Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing by James Mathewson and Mike Moran

Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing by James Mathewson and Mike Moran is an interesting book because it's written by enterprise-level Search Engine Marketing (SEM) geniuses. They eat big data for breakfast every day.

What they've learned is that too many companies are spending all of their time and treasure following UI and UX trends and redesigning their sites based on the whims of creative directors and not nearly enough resources on using big data to sort out what's working on your site and doing more of that.

Too many agencies are recommending throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Moran and Mathewson have figured out how to make search marketing, content marketing, 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.

Reading Progress

• April 18, 2016 – Started Reading
• April 20, 2016 – Finished Reading

About Outside-In Marketing

"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"