Bryson Meunier's Reviews > Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing

Relevance, Audience and Search by James Mathewson is one of my favorite SEO and web writing books, and I've bought multiple copies of it over the years for team members and myself. The principles in it allowed me to better articulate the change in digital marketing that I had been seeing over the years and distill that into a keyword research and audience segmentation product for the agency I worked for at the time. I still recommend it to SEOs I know, even six years after its original publication and in spite of the fact that some of the tactics in it are a bit outdated.

I'm mentioning this because I had extremely high expectations for Outside-In Marketing, and was inevitably a little disappointed when I finished it. Overall it is a nice update to Audience, Relevance and Search, but focuses more on content marketing, social media and other forms of inbound marketing that have emerged in the six years since Mathewson's last book. He and his co-author Mike Moran do provide plenty of case studies to drive their points home, but at this point in my career it's not really a lesson I need to be taught. Many of the examples were from authors (like Karen McGrane and Kristina Halvorson) whose books I've already read, and the examples didn't really shed new light on the issues they addressed. 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. But for me it was about 200 pages of preaching to the choir.

I liked the book, and am glad I read it. James Mathewson is a brilliant marketer and if you haven't read Audience, Relevance and Search this may be a better place to start since the book was just published this year and is more up to date. But for experienced digital marketers it's probably not necessary beyond the great enterprise SEO, social and content marketing examples in the book.