what messages will do that? How do you get those messages past tough new digital gatekeepers? You start here, with Outside-In Marketing.

Two world-renowned digital marketing thought leaders will show how to integrate content marketing with Big Data to deliver exactly the right messages to exactly the right customers and influencers. IBM’s James Mathewson and Converseon’s Mike Moran reveal how to make the most of today’s Big Data algorithms to shape your messages and get them past Google and Facebook. You’ll find up-to-the-minute practices, techniques, recommendations, guidelines, and metrics for mining the language your customers already use, so you can engage them on their terms, with their words. Mathewson and Moran show how to:

  • Go beyond “guess and hope” to transform your marketing practices, campaigns, and channels with Big Data
  • Recognize how Google uses natural language processing, machine learning, and data analytics “against” you – and overcome the obstacles they create
  • Infuse search and social data into product development from its very inception, so you can tightly align your offerings with customer needs
  • Measure campaign results more accurately, and feed metrics right back into practices for iterative improvement
  • Discover exactly what content is working now, and what’s failing
  • Uncover powerful new opportunities to develop discoverable, shareable content
  • Go beyond high-quality content: align all your marketing and communications practices to support outside-in marketing
  • Leverage advanced applications of text analytics and machine learning, including Panda, Penguin, Caffeine, and sophisticated sentiment analysis
  • Build standout web and mobile sites based on all you’ve learned about your customers
  • Find the right mix, cadence, and combination of social platforms to maximize ROI

Content marketing is all the rage right now—representing everything from the future of advertising to the death of journalism—but Mathewson and Moran move beyond the hype and offer practical solutions to take advantage, effectively and sustainably, of the deluge of data that businesses can benefit from.

Complete Review

—Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

If you employ Inbound Marketing, and measure the way Mathewson and Moran tell you to, you should be well ahead of competition.

This book is excellent for those who
– Understand that in 2016 digital communication is the way to go
– Want to learn how to do it better
– Understand that digital employees demand digital leadership

You will probably want to read it several times over, combined with discussions with both your marketing- and IT-departments. Both of these must be engaged in order to implement the right actions, and to get correct measurements from the same actions.

Complete Review / Translated on Blog

—Edgar Valdmanis

Packed with actionable advice and reflecting the decades of experience of its two authors, Outside-In Marketing should be required reading for any digital marketer. Although the term “big data” on the cover may scare away some people, this is not a bits-and-bytes book. The authors focus on data that most markters are already gathering or have available to them, but probably never use.

Complete Review

—Paul Gillin

Yes, inbound marketing and content marketing can be effective when you’re doing them correctly, and if you are a busy executive who is unfamiliar with these concepts and don’t do these things on a regular basis like I do then this book can help you quite a bit.

Complete Review

—Bryson Meunier

I’m tempted to start the review with “if you haven’t read this book, stop calling yourself a marketer” but the content applies to a wider audience, so I’d have to amend my opening to: read this book now. It’s one of those rare books that has more highlighted content than not, and I’m contemplating another read-through just to catch any bits I’ve missed. The concepts that Mathewson puts forward will be eye-opening for most marketers, and he backs them up with real-life examples. The idea of leading with your content is nothing new, but it’s framed in a contemporary context, taking into account the audiences that brands deal with today. It’s definitely not a Mad Men world any more, and Mathewson explains in straightforward ways how to catch up and keep up in a fast-moving world, combining marketing, search, analytics, and big data to meet your organisational goals.

Review

—Amazon Customer

In Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing, Mathewson and Moran have figured out how to make search marketing (SEM), content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO),and inbound marketing actually work for you by taking the guesswork and opinion out of the mix and relying, instead, on A/B tests, data-tracking, and strong analysis of the data you’re already collecting to win at search, to win at content, and to win at business.

The book is thin, essential, and maybe should even be proprietary. There’s no BS but don’t second guess them or assume that you, too, can’t leverage the sort of tools and strategies that Mike and James do.

Complete Review

—Chris Abraham
Chris Abraham

Foreword (By Prominent CMO)

Preface

1. Understand the Power of Outside-In Marketing

2. Transform Each Marketing Role in Your Organization

3. Learn the Language of Customers through Search Keyword Research

4. Gain Deep Knowledge of Customers through Social Media Listening

5. Learn How Big Data Algorithms Decide Where Your Message Is Shown

6. Build a Standout Website Based On The Proper Content Strategy

7. Design Your Content to Be Discovered and Shared By Your Customers

8. Put It All Together To Drive Content Marketing Results

• Learn more about Mike Moran
• Learn more about James Mathewson