“The Marketing Toolkit” Book Review

Marketing is such a key subject for the success of a small business that I would recommend spending any spare time you have (And yep, I do know we’re all busy people) researching and reading up on this topic. Put simply, if you don’t market your products well enough, you’ve got no sales, no revenue and no business.

Starting this introduction again, I should in fact be strongly recommending that you make time to find out about marketing for the long term good of your business - it really is that crucial.

Anyway, I recently came across a good book on marketing which I’ve found very useful. Marketing is a very broad subject, so if you’re still finding your way around and are a bit hazy about what to do next, then let me recommend “The Marketing Toolkit” by Jeff Della Mura.

Jeff’s book sets out to cover all aspects of the marketing spectrum in fifty bite-sized chunks. With much use of bullet points, simple explanations and real world examples I found this book relaxing to read, easy to understand and very clearly laid out. It’s very straightforward to find the topic you’re looking for and Jeff tries hard to link you from the topic you’re actually reading to other connected topics elsewhere in the book.

While the book covers all the fundamentals of marketing (like branding; advertising; wise words and sales literature; internet marketing and website design; communication and customer satisfaction) the book is carefully designed to show you the links between related components within any and all of these fundamentals in a building-it-brick-by-brick style. This greatly helps you to avoid overlooking something important that you realise you should have done when its far too late to stop the launch of your new marketing campaign.

One thing you need to know about this book is that its more of an “ideas book” than a “copy me” book. What I mean is that its a superb checklist of what you could be doing but you then have to read up somewhere else about the detail of how to do it. (Please take a look at my website www.BizSkills2000.co.uk for home study courses and free factsheets on marketing skills.)

To summarise then, I would rate “The Marketing Toolkit” by Jeff Della Mura as an excellent “dip in - dip out”  reference book at an affordable cover price of £9.99 when first published in 2009 - but see the advert nearby for the best price currently available on Amazon.

I always look forward to picking up “The Marketing Toolkit” every couple of months and just browsing through it. I always put it back down later on having found another great idea for my business, and so will you. Recommended.

• “The Marketing Toolkit” by Jeff Della Mura. Published by “How To Books”, Oxford 2009 ISBN 978 1 84528 285 1

Making Money using Twitter

While I was checking some details for the new 'Running A Direct Mail Campaign' home study course (which, incidentally, is in line for release in early October) a marketing article about using Twitter as a marketing tool caught my attention. I glanced at it meaning only to skim read it but got quite gripped by the whole idea of Twitter - which I confess I don't know much about - and I would love to put together what you might call a Mini CD Course as a quickie on this subject.

Using Twitter as a marketing tool has more potential than I thought because Twitter is more sophisticated than I realised. There are quite a few clever add-ons that build on its basic function as a messaging service so I'm raring to go and do some more investigating. But first, me and the team must crack on with the Direct Mail CD Course and get that one finished on schedule.

If only I had more time to look into all these ideas and make them happen, that would be brill !

Next CD-based home study course - this is your chance for a pre-publication discount of 20%

Currently working hard on the next CD-based home study course for my business Biz Skills 2000 Ltd. (www.BizSkills2000.co.uk)

This study course is on the subject of Direct Mail Campaigns - how to set them up; how to run them profitably; what the key factors for success are. 
It will be completed and going on sale in late September/early October priced at £17.95. 
If you send me an email at marketing@bizskills2000.co.uk by 30th September to say that you want to buy a copy, then I'll give you a pre-publication discount of 20%. 
How's that for a good deal?