21A – Reading Reflection No. 2

Inbound Marketing, Brian Halligan

The theme of this book explains how you can market your product / business and maximize the amount of followers you have.  Followers doesn't exactly mean on social media such as Instagram and Facebook, but how many people actually like your service and keep up with anything new you might have come out with.  With the immense amount of competition in today's businesses, this book describes different methods to reach out to consumers. 

This book connects to what we currently learn in class because it helps mold the big picture of starting a business.  With good content on how to do certain things like creating a blog, and creating great content for the online community.  This book focuses mainly on just marketing which is a key factor in business.  If the ENT3003 and some good marketing skills are combined,  there may be success in the start of a business.

A good exercise for this class based on this book would be to create a website.  This would take some time, so the exercise would be to add to a portion of the website each week and have a final website ready and complete by the end of the class.  In today's world we are seeing much of the shopping done online and much of the research done online as well.  People are definitely going to the internet to find what they need and it is vital that any business, big or small have some sort of website for consumers to see. 

An 'aha' moment for me was the section about the Grateful Dead and how they used a different method than other rock bands at the time to attract the media and their fans.  While other bands were trying to get people to their concerts to promote their albumbs, The Grateful Dead wanted their fans to just go to their concerts for an experience of a lifetime.  Their music was like no other with styles of bluegrass and jazz incorporated and their concerts were described as some of the best in terms of music and the shows with effects and lights.  This concert experience was what they wanted their fans to have and how to pull them into their fanbase.  So even though some companies may advertise in only one way, it doesn't mean that other methods won't work and could surpass the original ways.